EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Xhvhz.jpg)
So I thought about what my field of expertise is and the only interesting thing I came up with, is my thousands of hours I spent on YouTube and the phases it went through in terms of gaming.
1.1 A little backstory:
Although the category "Gaming" was added as a single category in July 2008 (Don't know the exact dates, but the first entry of web.archives.org with Gaming as a /browse category was 26th of July 2008), there were similar Categories like "Video Games" or "Gadget and Games" in 2006-07.
My story begins with a youtuber called cloud8745, I don't know how I found him, but he was one of the first let's player (although he didn't consider himself as one) that got over 30k subscribers, when it was a TON.
I didn't have a account, I just had his site as my Homepage. Sadly all reference were lost when he deleted his account in 2009, but it was sometime between Late 2007 and early 2008.
I made my account a few month before he deleted his, I used my sister's account before, in January 2009, I made my own.
Back then, there was a Videos watched count on your profile, before it got taken down just 6-8 months after I made my account, I had watched 12000 Videos.
All the phases and expirences are from my point of view, everything is written from my memory
1.2 Little Babysteps | 2006-2007
At the time the Video Game category was a mess of trailers, random pieces of Gameplay and rarely actual video series.
Some popular Gamers of the time were, the before mentioned cloud8745, ultraJman and some other early LPers, who were mostly filming they're TVs.
1.3 The Guitar Hero Era, or: The first Invasion | late 2007-2008
Guitar Hero 3 was released on October 28th 2007 and it was, from my perspective the first game to make a huuuuuge impact on the YT community (well maybe I wanna be the guy, but that was different).
Guitar Hero videos were the shit, everyone would record themselves playing the hardest songs, most still recording their TV, to get recognition in the GH community.
One of those was the 13 year old GuitarHeroPhenom, who is still pretty popular on YT, where as some others like Jameslikecoulter (definitely one of my favorite YTber of the era) stopped making videos.
The GH phase spawned many haters, screaming that people should learn to play fucking real guitar
instead of wasting their time.
I was sucked into this one too, even buying a XBOX360 just to play Guitar Hero and selling it after the phase was over, because I realized everything I needed was on my PC.
It survived till Rock band 2, the market was way over saturated, it all went downhill with Guitar Hero World Tour, because there were no new innovations and the series dried out.
Popular Youtubers of this time were GuitarHeroPhenom, JameslikeCoulter, azuritereaction, Bl00dblitz and many others.
1.4 Let's plays, or: Why don't you play the game yourself? | 2008-20XX
I already talked a bit about that in my first segment, but here I want to talk more of the "2nd wave of Let's Playing", which was much more technologically advanced than the first, LPs had actual production values.
A bit of a predecessor was chuggaconroy, who had Menus and used annotations to give a more walkthrough-esk feeling.
Now Let's plays have taken a life on it's own, with other famous Youtubers recording themselves playing (e.g. Ijustine) on the side.
Popular Youtuber are: chuggaconroy, NintendoCapriSun and thousands of others.
1.5 L33t Call of Duty H4x0rz, or: The second Invasion | 2009-kinda now
Many will probably be familiar with this one, because it's still kinda going on, even if it can't be compared with the Invasion-like status it was when MW2 came out in November of 2009.
People were making Call of Duty 4 videos before, but it started to really boom with Modern Warfare 2, so called "Commentary" was dominating the market.
The Art of COD commentating is to not commentate the game, but to talk about other shit, often not related to the game or to games at all.
The second big thing are Montages, don't get me wrong, I love montages, they obviously started 10 years before all of this, but never were there more than during this period.
Popular Youtubers are: Seananners, Smoove7182954, WhiteBoy7thst, xJawz and millions of others.
And again, I have 202 hours clocked on my Steam account for MW2, I followed the scene till Black Ops, when I finally unsubscribed to all my COD channels; the end of the Phase was mostly done by a single game, which brings us to:
1.6 Minecraft, or: A game made popular by Youtube | middle of 2010-NOW
I remember when SeaNanners uploaded a video in August of this game called Minecraft, a game which then had sold 10k copies (Not quite sure about the exact number) and was in Alpha (1.0.5_01). I immediately got myself the game, and so did others.
More and more Minecraft videos got popular and more and more were made, Minecraft got major attention and sold 3 million copies to date.
I'm not saying it wouldn't have blown up without youtubes Attention, but it helped.
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Thanks for reading my 2k Post and once again this is written from my perspective and I didn't do research for most of it.
