we-did-the-time-warp-again

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we-did-the-time-warp-again
@we-did-the-time-warp-again
RevRyeBread
@RevRyeBread
KeithJCarberry
@KeithJCarberry

the 11th anniversary of the Run Button youtube channel

the 11th anniversary of the Run Button youtube channel went by the other day and i've been thinking a lot about the channel. i love our videos, and i think we make hilarious and good and interesting stuff that has always been different from other channels. i'm very confused by the landscape of popular/ultrapopular streaming and LPs these days. i never really understood what was drawing people to certain kinds of LP content over ours but it's more confusing ever why people like the things they like. admittedly, it's probably why Run Button is an extremely small channel by subscriber numbers. if there's one thing we did right it was being very very early to patreon. i've never really posted about work stuff on here, but if you're interested in checking out Run Button for the first time i recommend our recent LPs of the first 3 metal gear solid games (the third of which is in progress) or our recent LP of Silent Hill Homecoming, or (despite the low quality, oops) our stream of Sonic Frontiers

Frontiers is especially interesting (and more Frontiers stuff without the quality issues is coming soon) because our first LP project back when i was 19 (lol) was playing through all the sonic games. just another thing that is making me retrospect i guess.

anyway if you watch some videos and like them or if you just love subscribing to random patreons because you're generous like that, you can go to contentburger.biz. it's always a huge help

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in reply to @KeithJCarberry's post:

blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog

It's definitely a bit of a bummer you two aren't bigger than you are. Not to get too inside baseball here (my own cousin and I tried to start our own Let's Play channel back in the day, too) but it seems like kind of a big fish/small pond situation.

In that regard, the people that do let's plays kind of dominate that space and push everybody out, probably with sheer volume more than anything else. The career LPers pump out multiple hours of video every single day and it doesn't leave a lot of room for newbies. There's just no oxygen left in the room.

And that's increasingly true even for people who've been doing this a long time. One of the first Let's Play channels I ever subscribed to was this super low key guy named Brickroad. It's rare one of his videos breaks 2000 views, and even he joked at the start of his new series that viewership on his channel is way down and he doesn't understand why.

In the "people cracking jokes over gameplay" market, a lot of people have settled for the big, boring names and its hard to shake them out of that comfort zone, I guess. They've been coming home to watch an hour or two of Game Grumps or whatever for like 7 years. Speaking as someone who continued to read Penny-Arcade for years after I started to hate Penny-Arcade, I know how difficult it can be to break habits like that, even if they turn toxic.

(Which is to say nothing about possible tinfoil hat feelings about the whims of the Youtube algorithm. Who knows what it's doing under the hood regarding recommending Let's Play content.)

That being said, Run Button kind of feels like a secret handshake at this point. It's one of those "if you know, then you know" kinds of things. That's not nothing. I don't want to make this sound like this is stagnant water or anything. I love Run Button and I'd love to see it around in another 11 years, y'know? The two of you do great work.

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blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog

Actually as I sit here it's probably other things, too. The growth of insane hours-and-hours long video essays probably gobble up a lot of that space, and when the pandemic started, literally everybody transitioned to "what if we just did big 6 hour dumps of streams every day" which also eats in to a lot of that space, too.

Speaking personally, I went from only watching one or two streamers and having a relatively tidy "Watch Later" playlist on Youtube (pre-pandemic) to now mostly watching streams in the evening and having to juggle two separate "Watch Later" playlists -- because one of them got too big (2000+ videos) so I felt like I needed to start over with a smaller one (that is now up over 300 videos in its own right).

There is definitely a sense that post-pandemic people are putting out more things than I have time to ingest, no matter how badly I want to watch it all. And it's the kind of thing that isn't really anybody's fault, it's just a side effect of a three-year-long national crisis, I guess.

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KeithJCarberry
@KeithJCarberry

definitely feel its true that super long twitch content from people who do goofy gameplay reaction/overreaction is eating the lunch of typically much better LP content from people across the board. our numbers personally are about a quarter of what they were in 2017 despite i think generally making better, funnier stuff in the last 5 years than in the first 5 years. anyway we're always glad when new people start watching but especially when we see comments from people who have been watching for ages (literally) so thanks for the comments

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SeshohoCian
@SeshohoCian

for some reason a run button bit that appears in my head randomly was the gameshow you invented during the Sonic Adventure LP that you called "What's My Age Again", which, as far as I know, only ever happened during that one boss fight and never appeared again.

To think I've been watching the funny gaming cousins for 11 years really truly made me pause and say in the immortal words of Blink-182, "what's my age again?"

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