Game Theory - Let's Plays are Dead...But Why?

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Are “Let’s Play’s” actually OVER? A format that once DEFINED YouTube in the mid 2010s has now become less relevant and successful on the platform. How and WHY did this happen? In today’s episode, join Game Theory Host Tom as he wants to explore the history of the genre and if there's anything we can do to save it…

Is the Let's Play dead? A format that once defined YouTube in the mid-2010s now feels like it's become a smaller and smaller piece of this digital empire. How did this happen? Why did this happen? And more importantly, is there anything that can be done to save it? Hello, Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show that is back on the green screen. And you know what that means?

It's time for another fun meta discussion about the gaming world. You've all seen the title. you've all seen the thumbnail and the cold open, I hope. Don't tell me you skipped it. Go back and watch it. I hit a secret in there for you and everything. And for those of you who did watch it and found that secret, thanks. Good job.

This video's main topic is the let's play dead. It may seem like a strange question to ask. In its simplest form, a let's play is someone recording themselves playing a game and also recording either their voice or their face so that the audience can get their reactions. as well as capturing silly moments. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. What is this? Videos like this were everywhere in the 2010s.

They launched tens of thousands of careers and were the gold standard of YouTube. So why am I asking if the genre is dead? Well, the truth is, I'm not the only one. I've seen this question pop up a few times over the last couple of years on Reddit, YouTube and on Twitter. But in the last few months, it seems like it's become a bigger and bigger topic of discussion. And I'll admit, something does seem different now.

It's not necessarily that there are fewer let's players. Arguably, there are more people doing variations on this sort of content than ever. But the traditional let's play clearly isn't having the impact it used to. Just looking at the top 100 YouTube channels in 2015, nearly 25 of them are let's players. But now, a decade later, it's only four. And mainstay channels like 8bit Ryan, Bijou Mike and Dorco are regularly. making videos about having to change their approach to let's plays because what they have been doing isn't working anymore.

So today, I wanted to take a look back at the history of the genre, how it came to be, how it evolved over time, and ultimately where it's going in order to truly answer the question are let's plays dead. The foundation of the let's play actually begins well before let's plays are even a thing. Gaming nearly at its very conception was designed to be played all. with people. You could go to the arcade and either watch someone beat the high score or play with someone else. You could go round to your friend's house and play couch co-op or go for a land party. Even one of the earliest games, Pong, was a two-player game. Gaming was designed as an inherently

social activity. Some of my fondest memories are playing games like Crash Bash with my brother on Saturday mornings before my mum and dad woke up. But what would you do if you didn't have people physically around you and you wanted to share your experiences with other people who also enjoyed that particular game. You took to this brand new thing called the Internet and the exciting new world of online forums. Specifically, a website known as something awful. While the exact origin of the let's play is a little ambiguous, it's widely understood

to have started here. This place was all the rage in the early 2000s, being the place memes like all your base belonged to us, How is Babi formed, and Chuck Norris Fax gained their massive popularity. In 2004, a user called Slow Beef took to the site and began uploading screenshots of his play-through of Metal Gear Solid 2, leaving comments about the screenshots that vary from informative like we'd expect from any normal walkthrough, and snarky like we'd expect from a normal let's player. This style of thread began to pick up traction, especially when people could start commenting

and guiding the actions taken by the player. of the time, meaning things went completely awry. But circling back to that sense of community and playing with people, not just on your own. This led to the term let's plays being coined in 2005, as in let us play. And that year might sound familiar to you guys. It's the same year a little website called YouTube became a thing. Not that the let's play would really transfer there for a number of years. I mean, the let's play was a static medium and YouTube was a video site.

No way these two things could work together. Until they did. On January 4th, 2007, Slow Beef began doing a let's play of The Immortal for the Sega Genesis, otherwise known as the Mega Drive for my fellow Europeans. Sound off in the comments. It started out like every other let's play slow beef had done up until that point. Then he threw the internet a curveball. Test, test, test.

Okay, uh, this is Slow Beef. Um, I usually like to add something a little crazy to my, uh, let's play threads. That, my friends, is a video clip with commentary. So we've said he liked to add some little extra thing to his let's plays, but this isn't just a little something. This was a genre defining moment. This led to people like fellow something awful user Proton John to start doing player commentary let's play videos later that year.

The same year that YouTube introduced something you may have heard of, the YouTube partner program, where if you reached a certain threshold, you could have ads play on your videos and you'd earn a cut. Suddenly, you weren't just uploading videos for your friends or communities online. This could be an actual job. And as the years went on, more and more people began to jump on this style of content, like Nintendo Capri Sun, Chugga Conroy, Raucco, Paul Sores Jr., Ethos Lab, and of course, PewDie Pie. What the fuck is that? I think he wants to home. All of them, and many more, saw some amount of success. Subs were going up and money was coming in.

But YouTube wasn't done adding changes to the site, and they did something that turned this relatively new but growing format into an overnight sensation. In October 2012, YouTube announced that they were changing how their algorithm worked. Before this point, the algorithm would recommend videos based on the number of views it had. If it had a lot of views, clearly a lot of people liked it, and so YouTube would spread it around more. Which led to people gaming the system with clickbait thumbnails, titles and opening seconds. Because it didn't matter if the viewer stayed for the rest of the video, the view had already been counted, and so they'd be put in front of more people and gain more clicks and online fame. That wasn't what YouTube wanted.

For the part of the program to work, they needed to show ads to people. And if people were clicking off after a couple of seconds, they didn't get to see that many ads. No, they needed to stay for long stretches to be shown as many ads as possible. And so, they changed the algorithm to favor not views, but watch time. You were rewarded the longer someone watched your video, which meant if your videos were naturally longer and had random spikes of horror or surprise that would lead to over-the-top reactions throughout the video, chances are more people would watch. Do you see where I'm going with this?

Let's Play's, along with daily vlogs, became the new kings of the platform, leaving to gamers we've mentioned like PewDiePie growing at much faster rates and launching the careers of some other now-well-known faces who'd only started recently. Who's that handsome guy up in the corner? It's me! Hey everybody, Dan here from the Diamond Mine Cart and today I'm starting a brand new adventure. Hello! All you beautiful people out there! Plus, this content was relatively easy and cheap to produce.

You obviously had to be entertaining and that's not always an easy feat, but back then there was very little editing involved. Mikes and webcams weren't that expensive and games weren't $80 yet. Oh, if only you knew the horrors that awaited Marg. I'm sure one of your indie horror reactions would have fit perfectly with the recent Nintendo directs. Thanks to the low-cost production, it meant you could very easily pump out daily, sometimes even twice daily videos. This time was also the rise of indie horror games, namely Amnesia, Slender Man, and Five Nights at Freddy's. Games that were hard to beat had loads of replay value and were full of jump scares, giving us some of the most entertaining reactions to watch from the comfort of our own bets. Hi! Oh, God damn it!

What happened? Oh, it's a shit! By 2013, PewDie Piedie was this. the most subscribed channel on the platform. By 2015, 25 of the top 100 YouTube channels were Let's Players. People even began wondering whether Let's Players could affect game sales. But while YouTube was happy to keep feeding their audiences these long advertiser-friendly pieces of content, something was bubbling under the surface in audiences.

Videos had become much more curated, more heavily edited, and Let's players themselves had gotten so big, It felt like it was impossible to really know them anymore. It no longer felt like sitting down with your friend to watch a video. You were watching a celebrity. To be fair, the creators were feeling this too, that videos were less authentic and that they had less of a connection to the audience who got them there to begin with. And that desire became an opportunity for the classic let's play to evolve and for a competitor to swoop in.

Now, Twitch had been around for a bit at this point. It was founded in 2011 as Just in TV, if any of you remember. that. It offered a different yet weirdly familiar kind of experience. It removed the need for things like editing and thumbnails. You could just turn on a camera, boot up a game, and play. Obviously, this was a huge cost save for creators, but it also brought back that old school feel of early YouTube, just longer. And for audiences, they were now able to get even more time with their favourite creators, rather than just a 10 to 30 minute video a couple of times a week. Now, they could sit with them for literal hours and watch them react to stuff in real time.

It felt so much more authentic. And the cherry on top, there was a live chat function. Rather than just commenting on a video and hoping that maybe the creator would see it and reply or respond in the video, now you could interact with them directly. You could help them with a part of the game they were struggling with, or you could just talk to other people who liked that creator. Kind of like the old school forum days. and much like the days of sitting with your friends on the couch and playing games together. The problem was, in 2014, Twitch introduced a new video management system that would remove your vods after 14 days, 60 if you were a partner.

So, what did all those streamers do? They began uploading their vods to YouTube, flooding the market with this new kind of let's play. You can see from this graph here that searches for let's plays begin to fall around this time, and searches for live streams begin to go up. Between 2014 and 2015, Twitch's unique viewers increased from 55 million to 100 million. And so YouTube obviously took note, releasing its own gaming live streaming platform, YouTube gaming in 2015. And again, this causes Let's Plays to drop down in popularity. But as you can see, here in June of 2016, there is a moment that the two searches cross.

Livestream overtakes Let's Place. Why? Because this is when Twitch, introduced cheering, where users could donate to creators in the form of bits. So, rather than subscribing to a streamer for $5, you could now donate a single bit worth one cent, making it much more affordable for younger audiences to support creators they liked, and it was a great way for a smaller creator to earn extra income alongside YouTube ad revenue that they were usually getting. Since then, live stream as a term has continued to rise, while Let's Plays have continued to go.

go down. Interestingly enough, at the same time, searches for gameplay also went down, while reaction went up, further implying that what people were really after were creators and their reactions, like the good old days of horror let's plays rather than actual gameplay. Obviously, there's a discussion we could have about correlation versus causation, but I thought it was interesting to point out. But YouTube wasn't done sabotaging their golden goose, accidentally or not. There was one more big change around the same time that would lead us to the question we're asking today. In 2015, YouTube was the top video streaming app at a time, competing with the likes of Netflix, Hulu and ESPN. But that was just the mobile market. Where services like Netflix really shone was in

TV viewership. Their high quality shows and zero ads was a huge appeal to the more traditional media audience. YouTube wanted a piece of that pie and so since 2015, they've been trying to do just that. launched YouTube Red, which we now know is YouTube Premium. This gave audiences an ad-free experience, plus access to exclusive high-quality television-level content made by the creators you all know and love. They introduced YouTube TV in 2017, a streaming service offering cable channels. And if you've been at a VidCon at any point in the last five years, you'll know that YouTube has been pushing creators more and more into making content designed for TVs. Make sure your videos are in 4K. Create series. Have your videos planned months in advance just like they do in TV land?

And of course, make your videos even longer. If you've been wondering why there's been a rise in crazy long video essays over the last five years, this is why. It's also why we saw the meteoric rise of channels like Mr. Beast, who were producing hyper-edited, high-production value videos to the point where legitimate TV studios were giving him actual TV shows, which basically just looked like his normal videos, but bigger. This is the type of content YouTube wants.

And so, just like they did back in 2012, they changed the algorithm to favour these channels. What most surveys define as YouTube's entertainment genre. But what did that mean for let's plays? They've also gotten longer over the years. You can record them all now in full 4K. Longer games mean more episodes of a series. And a lot of them have become hyper-edited with the rise of TikTok and Roblox. So surely, this is a huge benefit to them, right?

Sadly, that doesn't appear to be the case. Oh, yes, on a technical level, Let's Play's do tick all of those boxes, it lacks the one thing that the entertainment genre has. Its appeal to mainstream audiences. Again, people like Mr Beast are making shows that regular audiences want to watch, their reality shows with a YouTube twist. But even if it's in 4K and well edited, it's much harder to convince the normies to watch someone sit at their computer

and scream at gameplay. Don't get me wrong. I love Let's Play. Besides this channel, they were some of the first ones I ever subscribed to. But it's hard to deny that let's plays just don't meet the threshold for what normal audiences and therefore YouTube considered to be high production value. There's not multiple cameras. There's no characters or story arcs for the people on screen.

It sadly just falls into the same old trope that YouTube is just kids in their bedroom with a camera. And YouTube desperately wants to shed that stereotype. I mean, there's a reason why when PewDie Piedy and Marks. market player were asked to make YouTube originals, they made much bigger shows rather than just big, more high-quality let's-plays. YouTube has always known that let's plays don't translate. And so now it's less prioritized in the algorithm. So, that's the history of the let's play.

And so it's time to answer the question that kicked all of this off. Is the let's play dead? Well, honestly, it depends on what you define as debt. If you're talking about let's plays being the juggernauts of the online. industry, then it would be easy to say yes. More and more of those classic OG lets players have slowed down their uploads and began making new content or movies or apparel or food. And the data and history show a very clear decline compared to the newer styles of content. So if you were looking to become the next biggest YouTube channel, you're unlikely to get there by being a gamer

alone. That's also true over on Twitch. While it's clearly a more gaming-focused platform, unlike YouTube, the people sitting at the top are finding more and more success with other styles of content like IRL streams, just chatting or big events like the streamer games. However, that doesn't mean that let's plays are completely dead. There are thousands upon thousands of let's play channels around that are plenty successful. Heck, Proton John is still going after all these years. Obviously, success is subjective. For some, it may be about having the most subscribers or views, and as we've talked about, that's going to be a challenge. But for a lot of others, it may just be the ability to do YouTube full-time.

We're going to do a lot of back of the napkin math here, so bear with me. From the data that's available, what I could determine was that the current average ad revenue for a let's play channel is roughly $5 per thousand views. The median individual salary right now in the US is around $62,000. So, in order to make that much per year, you would, again, roughly need just over 1 million views a month. Now, that isn't a small amount. of views. But the point is that if you're getting that amount of views per month, it doesn't put you in the top 100 channels. You'd likely be somewhere in the top 2 to 3,000 channels. And that doesn't include the fact that some people could survive on less. Some videos have higher revenue than others. And there's other revenue streams like brand deals,

membership or merch, like a brand new theory where which you can get at theoryverse.com. Which means you may even be in the top 4 to 5,000 channel range. Of course, subscriber numbers don't direct directly translate to revenue. But it gives you a rough idea and goes to show that while being a let's player might not make you an overnight sensation anymore, they are definitely still around, and I would consider them successful. Success is what you make of it after all. Finding your key push. What is it that you bring to the table? And if you stay true to that, success, money, all of that will follow. If you put money in success first, you'll either burn out or people will begin to see through it and slowly fall off. The medium's not dead, it's just different now. It's more

like a semi-reliable office job rather than becoming a Hollywood superstar. Although that doesn't mean things have to stay that way. Just like let's plays have evolved from screenshots on a chatboard to videos with audio, to face cams, to live streams, if we do want let's plays back on top, it's going to take another evolution within the genre. If the industry is leaning into television quality programming, with videos that appeal to mainstream audiences, then let's plays need to adapt to suit that. We're already seeing some sense of this with videos like the Minecraft Civilization,

series. Let's plays with characters, storylines, cinematic camera angles. But clearly, we need to go further. How exactly we do that? I'm not sure. But I do know that this kind of innovation can't just be all about the data. It has to be driven by the thing that made all of these channels blow up in the first place. Passion. Doing what you love. Maybe one of you watching has that drive and is able to take the things I've talked about today and apply it to your brand new let's play channel, evolving the genre and breaking into the mainstream market that YouTube is so desperately pushing towards. All I ask is that if you do manage to achieve that, when you're up there, accepting your Emmy Award, just give me a little shout out. You figured out the solution,

but this is where you got a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.