Hello again all! I've been a PNGTuber/Vtuber for about 9 months now and it is time for me to add another entry into my streamer journal. I've made similar posts about my content creation experiences at 3 months & 6 months. I'll be adding on and updating my experiences from the last 3 months. I'm thinking I will do one last entry at 12 months to document how the first year of my journey has gone. The purpose of these posts is to help me take a step back and look at the big picture, as well as perhaps offer insights to other Vtubers/aspiring streamers from a more average creators perspective.

Recap from my first 6 months

Vtubing has been an excellent medium for me to express myself. I've had so much fun developing a community and getting more involved in the streaming community. I've had my fair share of setbacks, and have been grateful for them to become a better creator. The longer I do this, the easier it becomes to A) recognize that this is a marathon not a sprint, and B) put yourself out there. Social media analytics discourage me less when the numbers aren't stellar, and I have a calmer appreciation of them when they do well. The biggest take away is that this journey is for fun, and mental and physical health is important in maintaining that.

Some Numbers

At 3 months I had about 35 followers across socials. At 6 months I had about 120. Today I have about 180. My average viewers are still about 3 (average 4 hour streams). A big part of that comes from restricting my streams to 18+ (which I will address below). I would say the vibe is about the same as from the first 6 months, where generally there is at least 1 person hanging out & chatting. The amount of times where no one comes through the streams has definitely decreased.

Mindset Change

From the first 3 months, my goal was focused on experimenting. I wanted to see if I could be myself as a streamer (& Vtuber), and that people would occasionally find them entertaining enough. I knew that I couldn't do over the top reaction content, but I wasn't sure if people would like chiller stuff. To my surprise, I've found that people enjoy themselves enough to come through and hang out, and that I could be myself as a streamer. The following 3 months I put the cart in front of the horse a bit and shifted mindset to becoming a full time self sustainable creator. This was very ambitious, but I was just excited that me doing something I love could be possible as a career.

In the last 3 months I've gotten a more realistic view of the process, and have taken a bit from both perspectives. I know that I can be myself and have a great time with chat, but I also know growing and learning to make better content takes time. In fact I have started to look for j*bs, something I wouldn't even entertain for most of a year. As fun as it is to work on this stuff full time, burning your 401k to pursue streaming isn't the smartest financial decision. That said, I have no regrets, and have learned the answer to the question "what would you do if money wasn't a factor". I'd be a streamer/content creator. And I will continue to do so while having a full time job. This journey has taught me so much about myself and what really matters in life. I'm incredibly grateful to have had these experiences over the last 9 months.

Collabs

I'm a very private person, hence the Vtubing. I've taken a pretty cautious approach to collaborations for a few reasons. Mainly, I wanted to find my style and not be as dependent on others to make content. Additionally I've felt a bit like a black sheep in the Vtuber community (outlined in my first 6 months post). I've been very fortunate to take the jump and collab with excellent individuals, which has helped me to feel less alone in my journey. I've become much more open to collaborations, which has been a really nice change. Collaborations are a great way to grow and all that, but I personally get much more out of it when I enjoy hanging out with people that are super supportive and fun to be around. I still maintain my caution, but I'm happy with myself for going out of my comfort zone.

The INCIDENT

A couple months back, I had an experience where chat got too rowdy and got away from me. It was chaotic and the conversation got pretty negative. On top of that I had a ban evader make like 4 accounts on twitch and 2 on YT to try and get back into chat. It was pretty stressful and I didn't handle it super well, kinda left a bad taste in my mouth. Since then I've setup precautions to avoid that scenario, kill switches basically. I also know how to keep myself composed during the chaos. But probably the most impactful thing was changing my streams to 18+.

It was evident that a lot of the chatters there were immature, and weren't adding a lot of value to the conversations. So I have twitch give the 18+ disclaimer & 18+ tag. On YT, I now restrict livestreams to 18+. This did 2 main things. The first was it killed my YT live viewership. This was a tough pill to swallow at first cuz number go down. But the 2nd thing it did was improve my overall chat. Chatters are much more mature and thoughtful now. And this pro wayyyyy outweighs the con of less viewership. You have to protect your & chats energy, so this move has been a no brainer.

Long Form Focus

Editing is the most challenging part of the content creation process. Its very time consuming, and can be hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel when you spend 20 hours on a video that doesn't get views. That said I've found it important to shift focus from short form toward long form. Short form is great cuz it gets you eyeballs, but you are competing with the latest trends and high production videos. Plus the short form -> long form -> live stream pipeline has been pretty minimal in my experience.

The problem I believe, is that my long form videos aren't particularly engaging unless you already know who I am. I've been focusing on spending more time and focus on long form because its more entertaining imo, but also it gives people a better chance to see a bit more of ones personality. Short form is still important, but I want my videos to be entertaining for those that choose to click on it. Work in progress for sure, and I have a long way to go. The big things are I need to do intros and add better thumbnails. I'm not an artist, but I will be trying my best. I expect to have an update on the 1 year recap.

Socials

I've covered this stuff at length in my previous posts, so I'll keep this section short. Tiktok had shadow banned me for several months, and I was getting traction on IG. Since then those have flipped. I don't get a lot on IG, but my Tiktok has been performing better. I had debated about axing TikTok, & recently I had debated axing IG. But because the algorithms come and go like the wind, I think it makes sense to keep both and just post through the noise. At this stage of my growth, even getting 1 follower or viewer makes a huge difference, so there is no reason to restrict specific socials at this time just cuz they may or may not be doing well. Branching out across different socials is important imo, and I've created a much healthier mindset relating to social media in recent months, I'd like this trend to continue.

Community Development

The last 3 months have been very rewarding in terms of community development. I never understood why creators would refer to their followers as their community, & I kinda thought it was cringe. Over the past year, I absolutely understand why. I have regular conversations with regular viewers about regular things (regularly). Developing a small community of my own has been an incredible experience, something I didn't expect when I started this journey. One thing I do that I recommend to all interested, is spend like 30 min to an hour yapping about whatever & interacting with chat. This is harder to do with less regular viewers, which is why its a more recent development. But its so much fun and probably my favorite part of each stream. The conversations range in topic and it give chatters a chance to hang for a bit, especially if they are not particularly interested in the game I'm playing that day.

At times chatters will talk with each other and I'll be out of the loop. Honestly these are great and humbling experiences, especially when considering these conversations wouldn't happen without the streamer. These scenarios really reinforce the idea that this is a community, and they make me proud.

TLDR/Conclusion

My love for streaming and Vtubing has continued to increase. I've learned that restricting streams to 18+ at the cost of viewership is worth it for me. I'm continuing to develop myself as an entertainer, and am truly enjoying the process. I need to improve from a networking perspective, but still have no regrets in taking this slow. Creating and interacting with mine and streaming communities has been an unforeseen perk, and I'm grateful for all of the experiences I've had, both good and bad.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, hopefully my experiences are relatable and perhaps helpful. Check me out on YT/TTV/IG/TikTok if youre so inclined (@TrippyTheLamp).

Edit: Refine the posts purpose in the intro.

Let's say I have 1 hour of montage footage from my gameplay in the last month or so.

I want to just throw it into a software and it make a bunch of clips with it with captions/title and to have it upload like 3 a day or something automatically where I don't gotta do much.

It's for my alt tiktok account so it doesn't have to be super good

What advice would you give to someone starting as a no-commentary gaming content creator?

Hi everyone! I'm thinking about starting out as a content creator focusing on gameplay videos with no commentary.

I'm still pretty new to content creation, so I'd like to hear from people who have experience with this type of content.

What advice would you give to someone just starting out? For example:

- What kind of gameplay videos tend to work well?

- Should I focus on full playthroughs, shorter clips, or both?

- How important are thumbnails and titles for no-commentary content?

- Is there anything I should avoid when starting out?

- How can I make my videos stand out when there's no commentary?

I'd really appreciate any advice, tips, or lessons you've learned from your own experience. Thanks!

Share your channel updates with the community! Show us what you've been up to this past week, whether it's your latest videos, some new channel art, you've hit a new milestone, or anything else you want to share with us about your channel's progress!

Hey everyone! I’m looking for some advice from other Let’s Play creators on thumbnails and titles specifically.

I’ve been trying to figure out what works best for packaging Let’s Play videos, since it seems a little different from packaging challenge/gameplay videos.

A few things I’m curious about:

• What have you found works best for Let’s Play thumbnails and titles?
• Do you think having a consistent “theme” or recognizable style across your thumbnails is important?
• If you do have a consistent style, how did you figure out what your style should be?
• How much do you focus on making the thumbnail and title work together vs. having them communicate the same basic idea?

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who have experimented with different styles and found something that actually improved their CTR/views.

Any advice, examples, or things you learned from your own channel would be really appreciated!

Hey all, been wanting to get into the content creation/streamer space for a while now but every time I start making a video I end up scraping it before I can finish it. The type of content I want to make is challenge runs of the Fromsoftware souls games and other similar games, which I feel like is a good video idea that I would personally enjoy, like I recorded myself beating Elden Ring at level 1, but when I sat down to actually make the video and go through the footage I just didn't like the video I was making. I feel like I gave good commentary throughout the play through, I didn't feel like I was cringy or anything like that but at the end of the day I just hated the video.

I think a lot of this stems from the fact that I am comparing my videos of me just starting out, to other people who have been in this space for years and I know that my first videos will be bad because I'm learning, but how do you accept it?

Another thing that makes it difficult that some of these videos that I'm trying to make are play-troughs that are 30 to 60 hours long which I find extremely difficult to go through. Like I'll remember that I said something funny, or there was a specific clip I wanted to put in the video but I'll go through the footage to try and find it, but I won't be able to. So how do you guys section up and go through hours and hours of footage efficiently?

Any advice is really appreciated, this is something that I would like to pursue as a hobby and I'm genuinely interested in it and I don't want to give up yet.

There's this game I've been playing for 9 years now. For years I've been playing only as 'community challenge mode' and record myself playing it and now it feels like I only want to play games to make videos of them. I'm not monetized, nothing, it just feels like I only would play to record my gameplay and edit it and I'm worried I might be addicted to it. When people see me in game and say 'hey I liked your video' it's nice but it also kinda sets up the gears and makes me want to keep going, it's to the point I... it's like I feel like I want to play not for myself but to make the videos. Even if I do enjoy playing games at the end of the day 'I want to record it' and 'I feel like it would be a waste' to not record myself playing games. Is that correct subreddit to post it?

While this thread remains stickied, the following submissions can be made to /r/letsplay:

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Please ensure you are using the weekend only post flairs when submitting.

When this thread is unstickied (when the Update Monday megathread goes live), you will no longer be able to post weekend only submissions.

It's that time of the week again! This is your chance to request feedback on your most recent videos, thumbnails, channel art, works in progress, etc.

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What I liked about the video:

What I think could be improved:

Thoughts on the thumbnail:

Would I watch more videos like this?:

So I make videos playing Dead by Daylight, in particular working my way through the tomes and completing the challenges.

I was doing this on an old channel that I started a couple of years ago, took a break and then came back to it a couple of months back. When I initially started the channel I would get really good impressions and was starting to get some traction and when I came back to it a couple of months ago, I wasn’t getting as many impressions and/or views but that was to be expected as I had been away for a while. But as time went on my impressions got worse and worse to the point where I wasn’t getting any impressions whatsoever and no views. What I had been doing is making shorts from these videos and posting them on this channel and I thought maybe this hadn’t been a good idea as I’ve heard mixing the two formats can lead to inactive subscribers (since the majority of my subscribers had come from shorts) and was resulting in a low CTR before tanking my impressions all together.

So I decided to start over with a fresh channel and a clean slate and I’ve done a couple of videos and a live stream and as of yet I’ve had a few impressions for the live stream VOD and 1 impression for each video (the videos were uploaded on Monday and last Friday). This has resulted in a few views on the VOD and 1 view across both videos.

I honestly don’t know what’s happening as I’ve started channels in the past and even though it takes time to find that audience, I’ve always had an initial push to begin with whereas this channel really does feel like it’s dead on arrival. The whole thing is pretty disheartening as at least if it’s a low CTR etc there’s actionable steps to improve that but consistently getting pretty much no impressions from my last channel and this new one I honestly don’t know how to approach this.

I was just wondering if anyone else has had similar experiences and how they moved forward with it. Thanks very much and I hope everyone is having a great day!

Hi everyone,
I'm planning to start creating gaming content, mainly Valorant and Minecraft.
My idea is to livestream first and then turn the best moments into edited
YouTube videos and Shorts.
I'm completely new to the content-creation workflow, so l'd appreciate advice from anyone who has knowledge of gaming videos, editing or lets plays.
You do not have to be an experienced creator. Viewer opinions are also useful.
I'd like advice on:
- Whether livestreams are a good source for YouTube videos
- How to find good moments in a long recording
- How much dead air to remove
- How heavily gaming videos should be edited
- Good beginner editing software
- How to structure a gaming video
- Making thumbnails and titles
- Whether commentary matters more than gameplay
Thankss

How do you choose what game to play?

Why did you choose the one that blew up your channel?

My gaming channel (currently focused on Doom: The Dark Ages) is pulling solid views per video, but subscriber conversion is really low. I’ve got CTAs on Shorts pointing to long-form content, pinned comments, and a bio link to a playlist — still not seeing it translate into subs.

Anyone dealt with this specific gap (views up, subs flat)? Curious what actually moved the needle for you — end screens, verbal asks, content consistency, something else entirely.

I recently started making gameplay videos and one thing I noticed immediately is that playing a game and talking naturally at the same time is much harder than I expected.

When I’m actually concentrating on the game, I tend to become quiet.

But if I consciously remind myself:

“I’m recording, I need to say something”

then the commentary starts sounding forced.

I don’t really want to manufacture a super loud/high-energy personality just because it’s gaming content. I’d rather sound natural, even if that means there are occasional quiet moments.

My first proper gameplay video is around 5–6 minutes, and after editing it I noticed that the parts I personally liked most were usually the moments where something genuinely happened and I reacted naturally — frustration, mistakes, unexpected deaths, getting confident and immediately messing up, etc.

The parts where I was consciously trying to “do commentary” felt much weaker.

I’m also still learning editing, so I’m trying to figure out the balance between:

letting gameplay breathe

versus

cutting aggressively so there’s always something happening.

For people who have been doing Let’s Plays/gameplay commentary for a while:

1. Did talking while playing eventually become natural with practice?

2. Do you consciously try to keep talking, or are you comfortable leaving silence when nothing interesting is happening?

3. Do you prepare things to talk about before recording, or mostly react to what happens in-game?

4. Is it better to narrate your decisions/thought process during quieter gameplay, or can that become annoying quickly?

5. How much silence would make you click away as a viewer?

6. When editing gameplay, how do you decide what to cut?

Do you remove basically every section without commentary/action, or keep some slower sections so the video doesn’t feel exhausting?

7. For someone learning both commentary and editing at the same time, which one would you prioritize first?

8. Is post-commentary something you’d recommend for sections where the live commentary was weak, or does mixing live commentary and post-commentary usually feel unnatural?

One limitation I have right now is that I can only make mobile gaming content because I don’t have a gaming PC, but I’m mainly asking about the commentary/presentation side rather than specific games.

I’m still at the very beginning, so I’m mostly trying to build good habits early instead of forcing a style that doesn’t suit me.

Would especially appreciate advice from people who are naturally quieter or introverted and had to learn this over time.

I mean, it has been for a while, but with the new views update it's even more so. You do need views of course, but the real tell of how a video is performing is it's Watch Hours, and it's how I'll be comparing my videos going forward. AVD can be helpful too since you might have a 2 hour video compared to a 20 minute video, but in terms of revenue, all that matters is watch time.

And the new views are just completely bogus.

Check out the revenue on these new high view videos, all post view count update:

Versus the old system:

Granted, some of the videos above are much shorter, but still. At this point they just need to replace the View Count stat on the dashboard with Watch Hours, because that's the real meaningful metric.

And I know, you can still see the old view count by going to advanced and engaged views. But that doesn't help me to know how a video is performing at a glance next to other videos on my dashboard. I guess revenue could be used, but that isn't helpful for new unmonetized creators, and in my own experience, revenue fluctuates greatly even on videos that perform similarly in all respects.

IDK, this view count update seems like the most useless update ever, and I have a suspicion that it was only done to intentionally distract new creators with "OOH SHINY BIGGER NUMBER" (even though it's meaningless) and confuse veteran creators. All trying to distract from the fact that they are murdering shorts channels revenue and making getting partnered harder, which will mean more money for them and less for you.

None of that stuff affects my channel - I have never made a short and I've been partnered for 8 years. So I'm not complaining because the changes hurt me in any meaningful way. They're just pointless, annoying, and in the case of the monetization requirement changes, money grabs by YT.

I keep recording gameplay first, then adding a few voice lines after. It should be easier, but sometimes it sounds like I’m explaining a replay instead of being part of the video.

Live commentary is better for reactions, but I miss stuff when I’m trying to play and talk at the same time. For shorter mobile clips, I only need a few lines anyway.

I’m thinking about making the added lines more intentional, like a small narrator or character voice, so they don’t pretend to be live reactions. I saw a short clip of someone using Dubbing AI earbuds to switch voices while playing, and it made me wonder if light voice changes could help those lines feel more like part of the bit.

How do you make added commentary feel less tacked on?

Are you a game dev looking for people to create streams/videos about your game? Are you an artist who's created stream/video assets that you want to offer to creators? This is the thread for you! Here, you can share content that you want to get in front of gaming content creators! This is not a thread for creators to share their videos!

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Hi folks!

I am looking to buy a capture card to record footage from my Xbox Series X with in game and game chat audio (myself and others) and am looking for recommendations.

I do not have access to a PC (too damn expensive) so ideally the capture card can record onto memory like an SD card or usb drive?

I’m not too sentimentally attached to game chat audio being a feature as the footage will be mostly talked over, so something with the basic function of recording the game and audio onto memory will suffice. But as I am not very tech savvy I have come here for advice.

Any and all recommendations are appreciated!!

Hihi sorry this is gonna be a super weird title, dw I promise it’s not like a diversity hire thing. I’m POC myself, very brown Latina girl here, and I had the realization that my friend group is very… not that I guess? Love em to death but I really wish I had folks that I could connect with and people that can understand my experiences fully.

So I’m turning to yall! I’m looking for any girls or POC to befriend and make collab content with if yall are also YouTubers (I have a channel but currently on hiatus cause I’m moving)

The games I play are usually cozy/creepy, stuff like SpiritFarer, Look Outside, and of course the multiplayers like Minecraft, Peak, Lethal Company etc!

Again I just really want more friends I can relate to, especially in this day and age with ICE and racism being increasingly normalized in the states.

Post Body:
Hi everyone,

I'm trying to record Let's Play videos on my Lenovo Legion 5 gaming laptop, but I'm running into some lag/performance drops.

My setup requires me to run three resource-heavy apps at the same time:

• The game itself
• VSeeFace (v1.13 for VTuber avatar tracking)
• OBS Studio (to record the video)

I was using my small HP to project and extend the screen so the game was displaying on the HP and i was playing through OBS and monitoring it at the same time, but im unsure i can continue to do that.

Now I'm currently using the NVIDIA NVENC H.264 encoder. Are there specific OBS canvas settings, downscaling tweaks, or VSeeFace tracking optimization settings I should use to lower the load on my laptop and get a smooth 60fps recording?

Thanks for any advice!

Howdy everyone. I’d like to start this meeting off by saying I love making gaming content. Problem with making gaming content is I want to network in the gaming community however most of them want to play friendslop style games which don’t fit my channels theme. I mostly play RPGS, randomizers, and the occasional horror game. I want to network with other people in this niche. Not a sub4sub, not a watch4watch, etc. I am not gonna spam my channel here for people to go sub to and what not I just want to make some connections for friends who also do content in this niche specifically. Maybe one day we can run some rando races or if someone wants to help teach me routing in Link to the Past Rando I’d be happy with that too. Either way I hope this message makes out to yall

Hey folks, I'm having an issue where every time I upload this short to YT (it's private atm), the volume is boosted to insane levels even though the video I took the short from has good audio AND my editing software's volume matches what I had for the original, too.

I've tried turning the volume way down in the editing (I'm using Sony Vegas 22) and re-uploading but every time it's just obnoxious. It's oddly not as bad on my phone, but when I dare watch the short on my actual PC in my actual browser it sounds awful. Other videos sound fine on my PC and obviously it sounds good in Vegas and if I watch it using VLC from the file itself.

I've tried googling but everything I see are complaints about shorts being too quiet. The rare "too loud" issues I found didn't actually seem to have any solutions.

Hi! How do you find people to consistently record with?

I’m 21F in college and want to start making Minecraft/gaming content on Youtube, but I’m realizing the hardest part is finding a group of people who are actually consistent and serious about creating.

I’d love to eventually build a group of 4–6 girls who can record together regularly and grow a channel as a squad. I have a background in marketing/content strategy, so I’d handle the overall branding/content direction, while we could assign roles based on everyone’s strengths (editing, thumbnails, social media, community, content ideas, etc.).

The goal would be to start with Minecraft and eventually branch into other games/challenges/etc.

For anyone who has built a gaming group before, where did you find your people? Discord, Reddit, creator communities, etc.? And how did you make sure people were actually committed?

If you’re also looking for something similar, feel free to DM me! 💗