MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
This year’s London Games Conference on November 19th will have a number of high profile speakers from around the games industry sharing their knowledge.
Today Yogscast boss Rich Keith tells MCV about the firm’s audience and how the shift from written words to video has affected the game media.
For the unaware, who are you and what do you do?
I am the general manager of Yogscast, an entertainment company with over 20 channels on YouTube, reaching about 25m people every month, most of whom are 13 to 21 years old and don’t watch traditional TV or worry too much about traditional games media. In a previous life I published Edge, PC Gamer and other cross-platform titles for Future and, a long time ago, I edited print magazines about games.
Tell us a bit about your talk at LGC. Don’t just tell us the title – what is it really about?
I’ll be showing how YouTube has changed everything when it comes to how games get discovered by new players and what that means for developers, publishers and the rest of the industry.
What are the biggest challenges currently affecting the way games are marketed?
There is another big shift taking place, much as there was from print to traditional websites we seeing the move to video. But much more than that – and I think this is the thing that is yet to be fully understood – where before it was simply the delivery platform that shifted: print to digital that changed this time it’s a more fundamental change. Certainly words to video but also journalism to entertainment. So where before the types of content (news, previews, reviews – broadly what we think of a ‘games media’) remained pretty much unchanged the advent of YouTube and the dominance of video is based primarily on personality and entertainment.
What single area of games marketing should we pay attention to in 2015 – and why?
Video in general and YouTube in particular. The power of the medium is like nothing that’s come before it.
