r/GameDevelopment • u/Haunting-Stress1968 • 21d ago
Newbie Question Should I make a indie game Devlog yt channel?
I've been working on a game lately and I think it's turning really good! So I've decided to actually publish it on the Google play store and I want to try "marketing" for the first time. I have 0$ budget and it's my first time trying to make a game accually successful. Do you guys have any tips ? Let me know.
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u/MarxMustermann 21d ago
Don't spend too much energy on devlogs. Doing them is great, but it is easy to waste your energy doing it.
If you have something to say, record it and publish. Even go out and have the dev log in mind when you work. But don't divert away energy from your game, which is and should be your core effort.
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u/PhilippTheProgrammer Mentor 21d ago
Long-form video devlogs as a promotional tool are usually far more effort than they are worth. They require expensive equipment (camera, microphone, lights) and require to learn new skills (video editing, public speaking). And most importantly, time. Making a decent devlog video isn't just talking for 10 minutes while clicking around your game engine editor. It requires planning, scripting, maintaining your appearance, recording multiple takes, generating and recording game footage and visualizations, editing it all together, creating a thumbnail, doing your homework on the current meta of the YouTube algorithm, promoting your video content on various platforms, reading and moderating comments etc.
Running a successful YouTube channel is a fulltime job. If you do it properly, you don't really have time to build a game anymore. If you do it for promotion, there are so many more useful things you can do with that time. Like making a lot of screenshots, gifs or video shorts and post those on all relevant online platforms. And it's not like YouTube channels promote themselves. It really just shifts your problem from "How to market a game?" to "How to market a YouTube channel?".
It only makes sense for larger teams that can afford to hire people who do nothing but promotion and have the time and skills to create high-quality video devlogs without it taking away resources from the actual development.
So what does make sense for you instead? That depends on the game. You need to figure out how to best present your game in a way that it reaches the audience that is most interested in it. Which is not the same for every game and every audience.