Game Theory - How Minecraft BROKE YouTube!

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

Join former Game Theory Host MatPat as he reveals the TRUE story of Minecraft, and how YouTube saved it from being obsolete.

Hello and welcome to the theorist cast. Today we're building a multi-seer maker, followed by a portal to the nether. Hizah! Hoor! Hooray! Just let me diggy, diggy, diggy my hole and... Oh, wait, what? What is this? No, seriously, what is...

Help! Yay! It's a deadly, wendy, corpsi-wopsy! What another family-friendly Minecraft mystery adventure! Here on the theorist cast. Oh, internet, welcome to game theory. You know, fate, it's a funny thing. I'm sure we're all familiar with the butterfly effect. If you've ever watched any let's plays of Until Dawn,

I'm sure you've heard about the butterfly effect over... Butterfly effect. And over... Butterfly effect. And over again. At its most basic, the butterfly effect is the concept that small actions can have large effects, rippling down through time to change history as we know it.

The small decision of what you wore to school today dictated in some small way how other people treated you. Had you worn something different, would that cute redhead with the pigtails have noticed you in math class? Or would the bully in the hall have singled you out for a de-pantsing? True story! My decision to wear a belt one morning helped keep my pants firmly at hip level back in middle school, and the rest of my career in Medina, Ohio, thanks me for it. But small things like that can have a huge impact. Your choice to skip coffee this morning dictated how alert you were by the end of the day,

which in turn affected how effective you were at work. Which could be a really bad thing if you're an air traffic controller. Here's another true story. Back in 10th grade, I had a friend confessed to me that he decided not to commit suicide simply because I had had short, polite conversations with him every morning while we waited for choir practice to start. I had shown him human decency at a time, unbeknownst to me when others were harassing him. And in some way, those little conversations helped to save his life. A few simple hellos helped him to find the strength to keep on living,

and then he went on to touch thousands more lives. Even this channel is an example. No one would hire me, so I started this as a side project. Fast forward six years later, and over one billion people have been impacted by these videos in some way. And our community of theorists is 8 million strong. Boom, Butterfly effect. The moral is small actions have consequences, consequences that can change history in big ways. Which leads me to my theory today.

It's my belief that back in 2012, YouTube made a single change to their systems that went on to create a perfect storm, a set of conditions unintentionally primed to not only change change the gaming videos that you and I watch, but in the process produced the single biggest game of all time. Creating a phenomenon so big and so out of control that they then tried to kill it. Loyal theorists, I present to you today how YouTube created Minecraft, how Minecraft broke YouTube, and how YouTube tried to kill Minecraft in return. Now let me tell you how hard this was to find.

Back in the early days of YouTube, only the hardest of hardcore cared about subscriber rates or lists or things like that, so a lot of that data has been lost to time. Also, there aren't a lot of web historians out there tracking the rise and fall of Fred or End of the World, okay, and the websites that track this sort of thing, like VidStats X and tubular labs, only have data that backs up to mid-2013. So to get all this info, I went and searched through hundreds, and I mean hundreds of old snapshots of YouTube from between the years of 2010 and 2014 using the wayback machine.

Ooh boy, that was a weird walk-down memory lane. That, coupled with a weekend spent pouring over a six-year-old Subscriber statistics from Socialblade.com helped me to piece together exactly what happened. Now as I've mentioned in my past videos about YouTube's algorithm, the most radical change in the site's history came back in 2012 Changing from a view-based system to a system that instead favored videos that drive higher amounts of watch time Videos that would keep people watching more videos for longer amounts of time would get more promotion than me watching you explode bananas on your face for a grand toll of 30 seconds Because you can bet I ain't watching any more than 30 seconds of that nightmare fuel Ugh! That part of YouTube is a scary, scary place.

This was all meant to ensure that good content, stuff that kept people watching, got more attention. And as you can imagine, this prompted huge changes to what got views on the website. Out went the reply girls with their clickbait thumbnails. In came the Vine compilations, with their clickbait thumbnails. Out went the cat videos, and in came the listicles of top 10 cat videos. But those were just the intended victims of this change. There were also unexpected casualties that were caught in the crossfire. YouTube musicians and cover artists like Tyler Ward saw declines in subs per day and overall viewership.

YouTube Animators also took the hit as a short one- or two-minute-long cartoon just couldn't compete in a system built to support longer videos, something that Rubber Ross from the Game Grumps would articulate only a few years later. Does independently produced animation have a future on YouTube? But while some genres floundered, others came out of nowhere. And YouTube wasn't ready for the ramifications of what they'd just done. In one change, one small flap of their wind, They had created a monster. A monster known as gaming.

Up until that point, top gaming content on YouTube was mostly sketch-based, not gameplay-based. You had Machinima from Rooster Teeth, and, well, machinima shows like Red vs. Blue and Arby and the Chief. Freddie Wong and Corridor Digital brought games to real life with their incredible visual effects, creating monumental videos like first-person Mario, dubstep guns, the last mine cart. And then there was the third category, the character-driven scripted comedy sketches, like reckless Tortuga's online gamer and James Rolf's angry video game nerd. And the irate gamer. He was not as popular, but he was there.

I watched him unironically for a while. Man, I just feel the nostalgia pouring over me as I list off those names. I feel like a BuzzFeed article. Things only an online gamer from 2009 will understand. But other than those guys, honestly, that was it. Up through most of 2011, only one individual gamer was in the YouTube top hundred channels. Adam Montoya, better known as C-Nanners. And yet all of that changed in a period of five months,

from April until August of 2012 after the algorithm shift, when the floodgates opened and gaming content surged onto YouTube. But before we get there, it's important to know that there was something else going on at that same time. A small indie title named Minecraft was building a fan base all of its own. Although the first Minecraft video with commentary was uploaded way back on May 21st, 2009, when the game was still a Java applet. It wasn't until C-Naner started his Minecraft series on August 25th, 2010, that YouTube viewers really started to take notice of this game.

But while Adam may have been the first, it was a different channel. One that had, up to that point, uploaded nearly 500 videos mostly of Warcraft that paved the way for this game to become a juggernaut of digital video and encouraged a generation of young gamers to open their imaginations. Blue Zephos, more affectionately known as Yogs cast, took the open-world nature of Minecraft and ran with it, creating fantastical adventures that inspired millions of viewers to pick up their shovels and diggy holes, along with Honeydew and the gang. Within weeks, Blue Zephos was the fastest growing channel on YouTube. Minecraft's growth was their growth, and vice versa.

But every game has a life cycle. After a surge resulting from September's adventure update, interest in Minecraft, at least on YouTube, was starting to show signs of stagnation. Google Trends data around that time shows that while this update caused a huge uptick and interest, the enthusiasm for it didn't maintain. Even in general web searches, growth had slowed a lot. Now to be honest, I would have loved to have analyzed sales figures here, but sadly, no amount of my trolling through the deepest of webs could yield the data that I wanted. Notch and steam keep this stuff under super intense lock and key.

Even Steam spy couldn't help, so I was limited to publicly facing data. Based on the Minecraft site, I do know that it had between 1 and 10 million copies sold at this time. and just over 10 million registered users. Suffice it to say, where the game to have petered out from there, Minecraft would certainly have been an indie success, but definitely not the gaming legend it is today. So what happened? What propelled Minecraft from an indie success

to the second most-selling game of all time? A loophole. And with that, we return to YouTube and its algorithm change. You see, YouTube switched to a watchtime-based model yielded effects that no one saw coming. Most specifically, the overperformance of let's-play videos. I mean, it was the perfect match. Long videos that could be produced daily and had narratives already built into the games that were being played

Stories that kept viewers wanting to binge watch like Netflix to see the next chapter There was literally nothing else on YouTube with that same magic formula and as a result Let's Play channels dominated every inch of the website Gamer's climbed subscription charts in a matter of days the YouTube homepage which had 22 videos at the time Became dominated with anywhere between six and four gaming videos daily. I mean, think about that. 50% of the YouTube homepage

was gaming, and it was always dominating the top slots. Suck on that, Jimmy Fallon, and music artists, and movie trailers, and branded channels, and whatever other hot-knife B-movie meme challenges get shoved onto the homepage these days. But of all the games that thrive during this period, Minecraft

was the one that added the most notches to its belt. Boo, boo, yeah, yeah, I deserve that one. The endless ways to play, the constant flow of new mods, the ease of producing story-driven animated machinima, the appeal to a younger audience that would sit and watch for longer sessions. I mean, remember, these are the days before toy unboxings and creepy Spider-Man videos started brainwashing the youth of the nation. All of this! All of these reasons made Minecraft the king of this new YouTube. Interest in the game shot through the roof, pushing it to the highest levels it had seen in years.

It was literally the perfect storm. YouTube had shifted how it was sorting videos at the exact time that Minecraft channels had started to develop dedicated viewers. Watching build tutorials and Jaffa factories and adventures into the nether ensured that Minecraft and the channels that made those videos were dominating 3 to 6 slots on the homepage every single day. Yogs cast alone would sometimes have 2 to 3. A single channel owning two spots on the homepage. You mean it, you blow it up! And then it stopped.

Overnight, gaming disappeared from the homepage. You can pretty much break it down by month. After digging through a year's worth of screenshots, I was able to put together that May was the high point, with upwards of 14 videos on the homepage, but slowly month by month, it started to slow. June had an average of 7 to 9 on the homepage. July, at about 5. By September, gaming was gone. Day after day, zero. Occasionally a very rare exception of a launch trailer. So that makes the question, what happened? Did viewers grow bored? Sick of it?

Had they grown out of Minecraft? No, absolutely not. Data from Google Trends shows that the interest in Minecraft channels was showing no signs of slowing down. Yog's cast was on target to be the second largest channel on YouTube, growing just slightly slower than that of a newcomer. A new gamer on the scene who specialized in horror games? Maybe you've heard of him? PewDie Pie? No.

Viewer behavior hadn't changed. The cutoff was so abrupt. Something else had to have happened, and this is why I think YouTube started filtering gaming out of the homepage. It seems far-fetched, right? What motive would YouTube have for preventing gaming channels from hitting the home page? If the algorithm was truly built to sustain longer watch sessions, wouldn't this be exactly what they wanted?

A bunch of videos that prompt long watch sessions being presented to the widest group of people? Well, yes and no. Sure, a little Johnny Tuber fan over there may have been excited to see the next installment of honeydew making Jaffa cakes, but Normies visiting YouTube for the first time, were probably a lot less enthusiastic about seeing a blocky British Viking fight pixelated green monsters. And if the top six homepage slots are all dominated by a mix of Minecraft, Call of Duty, and Happy Wheels, well, you're gonna leave the site, assuming that this isn't a place for you. I'm confident that the influx of gaming content started to cost YouTube viewers.

And this isn't just me making blind guesses. Although Google keeps a very tight-lipped about how YouTube's daily traffic looks, Google Trends data shows that, during this period where more and more gaming videos were appearing on the homepage, actual search interest for the website was going steadily downward. After five years of nearly constant growth, YouTube was starting to lose momentum. And all immediately after this weird algorithm change. But that's not all the evidence I have. Remember how I said that September started the trend of not having gaming videos at all on the homepage?

Well, September also happens to be the month where search interest in the site started to pick back up. Coincidence? I think not! And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why today Jimmy Fallon and music artist and movie trailers and whatever Hot Knife B-movie memes are the things that you see appearing on your logged out homepage because they're the things that appeal to the most people. So YouTube literally went into their systems and nerfed gaming to appeal to a wider audience and boost their numbers. We just saw it happen. But over the months that had passed before they did, the landscape of viewership habits on YouTube had permanently changed.

Gaming, specifically Let's Play had gone from a niche community to a mainstream viewership genre. Before the algorithm shift, only four independent gamers had been anywhere close to the top 100 most subscribed channels. But in just five months, that number had jumped to 10, each growing two to three times faster than any non-gaming channel. And with multiple more gaming channels waiting in the wings to break into that list, the homepage had introduced a generation to the idea of watching other people game, and transformed funny, talented online gamers into overnight celebrities. A single loophole in the system,

an unintended consequence had made gaming the second biggest thing on the platform behind music. And where the flood of gaming onto the homepage practically made channels overnight, Exploding the viewership of gamers like PewDiePie and Tabuscus, it just as quickly shut off the subscriber faucets for channels like Captain Sparkles and Ant Venom One look at their trends charts shows that the homepage loophole helped them grow and then just as quickly as it was shut slowed them back down But no one felt it quite as hard as the Yogs cast crew with their daily placement on the homepage Sometimes with multiple videos on the homepage they were primed to challenge Pudes for his number one slot on YouTube Instead the Minecraft blockade slowed its growth and it It became another big channel, just not to the levels that it could have been.

And although it's hard to say where exactly the game would have ended up without the five months of the homepage push, the algorithmic loophole that Minecraft was fortunate enough to exploit, certainly helped accelerate the game's spread, turning it from an indie success into the gaming legacy that it is today. So that leaves us with just one last question. Why did I spend days logging through dusty, broken old websites to lay out this little piece of history? Well, to me, the most important lesson is that YouTube, and online, platforms in general have power over your tastes, offering you just an illusion of choice. One small change to an algorithm helped an indie game transform gaming as we know it,

and touch hundreds of millions of lives. That exact same change on that one website, in a sea of websites online, took the idea of watching other people play video games and made it into one of the most popular forms of entertainment today. Butterfly effect. A flap of the wings. Humans watch what's presented to them, what's right in front of our faces. We also tend to watch what's popular. Ooh, million views, that must be a great video.

But it's important for us to remember as viewers that both of those things are often determined by factors that aren't quality. Viewer beware. And also platforms, especially you, YouTube, because I know you are watching. I've heard from you guys that you tend to watch videos like this. Take that responsibility seriously. It's a big burden to carry. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory.

Thanks for watching.