EPTMy Experience in the CoD Youtube Community
A Timeline
![[image loading]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/1b56448f9cefadd60087e8e8528bedd0.png)
I remember the early days of the CoD youtube community. I came in fairly early around 2008-2009 when I mostly went on to Youtube to watch abridged series videos. Videos like YGOTAS and YYHTAS from guys like Little Kuriboh and Lanipator, even Adamwest'slapdog before he contracted a serious disease that robbed him of most of his creative energy for a long time. I even dabbled in it for one episode badly done with my friends of Whistle! when I was in 7th grade. Yep I was that 13 year old. It was around this time that I found out about the big names in the CoD community at the time.I found out first about Hutch, and I'm sure a lot of you guys recognize that name. I had found out about him around one year after The Matrix.
I should most likely describe what this community did, especially for those who never followed this community. The guys would take a capture card, hook up their laptop or computer to their TV screen, play a game, capture the video, and then make a commentary over it. At first these were very simple, but eventually they became huge undertakings with graphics and the like. The epitome of the lack of commentary, but significant effects and sounds was the "montage" which was, simply put, a compilation of "sick420blazin360noscope" goodness with a bunch of loud music in the video and some slowmo. These became most popular for Snipers, and much like the word YOLO, everyone hated to grind out games to get the clips, but people just couldn't resist using the clips they got.
Before I came on, very few people were big, and most people used the shitty capture devices. There were a lot of Spazzles or whatever the small capture cards were called, there were some other ones too, before the Hauppaug HD PVR became the standard for HD capturing in the community. The quality was god awful, and while people were watching the height of pro-BW, I was watching awkward commentaries over CoD videos by people who couldn't even position the mic properly.
It was around this time that the big names were guys like Hutch, Mr. Sark, BlameTruth, FPSKyle, and then several other smaller names. These were the early days of the community, before Machinima became a company to the community and not a type of video, before Quantic attempted to beat Machinima at their own game, and even before names like Xjawz were buying Mercedes with their Youtube Money. Of course that would change over the course of the next couple years. That was 2008, and 2008, if we all looked back on it, would be considered minute compared to 2009 and 2011.
The Matrix video I linked above is a repost from a video that occured what seems like a long time ago. That video was the first well done "montage," and that idea, compiling clips of crazy shots with loud, obnoxious music would forever change the community in 2007 and 2008. Those were the years the community grew to unimaginable sizes, literally to the point of breaking apart every other month. In 2009 the American community grew faster than all the other combined, within the year new names and old names who were small became huge, FPS Russia, Woody'sGamerTag, Seananners, IIJerichoII, Juicetra (and the other two Juicetra's, they were like a tri-fecta of bros), Muzzafuzza, there are too many to name really, they all became enormous. People like Tejbz and Hutch jumped on the bandwagon that was the beginnings of the corporation that would soon take over all of the CoD community, Machinima, which was the brain child of Mr. Sark and a couple other guys who stopped making video game commentaries and began doing business activities.
The idea of the montage became huge, and pretty much everyone was doing one or two per year, or even more depending on how much they used sniper rifles. This time period was during MW2 or Modern Warfare 2, when "no-scoping" was the norm, and clans like Optic and Envyus set up sniping divisions from within their original gamebattles clan. Truth be told, 2009 was the golden age of CoD on Youtube; no one was fucking around with money just yet, no one had gotten slapped around with warnings or had partnerships from Youtube taken away, and most of all, all the horrible unbalanced bullshit that would bring down this age hadn't been found yet - I'm looking at you One-Man-Army Noobtubes >.>. People were getting enormous, friendships were being created, cliques, for better or worse, were being formed, and most of all, people were making money; this was previously unimaginable when it was just people dicking around with awful video resolution and terrible audio to go along with it.
The scene began to congeal in a way, and smaller channels began to stop popping up. It wasn't that there weren't any new people, rather the scene had become oversaturated. Anyone with opposable thumbs and time to kill could become good at MW2, and the things that began to ruin the game popped up. One-Man-Army Nubetubes, clans of hackers, and even people attempting to NukeBoost came up. People in the Community began to become less trustable, and some people even faked videos of themselves, using friends to create impossible scenarios that the viewers didn't know where faked, these people became huge points of contention. The drama in the community wsa already unending to start with. People marking their videos not as "Videogames" in the description to gain more views. The famous biffs between Whiteboy7thstreet and just about every person alive in the community, along with the fact that he was a prejudiced man and a bigot, led to increased drama. The congealing of the community in 2009 created the tipping point for the community.
2010 rolled around and MW2 was no more, BlackOps had become the game of choice, and honestly the community came to a standstill. People wanted more attention, people wanted more money, the sin of greed became rampant, "view whoring" became the norm, spats became more like subscriber wars than anything close to adult, and the scene became what any large gaming scene would look like if it was run by warlords; that was what the commentators were at that point, warlords sending their subscriber armies to do battle with one another. People began to realize, very quickly, that BlackOps, though significantly more balanced than MW2, BlackOps lacked the fun factor for viewers. Some people made MW2 videos before, some people left BlackOps entirely because sniping in the game became incredibly hard due to the "quick-scoping" of MW2 which was entirely too powerful, but incredibly fun to see. The scene was still had its hierarchy, and the scene still was like a blood clot - no one was making headway up or down in any case.
2010-2011 introduced the idea of having a tournament between the up and coming commentators which would be called Commentator March Madness. This would end up being the most corrupted thing yet to be seen in the community, but in the end it helped grow the scene and distribute the wealth a bit more. Some commentators lashed out, saying that they being uninvited made the entire thing a farce, but really it was just more of the same warlord egos at war. People like Woody'sGamerTag became full time Youtubers, able to comfortably support a family with more money than they would have had they had a "real job." The scene had grown to an unsustainable point at this point. There was no way to continue the level of growth or stagnation. Too many people were doing the same thing; honestly, something had to happen, things couldn't continue in the same way.
Within the 2010-2011 split, new podcasts popped up, like KBMOD which is still popular on twitch, Painkiller Already which also still runs, The Brocast which featured FuzzyOtterBalls (who is now a big man on twitch, congratz to him) and was hot and cold depending on whether the guys were feeling it or not. Things became different to the viewers, but really, at the source, they were still the same. Machinima began to own literally everything, from the rights to videos, to the salaries of the people they paid to make videos. Every big guy was on Machinima, and Machinima became big enough to own its own HQ in LA around 2010-ish. Some of the big guys began to leave the scene, complaining of the bullshit going on inside of it. People like Hutch began calling people out, rightfully so in some cases, but came down with severe depression after serious issues with his love life popped up. Jericho went to college and began streaming League of Legends later on in 2012, while still doing some CoD things. Some people, like EatMyDiction became much larger and spread out between performance skits and CoD. The old guard was mostly still present, and still huge - they weren't just larger than everyone, they were just generally large (like bordering 3 million subscribers large). It was around this time that guys like Seananners began to overshadow guys who had been around forever in other communities, like even the great Day[9] when it came to channel views and internet "awards" (like the twitter based award for online performers.
I have to confess that not all of the scene was constantly in turmoil. There were spats, but not everyone took a side, many times there guys who simply sat-by and let the community do its thing, and stay laissez-faire through it all. Some of my favorite guys, like OnlyUseMeBlade just chilled through it all; they collected many of the annoyed, more mature subscribers throughout 2008-2010, but that wasn't really the point behind their actual non-action. While the scene was peaceful, people made money, things were great. The scene was in turmoil a lot though, about once a month, something, of varying severity, would occur; between the dick-pic sent to an under-aged girl from a prominent youtuber, to the lotteries that became prominent and awful for the scene, things always had a fair amount of drama in them to be fair. The ways people became wealthy off these videos, able to pay for college just from youtube, pay to support a family, or even just pay for a nice car, became schemes; these schemes were based off either raffles which increased the video count substantially with the possibility of winning an item between $20 and $100 just by viewing, or they were just well made videos. The former caused enormous amounts of drama, especially after XJawz unveiled his new 2010 Mercedes-Benz C-Class. The outrage was so great, people stopped the gimmicks.
From 2011-2012 everything was pretty much the same except for one thing, the scene began to contract. The popularity of Starcraft and the growing popularity of LoL, along with the fact that subscribers, many, like myself, who were 12 or 13 when they came into the scene full of no-names having fun and being bros, became disillusioned by the childishness that typified the community. I stopped watching upwards of 3 hours of commentaries every night with my normal games of SC2, and substituted Starcraft 2 streams around late 2011, early 2012 instead; many other subscribers did similar things with League of Legends.The scene witnessed a Big Squeeze so-to-speak. People began to leave the community, while many commentators stayed, while Machinima stayed a towering organization with enormous amounts of money (considering it's a video game video producer), the amount of money in the scene began to decrease to some extent. People like MisterFantasmo, Jericho, and a few others left the scene for a bit, either because they were off doing something that required them to take their video making time out of their schedules, or because they were simply growing up. Some people, like Hutch, came back after getting over depression or were simply rehabilitated by the community. Generally though, the scene became smaller, the squabbles stayed the same except in size, and the money decreased a bit.
The era I just talked about was the era of MW3 and then later BlackOps 2, which proved to be a fun game, but by this point, many of the old guard of subscribers couldn't spend as much time on Youtube. The scene shrunk, and with this, the commentators moved from producing just CoD, to playing League of Legends (badly I might add) and also, importantly, to livestreaming. It seemed as though Youtube had become a thing of the past. The community was by no means dead, and was by no means failing to survive, it had just fallen from it's height. Change was bound to happen though.
It's 2013 now, and a resurgence had occurred a little bit ago. People, commentators I should say, came back, Youtube became the mainstay once more. It seems that League has taken many of the casual viewers, but once more, CoD commentaries and the community have begun to thrive again. It seems like a revival has taken place, and, while the numbers of views are not what they once were, and the commentator bunch is a patchwork of new and old, there is a lot of hope in the community. I had a nostalgia trip looking at a MisterFantasmo video yesterday, and I realized how much history there really is to the community. I hope it begins to thrive again.
Thanks for reading guys, remember this is just how I perceived it, and is not a perfect description of the community. Before you blindly hate on the CoD Youtube community, take a read, maybe you'll understand a bit more why people say the things they do about the community. I'm sorry this blog became so long, but the read is well worth it, I promise.
. I did leave some things out, I couldn't name everybody, I couldn't name half the trolls too, like Ukranian limbs, without this turning into a Final Edit lol.
