Using Analytics to Create Viral Games

All right I'm going to start this off by just saying I feel pretty confident uh that this is probably the most valuable video you'll you probably will have ever watched in regards to game development and specifically virality um virality probably just about in any regard but especially obviously in regards to video games um today we're going to be talking about a retention study of 100 gameplay videos that I did um logged over uh 400 Data points and that allowed me to um identify like 24 specific gameplay features that have very predictable um effects on viewer

retention as kind of a quick intro here so after I released cho cho Charles I realized you know there's got to be a handful of game mechanics that have some kind of specific effects on retention because I'd been doing YouTube I'd been doing uh you know Dev Vlogs and stuff and I was aware that like okay there are certain things that You say and it will increase your retention there are certain things you say and it decreases your retention there are certain things that you can do that'll cause people to rewatch parts of the video

and increase retention that way um and so I was like you know within the context of actual gameplay there's probably a lot of things that do have significant impacts on retention and thus also on virality right because the Higher the retention the more views a video gets that's how YouTube works so the no commentary uh gameplay Channel Alpha Beta gamer uh was willing to give me access to their uh backend Channel stats and so if you're not familiar they do a lot of um it's a large channel it's one of the largest like indie no

commentary channels a lot of it is horror stuff but they've got a bunch of other random things as well and in the retention Study I tried to grab as many um as many games as I could that were coming from just in different genres all kinds of random stuff to get a widish data set as wide as I could that is what we're going to be talking about so uh as a couple of kind of prerequisites a little bit of homework uh because here's the deal this is a this is going to be a big

video this is a long video I'm probably going to have to film it in a couple of sittings but also if you want to have a Decent chance of kind of following along you should I mean ideally you should just watch all the other videos on this channel especially the stuff in the everything in order playlist um but especially the videos on Instinct uh video on what triggers a game to go viral and um the video on what entertainment is those three specific videos will give you a decent Foundation but again ideally you'd watch all

the other stuff and um I Should also mention this is if you really want to apply this stuff you're probably going to have to watch through this a handful of times um hey that's me increasing retention ah yeah but I I am serious here's the deal like all the stuff on this channel I don't want people to think that they can just like watch one of these videos and then just be like oh I watched all the videos but my games still suck it's like yeah you got to Like actually understand what I'm talking about

here so just watching through this is not going to make you have a game with 20 billion views okay that's not really how it works you have to actually understand what I'm talking about here so again going through those pre requisite videos will help that'll uh get you a solid foundation and um yeah so all right next thing uh so basically here's the deal if you want to make a game that Has that reaches a mass audience right you need to go viral okay it is possible to make you know obviously a very profitable game

off of let's say word of mouth or off of the steam algorithm and things like that yes you can do that but if you can go viral and get 20 billion views you might as well right so you know virality and social media YouTube twitch Tik Tok all this stuff it's the easiest way to get in front of a global audience and then from there it's like Once you've got like kind of like the mass mass like like number of people then they can take it on a word of mouth basis and kind of get

into those like IRL corners of the world that you would have a more difficult time reaching right there's a lot of people that don't watch YouTube there's tons of people who don't watch YouTubers they they hate it they find it annoying they find it obnoxious but their friend who watches YouTube might find out about a cool game And then they tell their friends that don't watch YouTube right so you ideally you need both word of mouth and mass mass virality ideally um so that's why this is useful so basically um as kind of a quick

summary of some of those prerequisite videos If a game is being played by YouTubers and that game is not getting as many views as they would normally get people aren't really going to continue playing it and it's not going to catch fire um if People are playing it and that video is performing above average you know let's say they're getting twice as many views as they normally would on their Channel they're going to say oh wow I should keep making content about this maybe their friends will start making content about it more people will start

making content about it here's the deal when YouTubers get views they get money so it's like if your game is a gold mine people are going to mine it right it's You don't have to ask them to you don't have to beg people to you don't have to pay them to you're paying them indirectly by giving them a game that will earn them more money large YouTubers they're good at editing they've got engaging personalities um they know how to kind of get the most out of a game and make it appeal to Their audience but

only to an extent right most YouTubers are not skilled enough to take a lot of the crappy games That get released on Steam they're not going to make a a viral video out of that they're not going to make money off off of it okay so ideally your game would be helping content creators make better content right you're not going to be getting in the way with weird stuff with weird mechanics with mechanics that are hurting their retention and ideally you will give them a tool to create good content and if you Do that successfully

then you can kind of Spawn this Title Wave of of content kind of like I mentioned one of the key ways that uh you would have control over this is through retention most social media sites most of the video ones specifically I'd say like YouTube and Tik Tock but other platforms as well they promote content that has really really high retention rates uh this is basically just how much percentage or how much time or both Really combine they're taking both into account um how much time are people spending watching a specific piece of content um

if people are watching it for 10 seconds that content is probably not going very far if they're watching it for 20 minutes well now you're going to get 50 million views or you know whatever it might be retention rate is very very important and we have a lot of control over that as game developer firstly I'm going to give you kind of Just the overall basis of how retention Works um again this is kind of gone into on other videos but basically the way that you keep somebody engaged is is by working towards a goal

right you have a goal you have a conflict you have a problem you have a puzzle and you're actively working towards solving it and you're demonstrating progress towards that goal throughout the video and what that is essentially doing is that people are Sort of they're sort of living vicariously through you and they get to feel as though they are solving a problem as though they are accomplishing a goal um so you're kind of taking people on a journey through uh accomplishment right you're giving them a sense of accomplishment the way that this works in practice

I'll give my uh my devlog template um for example so basically in like the first 5 Seconds of a video I try to explain the overall Conflict the overall story of the video it's like okay what goal am I trying to accomplish so it might be uh there's no enemies in the game and that's awful because I need enemies in a game okay and then next I'm giving a little bit of context like for the next Maybe 10 or 15 seconds some additional context so that people understand again they understand the full scope of like

what is the goal what are we accomplishing um and then in the next like 45 seconds 60 seconds I Try and make rapid progress towards that goal right it's like okay look we're we're doing stuff we're getting stuff done um we want to show immediately that we're doing something that immediately gives people this feeling that we are working towards this goal um and then this is something that I don't know exactly how you would uh incorporate this into games but just again from like an overall retention standpoint um then I'll like throw in a Twist

or like some Kind of additional um challenge sort of uh something that makes it a little bit more multi-dimensional like for example if I'm working on enemy AI maybe 60 seconds in I reveal that there's some other entire really difficult feature for the AI that I need to add that I've never done before and I don't know how to do it something like that right so and then the rest of the video what you're doing is you are showing progress towards the goal you are Interrupting that progress with additional like kind of like um intermediate

conflicts and actually I've got a graph for this I'll just pull this up on screen uh this is the graph here this is basically what it looks like this is how I outline it obviously here's the deal I'm not Mr Beast if you were to ask him I'm sure he'd give you a much better explanation But ultimately you've got your main timeline of your Video where you've got your overarching goal and some intermediate goals and then you also current you have constant reminders of how close you are right it's like oh we're about halfway there

you know it's like uh think about when you're on a car ride and you're like are we there yet are we there yet how close are we right we want to know where we are on this this spectrum you can think of it like a almost like a progress bar this is why Progress bars are on everything loading screens and all that stuff right because we want to see how close are we so that's kind of a basic look at retention essentially it's like if you know people lose interest in something when they can't see

the direction that they are heading or they can't see progress towards that direction an unengaging video is going to be one that feels kind of aimless it lacks Direction it lacks progress you Know if you're just accomplishing a task and then accomplishing a task and then accomplishing a task towards no really identifiable end um it's going to be unengaging you know it's like in a scenario like that you might as well just be listing off a random array of numbers just like one 8 45 109 8,504 like you're just doing stuff and it's not going

anywhere that is kind of The basis of what all of retention is kind of being built on and I think you'll kind of see as we get into all these specific features um you'll start to see kind of how that lines up first thing that we're going to hop into are features that harm retention so the first feature that's going to harm your retention and actually I should also mention real quick so keep in mind this study was done on no commentary gameplay videos Okay um usually I mean here's the deal most people are going

to be watching content about your game in the context of commentated and edited gameplay videos okay um there's a person up in the corner with a face cam and there's goofy edits and there's subtitles and all that stuff so naturally retention is going to be better and some of these things might become less of an issue so that's just something to keep in mind so the main menu this is one of these Things that on a commentated video this probably won't be as big of a retention syn but essentially you can lose 30 to 50%

of your uh viewers on a bad menu screen now here's the deal obviously I'll kind of show you I should pull up a chart so I can kind of draw what this what some of these things would look like in the beginning of a video naturally you're going to see your menu screen but also retention naturally dips a Lot by potentially 30 to 50% at the beginning of any video on my devlogs the retention dips a ton right in the beginning so that's this is again this first point doesn't mean the most and isn't insanely

valuable but I have seen examples where retention is not nearly as affected by um by uh the menu screen on menu screens that were more interesting and more interactive what retention is usually going to look like on a YouTube Video is it's going to look like this it's going to go down and then it kind of levels off a bit and then it you know it kind of goes along and then you get to the end right um so during your menu screen you're going to see this right you're seeing massive retention drop off um

in a lot of examples the retention drop ceases basically as soon as the game starts as soon as the player takes control of the character that's when the retention stops dropping quite so Dramatically you know this was an insanely consistent um dip that was logged you know this is an example here where at Point G right here the player was sitting on the main menu but then they started moving their Mouse towards the play button and so they were just sitting on the menu and then they start moving slowly towards the play button and then

retention starts to hold main menu ultimately retention will Consistently drop until the gam play actually starts so any time spent on your main menu will cost you especially any no commentary eding but less in others um you can easily lose 30 to 50% of your viewers to a bad menu on no commentary again I made a note on this uh to mitigate this you'd either need to have a really interesting animated or interactive main menu so that or make it so that the player controls the character to navigate the Menu now that's that one I'm

not sure if that's really a good way to do it because you need to teach people what the game is it means you would have to like start the game like in a tutorial or something it just seems a little bit messy but I think having uh a nice animated or interactive menu would help so uh next thing our player deaths essentially every single time that the player in your game dies you will lose retention because you are You know you were working towards you were prog you you were making progress you were going and

then all of a sudden it's cut short it's cut short and now it's it's it's like that tension is All released and people are like ah dang it and now they feel defeated and they're more likely to leave the video generally what I see with player deaths is around 6 to 15% dips um but there is a little bit more to get into here so often times player Deaths are especially hurting retention because they are they're followed by very long game over screens um and here I specifically noted you know sometimes you've got a game

over screen that's 20 to 60 seconds you know of of like you know you've got your game over screen and then it's followed by a loading screen and then it's followed by 20 seconds of retreading ground to get back to where you previously were or sometimes even longer And of course they also cause this jarring Breakin flow and progress to fix this I think it would be best to try to find ways to make player deaths as infrequent as possible um and make respawns as close to instant as possible you know try and cut out

as many menus or long animations or long loading screens um and respawn players in such a way that they're exactly where they left off or don't need to backtrack over things that they've already done um I Think I also made some other specific points on backtracking and how bad that is for retention um deaths it can also be less uh less literal there were some examples of of for example cart racing games where You' be racing the cart and then you'd like go off the the track into like the water and it have to play

a respawn animation You' see a dip of like 5% so let's see if we can find a couple examples of some of these all right so this one is an example of a 133% dip this is point B right here uh let me scroll down right here might be difficult to see um big dip and this is on a um a death during a horror game so player just died and now this long death screen is popping up and people are leaving the video and then I think it probably levels off again probably around the

point where um that death screen ends but yeah so that's an example of that One let's find a couple other ones here okay here's an example of like a sort of a cart racing one this is a six % dip um on point B right here so we're going along we're going along kind of a steady decline and then there's a sharp dip right at this point here right we fall off the edge and this is even a really quick this was a quick respawn this was a really quick respawn but even then you've got

6% of people leaving or 6% of people who were originally watching it's Actually more than 6% of the people who were watching as that point in the video because retention is already down to about 33% so it's actually closer to what would that be like a 15% dip is that is that right I don't know if my math is mathing but it would be something like that so those are some good examples of uh kind of what that looks like um so next one oh actually also another quick note um jump scare deaths jump scare

deaths in horror games Um are a little bit different but jump scares is a specific spefic Point later on that we'll get into so uh next one level and match completion so level-based games um are something that you have to be a little bit careful about because each individual level inherently it kind of it it's like it acts as its own goal right so you're you start a level you have a goal you complete it and now people feel a sense of completion and They're more inclined to leave the video and not stick around for

the future levels the you know let's say you've got a video where you're doing three rounds of a game or three levels you know let's say you you're doing three rounds of fortnite every time that a round of fortnite ends there's probably going to be a slight dip um every time a round of Among Us ends in a video there's going to be a slight dip because people want to stick around until they See you know the current goal that they're fixated on they want to see it completed so level completions usually Cause 3 to

10% dips um they're pretty much the most common and consistent type of dip logged during this study um the factors that contribute to the severity of the dips are the length of the level transition and how heavy the sense of completion is um there are some games where it's like shorter levels and it's not there isn't like a super super clear Goal that's being defined um so the dips are thus less you know maybe closer to like that 3% but if it's like slightly longer matches let's say maybe 10 minutes and the ending has been

really hyped up as soon as it ends you know so something like Among Us in fortnite I think it' be good examples of ones that would have this these larger dips um but also the wind screens you know in like uh like puzzle games um if you've got you know you finished the level and then You've got 10 seconds of loading screen and menus and stuff that's not good for retention obviously again in commentated videos things like this will probably be cut out but if somebody's let's say live streaming that's the other thing that you

got to keep in mind is a live stream is going to probably um line up more closely with a lot of this data um than most commentated videos because again in a live stream you can't cut out the loading screen you Just got to sit through it I think the best scenario and this is kind of again this is one of these points of nuance you know you've got the option to avoid level or match based games um and go for something that's more like sandboxy more open-ended that allows people to come up with their

own goal right so you could create a video that's based around a specific goal that you've set and you can end it as soon if you as soon as You've uh completed that goal like in Minecraft let's say you're like hey guys in today's video this day we're going to go and mine diamonds and we're going to make a whole full suit of diamond armor and however long that takes is how long it takes and you can end the video once you've completed that goal which is going to be better for retention um but it

can also be good to have match based games because it gives anybody who plays it this Inherent goal right it it you're giving them the gold you're giving them the stakes it you have a little bit more control over the structure of the retention and how well the game will retain viewers so there's there's a tradeoff I think that for if basically I think if you wanted to game man it's it's kind of tough right it's kind of tough I think ultimately sandbox is going to give you more potential for longevity but it's going to

to be more Difficult because it puts more of the burden on YouTubers to structure a really interesting and captivating video and you don't really have any say on it so it's just things that you got to weigh you know like for me I'm doing cuff bust cuff bust is round based because I think at that just I think it works in this scenario but worth considering but regardless your level transitions should ideally be as quick And streamlined as possible um you know long win animations or score completion times statistics all negatively affect the retention um

ideally you'd just say hey you won hey you lost make it quick make it snappy and move on to the next thing and and get that new goal in front of people as soon as possible um another note I made is that it could be useful um to like if you're doing round based stuff maybe instead of having like a bunch of five minute rounds you could Lengthen them to now maybe you've got like fewer rounds per video but they're like 20 or 30 minutes long or something so that that way you could fit a

single round into a video so that you're not getting those multimatch dips uh this is a very subtle one and it is this is four minutes into the video another thing worth noting um basically the further into a video you are the lower the percentages are um for the the dips because just you know once you're 90% of The way through a video or halfway through the video most people are there to stay but here at halfway through there there was a fairly distinct 2% dip it might be a little bit difficult to see in

the video here but 2% for a player completing a level and then they're shown these statistics they then continue continue maybe it's loading yeah so that's a 2% dip um yeah here's one this is uh for point a right Here this dip this is an 8% this is a player completing they've just completed the first level of the game and I I guess that that was it level completion was probably right here mhm and again this was a this was a quick a very quick transition but you're still seeing a bit of an effect next

up are notes notes are this going to be most common in your story based games or Horror games um pretty much every game is throwing story out there and they're trying to throw lore in and all this stuff but it's actually not good for retention if you're implementing your notes incorrectly you're probably going to see a 2 or 3% dip but there have been a couple examples that I saw that were really atrocious where there was a 6% dip um there are a lot of examples of well-implemented notes that didn't cause any dips so I'm

going to go through kind Of what the the main differences are so basically notes are worst for retention when they are very long right so multiple paragraphs a big you know like if if I've got like this much text three sentences four sentences or more holy uh that's going to be awful for retention okay the more text there is the less people want to see it and the sooner in the game that they appear the worse it will be for retention so if you open up your game and 30 seconds in you pick up A

note and it's two paragraphs alone people are going to go oh no not one of these and they're going to leave okay but there are notes that don't impact retention and these ones um are they're going to be really short I'm talking like one sentence two sentences maybe just a few words in nice big legible text um you know often times they'd have like pictures on them or drawings um and ideally they're also placed later in the Game like past the first three minutes if you're past the first three minutes of the video or the

game you're your notes are short they're visual um then you're probably not going to be causing any issues here um I think the main issue with notes is that they're kind of interrupting progress especially when it's really early in the video when again when progress should be fastest progress should be fastest the the sooner you are in the in The game and in the video so you know I think ideally it's best to just avoid using notes entirely but if you need to try and just keep them short visuals and text and place them a

little bit later in the game right try and put it off for a little bit um as well as you know another note here just again keeping the font size large enough so that people that are watching on a phone because again most people are not I mean heck the font size This right here is probably pretty illegible I would assume a lot of people that are watching this video maybe watching it on a phone but um yeah I mean most people they're watching on something small like this and um they they can't read the

tiny text so something to keep in mind next up kind of similar is Expo dumps again this is kind of in the the story realm of things actually I take that back we're going to go back to to Notes I'm going to show you some examples okay notes let's find some of these here okay this one is point a this is in the first like what is this probably like the first minute first minute and a half we've got a 3% dip as the player picks up a notebook that has a paragraph of text on

screen for some time okay let's take a look at this one yeah this is at 1 minute and two seconds this is what we pick up and there's a 2% dip off of this so yeah we just walk Over pick it up and everybody goes well not everybody a few percent of people go nope I'm good um this is from the same same game just a little bit later um this is a second note is at 2 minutes in and again we get a 2% dip um let's find some more okay this is this is

a pretty atrocious ious one here this is a 6% dip although it does seem to be coming after a oh wait no never mind I was looking at Point C this is point B point B right Here so we got a slight 2% dip for some reason why is this marked at 6% this is very clearly not a 6% dip this is probably more like oh actually it might be because it's probably dipping from here all the way down to here would be my guess that's probably why I logged it like that okay we got

this big long note on screen this is at 57 seconds into the game and it just stays on screen now again in a Commentated video that's edited and there's somebody reading it aloud these dips will probably be less significant but again taking the base data no commentary with less bias it's something to keep in mind okay here's another this one is this is a wild one uh this is 12% this is 12% at 1 minute into the video player picks up a note to read this is point a this is this dip right here um

there was also Point C which was sort of a Hold I guess we'll get into that stuff more later but um we do have a very significant dip that dips and continues dipping until the player puts down the note I bet I'm losing retention right now because this note is on screen okay we've seen enough of that you get the point all right now on to Expo dumps all right so long Exposition monologues dialogues can cause 3 to 10% dips okay similar to notes the longer they are and The sooner in the game that they

take place the worse the dip will be um small moments and and it also but it also depends on what the content of the conversation is um which we'll probably get into a bit more later when it comes to some other stuff but okay so small moments of Mo uh moments of monologue that last let's say 3 to 5 seconds I never really saw any examples of it causing dips and retention in those scenarios especially if it's placed After the first few minutes of gameplay like notes uh but you kind of start entering this risky

territory with these 15 plus second Expo dumps uh the dips are also made worse when there's no voice acting um again in commentated videos it kind of acts as voice acting so that might help miate it um or when there's nothing else going on outside of the Expo dump like let's say you you start talking to an NPC and now you're just locked into conversation with the NPC and you can't do anything else but um if you're able to still walk around and stuff then that seemed to help it as well so to optimize Exposition

keep things short add voice acting have act you know either yeah like an act active cut scene like I mentioned here or allowing players to oh yeah I mentioned here as well um to continue moving around and ideally hold off on Long Exposition until a few minutes into the game you know if there's certain stuff In like let's say a tutorial that you need to get across try and do it quickly very short um and try and keep the player active you know just like kind of like sprinkle it in it's like oh you need

to learn how to interact with items okay quick little quick little thing right here oh you need to learn how to jump oh quick little thing right there you know um I'll find a couple examples of these okay this is point a right here this big dip uh this is a Long Expo dump monologue from an NPC that people are skipping past interesting note uh the way the timing works out one 10-second skip still puts you on the first monologue and a second skip puts you past a brief gameplay segment right to another monologue it's

also worth noting that not everyone skipped forward over 6% just left the video entirely so that's why there's a very this is an interesting one right so there's this there's this really weird Bump this C point right here and I was trying to figure out why on Earth there was this bump and it's because when you're on YouTube when you double click to skip or it used to be 10 I think very recently they might have changed it to 5 Seconds um and so I seemed like that might have been what this bump was being

caused by but in any case we see this dip here um which is long Expo dump so it Looks like this we're we're going through the level and now we've got this character and we start talking with them and people are not interested they want to see more of the actual game it's just not engaging okay this is a um 6% dip here this is on point B this is right here so it was kind of already on a slight decline but you could see it declines a bit more sharply and then it levels off

after uh I would assume this is after The the Expo dump but we'll take a look at this this is a 6% dip also this is occurring at uh what is this 3 minutes in actually but you can see we're not remaining very active this is 2D um there's no cut scene obviously no voice acting and we're just kind of sitting looking at text I know you're all bored probably 6% of you all right anyways so that Is what Expo duns look like next up backtracking this is one that we kind of briefly mentioned a

little bit before that kind of often times ties in with player deaths so backtracking you're going to see dips of maybe around 3 to 6% there was one Fringe example um that was a 10% dip backtracking usually happens when a player has died and respawned at a checkpoint usually like if it's over 10 seconds from where they were killed and are respawning um and It's requiring them to replay some stuff that's that's when you're most commonly going to see this um dips like this can also happen if the player goes down like let's say a

long deadend path and then they have to retrace their steps and go back through the environment that they've already been through um some of this can be fixed by simply applying the strategies mentioned on point B player deaths again you know if you keep your um respawns to a minimum respawn players As close to where they died as possible things like that then that would help retention and also keep in mind also keep in mind I'm not saying that this is like how like 100% sure like how you should design your game because a lot

of these things that are good for retention act against the actual player experience not all of them but some of them like for example I mean usually people don't like backtracking but if you need to let's say punish your player Or something for messing up and you need them to backtrack a little bit or the way that your save system is programmed means it's just not possible to do something like this then you might just need to ignore this point and just say hey this is one of these features that I'm going to have to

take a slight loss on but maybe I can make it up in some other area um you know you need to be weighing all this stuff carefully don't just take this and Be like oh well I guess I can't have respawning it's like no that's not what I'm saying it's just it's something to consider something to consider see if you can fit it into your design see if there are creative ways that you can design your game like in cuff bust for example there's no death there's no death in cuff bust and there's no like

for example you can hinder people's progress you can mess them up you can knock people out but then they revive After like 5 10 seconds um even when they're knocked out they can still look around they can still talk um if you get handcuffed which is kind of the cuff bus equiv of death you can still run around you can still talk to your friends and you can get uncuffed right and you can uncuff yourself as well there are ways to do that and so that's how I'm getting around player deaths at least hopefully you

know we'll see how it works in practice but that's part of it you know Another good example is uh being downed in uh video games in a lot of games you get downed you don't immediately die especially in like multiplayer Team based stuff and that's good for retention not only in the context of videos and live streams but it also is good um for like actual player retention the people that are actually playing your game it will make it more engaging if you're not immediately out so um yeah that was just A note that I

wanted to mention there so backtracking let's uh pull up a few examples here okay this is one example this is point a right here slight dip nothing crazy it's somewhere around 4% uh the note here that I have is that the player dies and respawns and the player isn't technically backtracking but it looks like they are so um this is at 58 seconds in I guess you'd probably need to see the earlier parts of this video to kind Of fully understand whatever we'll find a better example okay this seems like a good one um this

one see yeah this is this is definitely a good example okay so this is uh a 10% dip this is a minute in this is this point a dip here this big crater um so the player dies and has to restart the game they're backtracking over a bunch of already seen content during this minute there's a whole minute of backtracking here uh there's a Deep dip and retention where many people have skipped so not all of them have left it seems like a lot of people are simply skipping ahead in this case but he was

my best friend yeah so we've just lost and then we go back to the menu and it's just retreading the exact same stuff that we saw in the beginning um this one is 3% dip at D this is a very subtle one very subtle one but we've gone Down a hall to this area here and we realize oh we actually can't go through there so then we have to go back and I believe get like a torch or something so we have to go back walking slowly and there's a slight dip it's in this case

it's probably just people skipping ahead because it looks like the retention does it kind of Pops back up it's just a very very minor dip in this case probably wasn't a lot of backtracking it's Probably like 5 Seconds um we got point B here this looks like a slight better example you can see this slight dip this is around 5% this is uh the player dying and respawning and they have to replay a whole level which comes out to around 20 seconds of backtracking so they've just died and they're restarting the level um that pretty

self-explanatory next up Credit scenes credits are a pretty simple one um but it's also one that you might not need to it's one that you can take moderately seriously depending on the kind of uh game that you're making ultimately here's the deal uh as soon as the credits roll people are like oh okay the game is over all right the game is done there's nothing else to see here and so people start leaving IND droves okay um any viewers that you have left they are Going to immediately start dropping off as soon as your credit

start so ideally you would would cre keep your credits short if you're putting your credits in at all um you know ideally you'd probably just put your credits behind like a button on your menu screen but if you really want to have an end credit sequence don't try to make it longer don't try to inflate it I've seen some developers that try and inflate their credit scenes to make it look like it Was a bigger production and more impressive don't do that it's not good for retention um it's also worth noting that you should not

put anything important after your credits okay if you've got a post credit scene this is something that I did in in Choo Cho Charles if you've got something that you actually want everybody to see put it before your credits because again once once the credits hit everybody starts leaving and then you're going to be left With a fraction of that for the people who are actually going to see the post credit stuff um you know it's also worth noting that since naturally the credit scene of a game is going to be at the end the

retention drop off isn't going to affect the overall view duration of a video as significantly as some of these other dips you know even if like let's say you're losing 30% of your your viewers On the credit scene it's probably not going to affect things as much as maybe a 10% dip on a an expo dump that was really early in the video right because since it's happening at the very very end the way that it averages out isn't going to be quite as significant um also you know the length of your credits and the

length of the game like let's say you've got a game Jam game something super super short it's like a 5 minute game and then you've got like a 1 minute Credit sequence like that's going to have a significant impact on the retention but if you've got like a 2hour game and you've got like a 20 second credits sequence at the end like it's not really going to affect anything super negatively but again if you're trying to optimize everything as well as possible just don't have a credit sequence just put it behind a button on your

menu lots of games do that that's what I'm doing for cuff bust it would be Weird to put it anywhere else in a game like that anyways but okay we'll show off a couple examples of this this is a 30% dip this is point C here towards the end this is when the credits start rolling oh wait you actually can't see that there we go so credit start rolling and immediately you see this massive dip and it just starts going down down down down down credits roll and immediately it's dipping for The like the rest

of the video here um other examples this is one this is a 25% dip this is point a you can see this massive dip massive dip as soon as those credit start yep um and then those were looks like those were the only couple of examples but at least the only ones that I logged but whatever anyways next up our walking simulators so um these examples there aren't there's not a lot of spec super specific Stuff logged because it's basically the way that a walking simulator looks is uh just like really sharp dip in the

beginning and then it just kind of keeps going down because there's not really typically not really much of anything very engaging going on not a lot of bumps not a lot of major dips just constant decline basically walking simulators it's bad for retention all right um but there are scenarios that I've seen where if a walking simulator has a decent variety of scenery um and no specific like sort of area or biome or set piece is you know being shown on screen for too long then people will be more engaged um again still not super

engaged but a variety of a variety in your environment um is very useful you know if you have a long dirt pathway through a same Forest that players need to spend an entire minute running down retention is going to drop pretty Significantly um but if you add things along the path you've got interesting landmarks ahead that people can anticipate getting to right people are like oh what's that interesting looking house at the end of the path right now there's some there's some form of question in their mind like what is that I want to see

what is there so if you can you know design your your levels in such a way where there are things people can see there are goals that people can See landmarks things to walk towards then it it's like in a way it acts as a progress bar essentially right how close you are to that interesting thing in the distance that's like your progress along this progress bar and so that will help increase uh retention um let me see if I can find a couple of real examples here um this is probably the best example right

here this is you explore uh it's it's a very very nice looking game you know as far as walking simulators go This is about as pretty as you can get you explore an Icelandic environment I believe you get to take pictures you take pictures of stuff there's like photography but this is basically just a 15-minute video where you walk around um and you can see here the retention gets down really really really really low um Excluding a couple points like this point C here um in this spot the the player finds the last location that

they must visit and photograph and they find a person There's an actual person wowe um this is the first person seen in the game their silhouette is visible and they're standing at the end of a cliff or Ravine player takes a picture of them and the game ends so it's something different happening and it's the ending of the game so there's a handful of People that are fast forwarding to to see that specific part but in any case um yeah walking simulators bad for retention but there are there are some things to learn based off

of environment design and how you could design an environment that's a little bit more engaging okay dullness this one is a little bit more broad this isn't super specific but basically dull boring or overly slow parts of your game can easily Cause 3 to 15% dips whatever that might look like um I gave a handful of examples down here but basically these are woron by length of the Dole moment and by whether or not the player is currently working towards a clear goal um you know again this kind of also encompasses things like those loading

screens and those um level completion screens things like that you know if you've got 5 Seconds of walking down a hallway towards a door that's not a dull moment because also Again like we talked about in the environment design if there's a goal if there's clearly something that you are walking towards and there's some mystery around what you're walking towards then that's going to be more engaging um but if the player and this is like a real example if the player walks into an elevator and spends 15 seconds riding the elevator and you're just sitting

there in an elevator you could easily see a 5% dip um usually dips caused by Dullness are noticeable after around 10 seconds of this kind of just dull repetitive nothing really happening kind of moment um you know some other examples that I had here um that were causing some dips were like 10 seconds of like climbing a ladder like players walking around they're running around they're they're playing the game normally and then they get to a ladder and then they're just climbing climbing climbing climbing climbing and that was Causing a dip um 5 Seconds of

a black screen during a cut scene so it might have been something loading but just that black screen that that's not engaging um 15 plus seconds of aimless walking again like kind of what the um oh I just realized I skipped a section but we'll we'll go back and hit on that one um you know with the walking simulators it it only takes it doesn't take long is what I'm saying for for the retention to Start dipping on this stuff which is also why again this is one of these examples where it's like to have

stuff constantly happening every 15 seconds that's again that's kind of Overkill because this is one of these things where YouTubers recognize like okay this part is kind of still I'm going to cut it out of the video so in a YouTube or Tik Tok scenario oftentimes things like this Will be remedied quite easily again in live streams not so much in live streams you can't get around it but it's just stuff to consider while you're designing okay um long boring tutorial sequences you know overe explaining stuff that doesn't need to get explained at that point

in the game you know I deal you know kind of chop it up explain stuff in steps across you know maybe the first 15 minutes of your game if people don't need to know how to crouch until half an Hour into the game don't teach them how to crouch until half an hour into the game right don't don't overload them with boring information so yeah goldness all right um let's go back up to lighting and obscure style so this one there were a handful of games that I was seeing where the retention seemed to dipping

a lot more than it should have I was like what is going on that's causing this really steady decline um and what it seems like is Games that are overly dark visually um or that have like really like kind of convoluted art styles really harsh art styles are it makes the viewing experience frustrating it makes people more likely to leave it's just if the visuals are kind of grading or difficult to to to see and identify then you're it's not you're not going to see like massive Focus dips you're just going to see a more

steady decline um over Time um so often this is going to be seen in horror games that are really dark um but also there were some other games that were also just that had kind of harsh art styles I think this might have been one of them so there's a couple other things going on in this specific example I think um um but so so there's two things one this is this game is high action and we'll talk about why action is really bad for Retention in a little bit probably a long bit cuz this

video is going to be freaking long we're only we're not very far through this we got a lot lot more stuff to go but um yeah we'll talk about why action is bad so action is probably a contributing factor here but also you could very clearly see the art style here is you know it's cool but it is it's very dark it's kind of obscure and it's a little bit difficult To see kind of what what's going on and so as a result again there's other factors as well but you can see the retention goes

way way way down now largely or partially at least probably um in regards to action but we're going to get into that later hey here's actually a good example I'm just just scrolling through here this is a great example of um level completions um that I didn't see when I Was talking about that section this is uh grapple Hoops every single time you could see like the retention stair stepping and there's there's a couple other examples in in this um document that I have of that but you could see the retention stair steps every single

time that a level ends um and that look looks kind of like they're very short short rounds oh also here's an example of a dull sequence where we're just going Down an elevator waiting for stuff to load again probably better than just a straight black like loading screen but if there if there are other ways to get around it ideally you should so anyways you get the point so um back to where we were repetition so repetition is kind of like I've got Written here it's a tough one to get specific on but it's worth

bringing up and thinking about basically if your core gameplay element or core gameplay Loop is constantly repeating in like let's say under 10 seconds then you probably have a repetitive game that's going to cause people to become bored very very quickly I think flap Bird Okay um this is very closely related to action scenes and how constant repetitive action um causes massive dips In retention again we're going to get to that in a little bit um examples would be stuff like night of consumers this is one that it seemed like since the gameplay is pick

up a box put stuff on a shelf that gameplay Loop seems to be a little bit too short to keep people like really engaged and obviously here's the deal that game has gone plenty viral there are other things that are carrying it but that specific element is slightly working against it again the goal isn't Necessarily I mean ideally you should probably try and Implement as many of these features as you can but it's not like you can't go viral by committing a couple of these sins right yeah so night of the consumers what we have

is where it's just it's kind of just generally dropping off a bit faster than some other games again it holds fairly well in the beginning but it's kind of like once People have seen it they're like okay I I kind of get the idea and then it seems like the engagement kind of falls off a little bit see another example here was ASMR simulator ASMR simulator um yeah so this is one where there's not really a goal to keep people engaged the gimmick gets old pretty quickly and people start dropping off really fast to by

the end it's you're down at 17% or Sorry no down to 17% by the end of the first minute that's that's pretty bad retention um and again it's just kind of it's the same and this is a very short video too querty hey there you go also give mind I'm not bashing any of these games I I hope that's clear that should be pretty clear I'm not bashing these games again I'm just saying hey these are statistics these are examples Because yeah there you go basically General repetition is not as bad for retention as high

action games like really like again that's one of the most interesting uh findings that I had but again later anyways um but again repetition still something that you'd want to avoid um I think the best way to think of it is that while you don't want a game to get dull you need to give people Variety in the gameplay Loop and let it breathe a Bit um you know ideally if you're giving players a little bit of time and space instead of making a Flappy Bird Style game where the player simply flaps over and over

and over again until the end of time then you'd probably be in a better scenario um also keep in mind Flappy Bird while yes it was viral it was viral not necessarily because the no commentary gameplay videos were really engaging um again that's that's that's kind of one of these examples where it's Like the people who are commentating the videos the people who are making the videos depending on what they're working with they might be able to spin it in a way that is really interesting so it's like there are certain things where it's like

you can get away with stuff because something else happens to be working in your favor and in the case of Flappy Bird it's like it was one of these things that was like it was like Ironically big um you know people are like oh my gosh what is Flappy Bird oh my gosh this game's so stupid why is this game so big every body needs to it was it was a weird thing it was a weird thing so this this is we're getting into a new category now okay this is features that help hold retention

um so you know the last section there we're talking about stuff that's going to make a game go right those are our dips anything That's causing clear decreases um now we are talking about the features that are going to make a game go hold and then maybe it kind of goes down a bit more and then it holds right this is these are our holds right this is this is what we want right cuz ideally we'd have a game that has a retention chart that looks like this you know it it as soon as it

starts people are loving it they're engaged and they're engaged Until the End right the Closer we get to this the closer we get to everybody in the world knowing that your game exists okay so holds are very important and that's just our general engagement Chase scenes are very interesting and I've got a comparison here to jump scares but I guess those are going to be mentioned in the features that bump retention because that's another category that we have here but um Chase Scenes so similar to jump scares spoiler spoiler alert jump scares cause big bumps

in retention but um chases also do a similar kind of thing because often times they kind of go hand inand especially within horror games so we can easily see 5 to 10% bumps but there are examples of Chase scenes that cause as high as 35% bumps and this is because people are rewatching that section um you know that's going to be your retention is Looking something like this and then you've got a a big chase chase scene jump scare and then it looks something like this right is people they're rewatching it because it's just that

awesome and Intense or whatever and obviously that's going to increase your overall average retention by that much the really strong aspect though of a chase scene is how well they retain viewers so a good chase scene can easily and I mean like easily hold viewers Attention Rock Solid for like at least two minutes okay uh there was one example that I had of a five minute hold on a chase scene okay I'm talking like you know you're going down and then the chase scene starts and it's like boom okay and then the chase scene ends

and things continue going down Chase scenes are crazy for retention um so some shorter chases in the 10 to 30 second range will cause Small bumps and they'll look on a chart much more similar to jump scares um so to make a perfectly optimized chase scene you'd start it off with an intense jump scare to kind of Spike retention get people rewatching because people really want for some for some reason people really like rewatching jump scares even in a no commentary context it would make a lot lot of sense obviously in the context of commentated

videos because maybe the YouTub going oh My gosh whoa that that was crazy oh I'm so scared and they fall out of their chair and they scream and whatever um sure people I would understand why people would want to rewatch that but even in non-c commentated videos people rewatch jump scares like always again we'll get into that more later but um so obviously if you're making an optimized chase scene in a horror game then you can start it with a jump scare don't jump scare people in a random non horror Game but if you're doing

horror then that would work really well um you reveal the enemy immediately and you start engaging viewers so then what you're going to do is you're going to slowly increase the intensity of the chase as time goes on uh you want the audience to feel like they're inching closer and closer to dying but without actually dying um this is you know kind of as we mentioned with player deaths right you want your the Chasing to feel difficult to feel intense you want people to feel like they're it's right on my back he's right on my

back he's he's going to catch me any second now but without actually being in danger right you want to to have sort of an invisible um sort of an invisible little Little Guardian Angel keeping the player safe so that they don't actually hit a player death and cause a dip and Retention um so if the players actually dies right you know flow is GNA break and people are gonna leave the video so make your chases easy while still feeling dangerous um to raise tension you can show the enemy character getting closer and closer to the

player over time or raise the stakes with new challenges and obstacles to overcome while trying to run away um basically the if people are the the the the issue with a lot of I'm I'm just going to use horror games as the main examples uh here cuz it's the easiest and the most obvious usually when you're running away from an enemy you're facing forward and they're behind you you can't actually see them and so that's not as good for retention cuz you might be running straight forward for two minutes but you don't actually see the

enemy you don't know how close they are behind you um this is where Chuchu Charles has such an insane leg up on Most horror games is because the way that the Mechanics Work the train is moving forward but you're on the back of the train facing backwards so you can like you're being chased and you can see the enemy constantly you know he's right there and um this is one of these retention things that I honestly got lucky with I got lucky with this I did not know how powerful Chase scenes um are um when

I was designing Cho Chu Charles I just knew like okay cool enemy Character some cool mechanics some action um and I just happened to design the the chase gameplay in such a way that it is insanely good for retention and I didn't realize that cuz again I did this retention study this was after um that game came out but as I was finding all this stuff I was like oh okay now it makes sense because I mean that game went way more viral than I was expecting it to um and these are some of the

reasons why okay so you can also Increase the intensity of the chase with you know your music um obviously that's an easy way to up the intensity you know if the enemy is physically far away I already noted it here um if the enemy is physically far farther away and people can see that they're further away then they're going to start to feel safe and Stakes kind of start to lower you know so you want to keep the enemy close and make sure the player knows that they're close uh when ending your chase scene It's

also best to not end it too abruptly um because that gives people a kind of an increased sense of safety it's like oh okay I'm safe goal completed goal accomplished again it's it's if you're chasing is Big that's great because you could hold people for a few minutes but if if they feel like okay I've completed the challenge then you're going to see this this big dip so ideally you need to transition smoothly Transition to a new goal um as effectively as possible over the course of maybe 10 20 30 seconds rather than just saying

oh enemy's gone you're no longer in danger and there there's too large of a you know kind of a dispersement of of intensity so ideally people be like okay I think I escaped I I think I'm in the clear but I'm still cautious right that's that's what that's the state that you want to keep viewers in um so let's take a look At some examples this is again this is one of these um these data points that was insanely consistent all right so this is an example um this is pointk here this is approximately a

one minute hold um and Rewind slightly here so basically we're just walking along we're just chilling and then all of a sudden we start getting chased and we get chased for a Minute and we're running and we're running and we're running and we can kind of see this is a creative one um I don't know if this is a sh like a transparent kind of shadow monster or if this is the shadow of the monster but either way you can kind of see a little bit that like oh the enemy is still behind us and

the game is third person this is the player character so this is kind of a creative way that um we're kind of able to See how close or far the enemy is from us this is an example from Mr hops Playhouse 2 um so you can see our retention was dipping quite a bit as um the game was beginning right and then as soon as the gamepl starts and the monster comes in we've got a brief hold because is a very brief chase scene but we'll go ahead and take a quick look at this so

cutscene stops we hop into here we get Up and then we've got a chase scene and our retention is being held okay we've got a 30 second hold here this is point G you can see this is uh oh if I scroll down a little more um this is also an example of one that I believe is opening with a it might be opening with a jump scare either that or it's just again just basic Chase bumping um so this is a Chase sequence with an enemy at G point we'll go ahead and just take

a look at This example we're walking around and oh no and here's the enemy we're being chased and we'll see if there example if uh we get this oh yeah yeah see we could see oh look they're right there the enemy it was so close oh close but no cigar right that increases intensity and helps um hold retention here's another one this is a 1 minute and 15sec hold um this is point H right here was kind of going down there was a slight bump here For uh a monster reveal kind of started going down

again a little bit there was a slight dip um when a player died and then actually it looks like this was D point right here a Chase started and then we died and then right here we're redoing the chase so um we'll take a look at this one there's the monster and now we're being chased and again this is a good example where um because it's not like first person or Something we've got this uh 2D perspective we can see oh crap look how close they're getting we're getting so close to dying but we're not

um and another mechanic here that's making that even better take a look at this so our default moov speed for this player character is slower than the default move speed of the enemy so what you have is constantly the enemy is getting closer to the player but there's this speed up ability that actually is Keeping us so like on average we are significantly faster and we're not actually in danger again this is kind of one of these Guardian Angel mechanics um that's keeping the player alive and making the chase easy without you know you know

while still keeping intensity up um so that's a good one so that's kind of a summary of uh of chasing all righty took a little break back at it again let's see how much more of this we Can get through here okay so uh we just went over Chase scenes okay next thing boss fights all right boss fights are very good for holding retention ultimately I'll just read through here boss fights very good for holding retention attention yeah whatever same thing um and there are many examples of them holding attention Rock Solid for 1 to

three minutes um I suspect you could effectively hold people for even longer over five minutes Potentially fairly easily um and the way that most boss fights are formatted just kind of automatically leads to them being just well formatted for retention um you know you're fighting a unique enemy and a unique you know environment it's refresh Ing and the Enemy being more dangerous and More in control of the situation than the player is um which is similar to how a chase scene is formatted right in a chase scene the player is in danger you're running you

Can't even fight back you are you know cat and mouse and you are not the cat right you are in danger and so it's a similar kind of thing in a boss fight right you're facing a very formidable foe um so this raises the stakes and intensity um also similar to chase scenes having a multi-stage boss helps to raise the intensity even further and helps re-engage people who may have started getting a little bit bored since there's kind of a new twist um or threat Uh to you know change the combat Dynamic and just again

make it seem more challenging make it seem like the boss is in even more control and that's kind of how I think you could potentially get into this kind of like five minute range um effectively is like you you you know maybe you get three minutes in and you kind of switch it up and then you get another few minutes in and you switch it up again or something like that um essentially if you have a good Standard boss fight it'll probably be good for retention um this is the same principle or sorry the same

principle applies pretty well to mini bosses um which can easily hold people's attention for at least 30 seconds you know so periodic encounters with larger more unique enemies that are more difficult to avoid or kill you know again it kind of shifts the power Dynamic from boring repetitive action Sequences to something more similar to a boss fight where again you know this sort of even if it's a smaller you know it's not a full-on boss fight but you've got a more powerful enemy that is putting the player in more danger um and it's it'll help

keep people's attention um as well as this stuff that's listed here another thing that's really useful with boss fights and how well they um hold attention is that often times they literally have a a progress bar on them Right you've got a health bar above the boss you know how close you are to defeating them or how far you are to defeating them which means even if you die you know it's like okay I was this close and then if you die again but you got a little bit closer you're like okay I'm getting better

at it you know so there's um again clear progress towards the goal of defeating this boss um I think again this is one of these things that with Chuchu Charles worked out Really really well Charles kind of acts like every um encounter that you have with him during gameplay kind of acts as a mini boss fight because you can't beat him during those times um you know he'll come back after a little while but he's a large threatening enemy you can only knock his health bar down a little bit but the health bar is still

visible even during those encounters and so because of that it's every single one of those encounters is even more engaging uh even More so than you know just a game that has like a Chase sequence cuz we talked about before it also works really well because of the chase sequence but then also having this mini boss type um angle to it also helps it out even more all right so here's going to be our first example this first example isn't a great one because it's occurring towards the end of the video um I don't know

if I have any examples that are going to be showing up like earlier in gameplay Because typically boss fights are going to be at the end of a game or at the end of a video and things like that but you can see here um retention has been kind of steadily declining but then once the boss fight starts which is this behold here um there's a slight bump and a rock solid hold and even another um slight bump when the boss is defeated so we'll take a look at this real quick so boom here we

are it's it's a boss fight we're fighting the boss nor I Think standard gameplay here is what is it uh Contra inspired you run around you shoot stuff but this boss fight held attention pretty well um we've got another example here in this one um this is a fairly short video but again we could see attention was steadily kind of declining and then we've got this slight bump and hold for the boss fight and again is a very similar way that this graph is is um Playing out and a slight bump again once the boss

is actually defeated this is the boss fight I think before the boss fight it's just again it's kind of one of these 2D running gun it's kind of a retro sty it's actually a very similar game to um the last one we were just looking at here and so we fight the boss for a little bit and then and that's it another example here again it's the holds aren't quite as definitive as some of the other stuff That we've been looking at but it's still it's still noticeable and again very very similar kind of chart

here we can see steady decline steady decline and then we can see it starts to go up a little bit more as I'm assuming people are kind of like fast forwarding to this point in the video um slight bump here as the boss fight starts and it holds rock solid until it bumps up again when the boss is defeated so this game um again it's kind Of a high action I think sort of level based anger foot by a devolver and we get to this boss fight level where we fight a giant evil helicopter which

is very different from anything else Set uh oh yeah it's it's the the goo copter goop copter interesting name uh but you can also see we've also got this beautiful little progress bar health bar but it's acting as a progress bar it's like a Loading screen right so um that was a good example there let's see okay this is an example of a mini boss this is in what is this in ripout um we got this e hold right here here we can see things were there was a slight bump C when there was it

looks like kind of sort of a pseudo jump scare slight jump scare there and it was kind of going down and then it kind of it seems to hold pretty well for uh about 30 seconds okay this this looks like an Arena yeah I guess I kind of just time stamped it a little bit early yeah there we go there's the boss boss SL mini boss B okay cool that's that and that's about it that that's those kind of kind of the the key examples that I've got there all right um next thing parkour now

this is a feature that there were there were only like two examples so I wasn't really able to pull like super specific data for this but I did notice that There were a couple of games that were like pretty high action that you shooter games and stuff like that and of often times they were level based games right so you'd go through you'd kill a wave of bad guys um and then you get to the checkpoint and then load into the next level and I was noticing that the levels that had more um more parkour

seem to be holding um a bit better and the ones that were more like just High action Seemed to be declining a little bit more so so it was um again not something that was common enough that I was able to like really put anything super solid together but it was something that I noticed that I thought was kind of interesting and made a note of um I'm assuming this is just because parkour is a less common feature in games so it's maybe just kind of more interesting for people to see it so that's about

it There this is this is one example here in grapple Hoops I think we looked at another example from uh for something else on grapple Hoops a little bit It Go um but this was you know again you can kind of see we actually yes it was cuz we were talking about the stair stepping on the levels um so what you can kind of see is you've got these perfect holds on the this D hold and the E hold here and those are both parkour levels whereas some of these other ones you can see They're

they're kind of declining a little bit more again it's very subtle but there were I think there were a couple other games where there was there were similar similar patterns so clear definition of goals here's the deal this is kind of just to summarize a lot of kind of the the the overall strategy that I'm seeing with most of the stuff that's causing these retention holding Features and ultimately again kind of like we talked about at the beginning of the video the key pattern here that ties together all these features is that there's a clear

definition of a goal anticipation of something to come and an increase in Stakes um I've gone through this concept pretty thoroughly in this section but I feel like reiterating it Chase scenes boss fights and everything else on this list don't have specific individual reasons why they hold Attention right it's not it's not some there's not something magical about a boss fight but it's that it happens to be formatted in such a way that there's okay there's a clear goal there's a clear conflict there is a clear threat um and there's we can see progress towards

completion of this goal so basically what I'm trying to say is that you don't need to make a game that has just these features on this list right you could Create completely new features as long as they are following this clear defition of goals right because that's what's actually making these gameplay mechanics so valuable from a retention perspective so there are other ways that you can do this right there are other ways that you can hold retention um these just happen to be the ones that are common in most games already you Could go completely

outside the box and do something completely new and as long as it's fitting within this kind of structure it will probably do really well on on the retention front next up features that are going to bump your retention um first up is jump scares jump scares are the most consistent and effective way that I have found to get people to rewatch a part of a video um commonly creating anywhere from you know 2% on like the really low end um to as high as like 25% bumps in retention um there are many factors involved in

this wide range so I'm going to go over those the main factor is going to be the intensity of the jump scare right a subtle jump scare and Stinger that's going to be usually pretty small right you see somebody peeking out from a doorway and there's a little like type of sound or something that's maybe a two three 4% um but really intense jump scares are you you know you're usually going to see a larger jump I've seen plenty that are like in the 10 to 20% range um an interesting attribute of jump scares is

that indiv idual jump scares lose their novelty very very quickly um if you reuse the same or a very very similar jump scare multiple times you know you might see a 10% bump the first time and then the next time it'll be like 5% and then the next time It'll be like 2% and then past around like three uses you're not really going to see any significant increase in retention because people have already seen it they've already seen this jump scare there's no reason to rewatch it again they've already seen it um so if you

want to keep your jump scares as effective as possible what you could do is you can have multiple enemy characters that all have different jump scare animations um I think that that's Probably one of the most common ones or you could perhaps have um you know maybe it's the same character but there's different jump like very distinctly different jump scare animations like maybe in one they grab you and they rip your head off and then in one they like eat you and swallow you whole or I I don't know there's like different things that you

could potentially do with it in order to avoid reusing the same jump scares because again then you will you Can make the most out of it right you'll get more rewatches this is something that FNAF happens to have done really really well the original FNAF game I mean it's got a lineup of what like four main characters I think four main characters and then there's a couple of other you know you got like your golden Freddy and all of that so every you know through throughout the game people are if everybody is let's say rewatching

a jump scare generally around like one or Two times and there's four different jump scares you're going to get eight rewatches across sections of a video about the game or something like that right so it's good for that type of stuff um and any other you know of these like mascot horror games that have lots of characters in them that's better for retention because their jump scares are causing people to rewatch every single time that there's a different character playing a different jump scare animation Here is one this is I point this big bump here

this is a 12% bump this is a game we've looked at a couple examples from and boom there was our jump scare it was we we go along here and then yeah big enemy character comes out and kills us very cool um this is a 1% bump on B Point very subtle it's almost not even noticeable this is a small Stinger here yeah little little character walks Past the door people aren't really watching it rewatching it that much they're like okay yeah I I saw it um there's another example in here of a another small

stinger and then for a more intense jump scare there was a 3% bump this is uh this dbmp right here okay that didn't really show me much there's our guy and boom okay cool jump scare 3% okay this one one is B point this big spike here 10% approximately uh this is The first reveal of the enemy character and a close call player almost gets caught walking along we're chilling the door is locked and hey Presto big jump scare and then we've got another big one here this is a 15% this is on night of

the consumers here they've got great jump scares 15% you can see e point here and it also there's a note that the death sequence is a bit drawn out about 15 seconds and has a suspenseful Chase which is probably why We're seeing like multiple points up here almost like a a very short hold but we'll take a look here at this example okay there was that oh right it's the whole I forgot about the the the manager mechanic so it's almost like two jump scares jump scare chasing jump scare so that's why you've got a

slightly longer um slightly larger bump there okay we got another 9% here oh this is actually On one of my games this is on my beautiful paper smile this is a 9% at 240 this is uh the B Spike right here player opens up their inventory and there's this Easter egg jump scare thing where if you try and take off your mask it it does this it tells you that you're not allowed to remove your face and that's it so that was a significant bump um this is one from Gart a band Ban from my

buddies at the euphoric Brothers this is a uh what is this a five 5% bump B point right here for this subtle enemy reveal with good old opila bird peeking around the corner yep that's it there basically I think you kind of get the point uh it would be kind of nice if I could show off how the jump scares get less and less powerful so in this one the jump scare I believe is the same every time except I Suppose for this last one this last one is different but we've got the same jump

scare I'll show you in a second the first time we get a 10% bump which which is uh B point the second time uh the player has another jump scare encounter identical to the first jump scare uh this is a 6% bump this is C point right here uh D Point there's yet another almost identical jump scare except this time the humanoid is black and not red um the atmosphere doesn't Shift anymore I don't know exactly what I meant by that uh we'll take a look in a second that's D point right down here and

then we also had e point which is another almost identical IAL jump scare um pretty much the same as the last one it looks like hardly even a bump it's almost not even worth noting but we'll we'll take a look at these for reference this is our first jump scare in this game we just kind of we walk Around and we scan stuff and then we do a scan and there's a person oh how spooky it's pretty cool all right um and then essentially the same thing again okay you pretty much see except it's in

a slightly different environment here and then we've got one more here and I won't even take a look at the last one that because we get the idea so that's jump scares the one other thing That I should mention about jump scarce that's interesting is that horror games can kind of get away with having death sequences more so than non horror games because like we talked about previously um obviously like in most games death screens player deaths interrupt progress right um in the context of a horror game it's usually it's going to be paired with

a jump scare which increases retention um and it's almost like the The the jump scares are part of the experience right people are prepared for these deaths and they almost kind of want to see the jump scares they want to see the player die at least once so that they can see kind of what's going on and so I I think this is again another reason why as you've perhaps probably kind of seen here there are a lot of reasons why horror games are inherently more viral um and why they lend themselves better just due

to how They're typically formatted they lend themselves better to virality due to chase scenes and jump scares and they can kind of get away with player deaths when other games can't it is an interesting thing where jump scares kind of counteract the the negative effects of death sequences so that's something to note next up Secrets interesting Secrets or hidden rooms I've seen cause slight 2 to 5% bump Um I would assume that these are probably coming from you know people who have already watched a gameplay video or who have already played the game but didn't

know about the particular secret that's being shown and so then they rewatched to get a closer look um these bumps are usually pretty subtle because again most people are going to be watching a video of a game for the first time so they don't necessarily know that something is secret unless it's very Clear through the gameplay that this is is something that the player is stumbling into so this was something that I also didn't have a lot of examples of I don't know if yeah okay KN of Night of the consumers had one of these

this is a 5% bump on F you see right here slight bump where the player finds in the staff only room this little corner that they can break into So little things like that there's some value to them all right this one controversial but hey here's the deal I'm just the messenger I mean this really shouldn't be a surprise looking at the success of games like something is Stellar blade yeah Stellar blade so looking at the success of uh games like that spoiler alert there are a lot of gooners on on the internet and gooners

Like rewatching parts of games with sexualized female characters shocker here's the deal I am not planning on putting any sexualized characters of any kind in my games cuz I'm not trying to appeal to gooners but since I was collecting the data this was data that was consistent so I had to log it you know like this is an example bro the dip reason that I wrote down are are almost Comical uh 3 to 6% dip anytime there's no demon girls on screen 3 to 6% bump every time there's a demon girl on screen um and

then I've got a an a hold at a a three minute hold uh this section here which is you know at the end of the game there's a segment where you go around and talk to all of your uh demon wives and there's no gaml just demon girls and that's the part of the that's the part of the video that has the the strongest Hold it's just kind of uh sort of visual novel um you just go and talk with everybody so there you go the gaming gooners have been exposed not necessarily saying I recommend

it as a strategy but it's there all right random interesting moments so some games they'll include there'll just be like some random funny or interesting moment it's just something random um and I've seen 2 to 7% bumps for this kind of stuff and I'm when I Say random I mean like really random like really out of the blue maybe hey maybe it just went over my head but um yeah kind of just depends on how impactful the moment is so for example there was a 2% bump when a player in one game started riding a

hedgehog with a tiny gnome I I I guess I'll see if I can find the example of it um and then there was a 7% bump uh when a camera slowly zoomed in on a fish that starts just talking to The player and then there was another one again another fish moment I'm pretty sure this is a completely different game uh a fish randomly fell out of the sky in front of the player probably not something that you want to put all throughout your game but it it was it was an interesting thing to note

um let me look for that Hedgehog one cuz that was kind of a yeah that was kind of a cute one small 2% bump here this Is oh there was also a good chase scene in this one and for some reason I didn't actually log it here but you see I mentioned it here I I might actually show off that um chasing because it was formatted pretty well so B Point again kind of it's a it's a slight bump it's nothing crazy so we're just kind of walking through the forest right going along and then

we see a hedgehog and there's this Little Gnome dude just chilling and so then we hop on and we Just get we get to ride a hedgehog and I guess 2% of people thought that was really amusing and I mean I mean they're not wrong it is look at it's it's so cute bro the water effects are wild this game is just really beautiful but in any case Hedgehog very cute bro I can't get over the water effects looks great um yeah and then also real quick let me just show off this chase scene because

again this is another example of a chase scene that isn't in first person where You can clearly see where the enemy is in relation to your player character and it had a really significant impact on the retention okay yeah right here we're skipping along we're chilling we got enemy person up here so we're still waiting we're still anticipating the enemy coming up they got to come up soon now the yeah here we go nice slow motion intro Here and now we kind of move along as they chase us through the water this scene especially is

great this is the specific one that I had in mind because you can see we're moving slowly they're behind us we can see that they're behind us and so this is where the intensity is going to be at its peak so again kind of out of order but I as I was looking at I was like oh I remember that's that's a great great example so anyways uh trippy Stuff and Illusions this is the next one here features like this are rare there are not a lot of games that are this experimental that they get

into areas like this but there were a couple examples of like optical illusions um and things like that and so basically as long as the optical illusions and and this trippiness is not so obscure that it's kind of reaching into that you know um obscure art style territory that we talked about Previously um it does not seem it seems to be interesting to people um I was initially thinking when I was watching through some of those videos I was like you know this might not be great for retention people might see this and be a

little bit turned off by it like oh this is kind of weird I I I don't know what's going on um but it it seems to be fine and even cause you know slight bumps again we're talking like 1 to 3% um we'll pull up a couple examples okay Super liol had a couple decent examples so there's a 3% bump at B point oh let me scroll down a little bit right here um and we'll just take a look at this here I think this might be one of the first times that we're using the

the scaling illusion I think that's that might be what this one is so we can see it's kind of trippy it's this a very trippy game in general and there might be a couple other examples from it but this was a Slight slight b or actually it it also it might might have been specifically let's see at 318 so this was logged specifically for 308 I guess it's kind of both there's I guess there's a couple things going on at once we've also got this Pawn here that's that looks 3D at first but it's actually

stretched across across the floor so um and then there was another example here at C Point slight 2% bump SL Hold um where we've got a cool level transition hey that's pretty smooth right there that's pretty smooth that's cool that's cool people seem to they liked it oh that's neat and then there's a couple other examples of maybe slight bumps e Point here you can see slight little Peak there this is uh another cool optical illusion as we're going through this hallway Here kind of neat so that's about it there nothing major but those sort

of visuals as long as they're still readable people are okay with that okay so next up we've got nuanced features and some other notes so the first thing is action scenes now action scenes had me confused they had me pacing around my room for probably I don't know how long it was it was either hours or maybe a whole day a couple days I don't remember but it had Me a little bit stumped I was looking at all these different things like Chase scenes and I thought that chase scenes initially I thought that they were

working well because it's action it's action there's stuff going on there's cool things you're being chased it's I thought that that was action um and I thought that that's why I was holding retention really well so I started looking at these games like like shooter games games that had lots of Combat things like that uh waves of enemies and I figure that those would have really good retention I think that's what most people would expect but unfortunately this is not the case so the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to make

a clear distinction between kind of where the separating dividing line is between a chase scene and an action scene okay a chase scene is when the enemy is in control of the situation Okay a chase scene is when the enemy is in control a chase scene is when the player is in danger okay an action scene is when the enemies are in danger it's when the player is in control of the situation right when you're mowing down waves and waves of hundreds of enemies or however many 20 enemies 10 enemies you are in control of

the situ situation there's no there's really no threat there's no threat at all and so um you know boss fights a boss Fight is falling into the same kind of category as like these Chase scenes where the enemy characters are in control of the situation but these actions scenes that you're seeing in most shooter games are awful for retention because there's no question there's no conflict there's no real conflict behind the scenes right because people see like oh okay the player can just mow down enemies they're just an absolute beast and there there's nothing There's

no unanswered question here like we know how this is going to end the dividing line is who's exerting more power and control and who is in the most danger um so furthermore when I'm talking about action scenes for this point I'm very specifically talking about anything that's heavily combat focused right that's kind of the main thing is from a combat perspective um you know player mowing down lots of enemies again like we were talking about Things like boss fights and slower more strategic combat segments are different um action scenes can cause slight 2 to 6%

bumps early on and they can maybe hold it for 10 to 45 seconds okay so at first it looks good but then after this initial bump and slight hold uh the action starts becoming repetitive exhausting and people start leaving very very very quickly there's essentially no there's no clear number at as to how large this dip will be um basically as Long as the action continues retention will continue to drop until it hits zero it's pretty horrific and we'll we'll take a look at the charts in a second here um but this can happen in

anywhere from 1 to three minutes of action you know that it'll take for it to like really like bottom out um you know and that'll kind of depend on how interesting the gameplay is or how unique the action scene is um keeping people engaged through action scenes is Very very very difficult so games that are purely action like you jump into an arena and you're you just gun down some enemies and then you move to the next Arena level based stuff like that it's going to be very very very difficult probably I would say the

most difficult genre to make go viral okay shooter games and again I know some people are thinking of examples in their head but we're going to go over those in a second basically shooter games should be Avoided if you want to go viral shooter and action is about the worst place that you could be um ideally your action scenes will be shorter they're going to be more spread apart um giving them more weight and importance okay so high action Shooters like Doom they don't actually get that many views like yes Doom has done perfectly fine

I'm I'm like Mo like Doom 2016 and whatever the more recent one is they've got great Word of Mouth people Are familiar with them they've got uh it's it's a very long-standing IP it's got a a dedicated fan base so there are reasons why it is still successful but from a retention perspective and from a YouTube virality perspective those games don't really get that many views or I guess I I maybe shouldn't say that they don't get that many views here's the deal Choo Charles gets as many views on YouTube as Doom 2016 We'll put

it that way right you know I'm looking at view counts here you've got like uh 7.6 million here 7.3 million 7.2 million uh 6.5 obviously th those are big numbers those are good um and I think a lot of that is going to be coming from the IP being known people are engaged in this and obviously like as far as high action games go this is about the best that there is but you with your absolutely unknown indie game that nobody knows about you're going to Have a hard time making action work and again it's

like even with chooo Charles I'm pulling I mean actually I'm I'm actually pulling bigger numbers Chuchu Charles videos you know focusing more on Chase sequences more weighted see oh hey AIT Ryan first we had chy Charles now we got this dude I'll have to watch that all right anyways um view count you know hell about that's the the first thing that pops up what is this um yeah We've got gameplay videos here with 48 million views 34 million views 33 million views we've got I know there's a couple other with like 15 20 right so

high action that's a tough one it's a really tough one so more strategic and slightly slower Shooters um as well as multiplayer Shooters are a little bit better so something like G where all the other players are real people right you know that they're real People so you know that it's not going to be an easy time necessarily killing the other players so you know that there's more threat as well as that there's more time for tension to build right so like let's say you're you're running from like one little town settlement to the next

town settlement and you hear gunshots in the distance and you're like okay we're alert now right and so now um intensity can start to build and you start kind of cre Reeping in and you start kind of stalking and then you you can see them in the distance and then you start to get into a firefight and they start shooting at you and you start shooting at them and you don't know where they are and right so there there's more intensity there's more weight you don't necessarily know how it's going to end and so because

of that um a lot of Battle Royale games get really really good retention and are inherently more Viral because it's not just mowing down enemies now there are some scenarios where you do have specific players like Esports sports players and things like that who are insanely good at the game um and watching a gameplay video of them you are you are watching them mow people down and a lot of those do get a lot of views so I think there is probably a slightly different Dynamic when you know that it's sort of like watching a

speedrun right it's like Yeah the person is doing it easily I mean they're making it look easy but you know that what they're doing is difficult and takes a lot of skill and so for that reason it can still be engaging in those scenarios but single player Arena shooter First FPS games it's it's not good not good basically the only way to retain viewers through action scenes is ideally to keep them short or to communicate a clear goal for The players to work towards during combat let's take a look at some examples here first example

I've got here is from conscript um very sharp falloff I don't know exactly what that was coming from um but basically it looks like and I just I call this repetitive action exhaustion um it looks like it starts kicking in around a minute or a minute and 30 seconds of Action we can kind of take a look here and see if we can find some specific examples I didn't really log a lot off of this long cut scene Expo dumping this is probably where that initial sharp Spike came from okay so I'm going to assume

that this is the sharp dip here and then probably right around here this is when we actually get in game and then it's kind of probably going down a little bit until action starts it's going to bump Up a little bit it's going to hold for a little while so so we're going to have a little bit of time walking around people are skipping ahead and then we're going to start to see some action right here yes now we start to see some action now people are a little bit more engaged but as we continue

forward we see Well how how at risk are we really because we keep mowing them down and we're we're kind of doing okay here and so then sometime around here it seems like be sometime around the 5 minute Mark which is around here people start becoming unengaged and they start leaping okay and we can see that it starts to dip and it keeps dipping and dipping and dipping and dipping and dipping in this Example um the note that I had here is that people seem to be fast forwarding to the action segments and then after

they're seeing how repetitive it is they seem to be leaving uh the big thing hurting retention on this game is the delay in title screen okay that's not really relevant here but um we can see that there are initially so so I think it's sort of a a kind of I guess you could say level or round based game um pretty short this Keep in mind this is two minutes where you fight different opponents you fight an opponent you kill them and then you move on to the next opponent but there's also these level transitions

here so what it seemed like is going on is people fast forward in here they watch a little bit of combat it dips as the transition screen comes up so people go to the next action sequence and then it kind of goes down again you know we could see I've logged Here every single one of the dips every time that it dips is during menu navigation or during um loading screens and then you can see as we're getting further on through the video those bumps are getting smaller and smaller and it's just people leaving and

slowly dropping off all right this is the other one that we were talking about earlier where um the art style seems a bit obscure combined with um High action and it's Resulting in some really really really big dips um pulling it down to only a couple of percent of people actually watching at the end we'll pull it up again for an example here uh what we see is basically as soon as the action starts which is almost a little bit odd it's almost a little bit odd because and I made a note of this here

that it's kind of strange because there's a little there's a little Hold this be hold here for like 25 seconds where as they as the player is just walking around going to go back and just check this this out as we're just walking around the retention is actually better than when the action starts and then it's like pretty much right after this people are like okay we get it and it just it just kind of continues like this on repeat for a while and it's just it's just not engaging all right this is Another example

uh this we looked at some other examples from this game um it's again it's a very similar looking chart where you got a little bit of some Expo dumps early on a little bit of slow stuff and then you got like some bumps here and there as we're getting through and starting some gameplay and action slight hold as the action starts and then it just kind of starts dropping off pretty quick you know it starts Off a little bit slow with a bit of a you know tutorial and Expo dump um little bit of platforming

and then the action starts somewhere around here this looks like the start of an arena you see we start shooting some enemies and this is mildly engaging we could see for a little bit this is D 124 yeah where where the game play started yeah and it holds people for a Little while and it's like it's cool this would probably be really fun to play but from a viewing perspective you know like at this point in the video a lot of people have dropped off um even though it's still it's the same thing it's the

same stuff but it just it gets repetitive we get the idea and it becomes unengaging um so I want to find an example now of an area that is holding action that's holding Retention a bit better yeah so in the game meat grinder this one and I actually played this game this game was really fun again fun to play um and actually I mean the retention here is not awful but you can kind of see these action dips here uh so in any case there's a specific level that held attention really well or there actually

might have been a couple because there's Also like some bosses in it which help with retention as we've discussed yeah this was an example that I really liked there's a couple others um that are more boss fight oriented but this one right here this is the iold right here Rock Solid for about a minute a a big old C plane flies in overhead and it becomes clear that our goal is to get on top of this plane or to to board the plane and so what that does again this is kind of Like what we

talked about when it comes to environment design with um walking simulators where if there is a goal in front of you that you are walking towards it acts like a progress bar it acts like a loading bar it's like we know where we're going and we can see exactly how close we are to it um so clear definition of goals this is a creative example of that um and even for a high action shooter also could be considered that there's a little bit of Parkour kind of going on in this as we're jumping across the

trucks um so that could be helping it as well but I just thought that this was a cool example of a really solid hold um in an action context those are the examples examples I'll give for action scenes I wanted to do a few more examples than I normally would because um action scenes man they are it's a tough one to kind of wrap your head around at first it's it can be a little bit confusing next thing Cutcenes cutcenes are again one of these new wants features because they there's nothing inherently wrong with them

they're in a complete gray area they're neither good or bad the outcome completely just depends on how the cut scene is being used um if it's an intro cut scene at the start of your game you just say as in the same way that you would with gameplay you just want to get to the point fast give people a goal or a Conflict um you know if you start with 10 seconds of random environment shots people are going to skip it or they're going to leave the video um and you know there are examples of

that where there's like 15% dips but if you've got an intro cut scene that clearly defines a goal then that can hold attention really well and that can be a good way to introduce the goal for gameplay um you know cut scenes that interrupt the flow of the game or that make really abrupt Pacing shifts um seem to be a little bit dangerous right and then you can see like I've seen six to 20% dips um you know like let's say you this and we kind of talked about this in the chase section but if

you've got like a really intense Chase sequence and then somebody goes through a door and then a cut scene plays and now every the tone is shifted and everybody's completely safe and the threat is is gone and and youve just got this massive cut in Tension then you're probably going to see a lot of people leave so basically cutcenes should follow the same principles as gameplay you should be outlining clearly defined goals you should be avoiding dull stuff next up is mystery and tension now this one might it can feel a little bit um counterintuitive

when it we've also talked about you know like notes and Expo dumps but I think there are ways to Do this intelligently so basically coaxing people with a mysterious story can be another effective way to hold people's attention although it is risky since it's typically done through dialog and Expo dumps and I wrote here very epically uh because since we're smart epic people there's a way around this just make stuff mysterious without long Expo dumps wow very surprising answer and very crazy and I even put this Little little face in here because I can uh

anyways you can seed mysterious ideas and ominous intentions over the course of a few minutes with you know small environmental cues or very brief conversations that follow the best practices outlined in point e uh for Expo dumps um mysterious characters and lore can be a nice way to add additional layers of conflict but it's probably not going to get great Holds on its own you know ideally you'd want to combine this with other forms of conflict so yeah it's it's one of those ones that you have to approach very very carefully and slowly and cautiously

I think it again if you've got like a story based game a puzzle game something like that it's it's something you can do and probably should but you have to be careful not to get into this territory where you know you're doing these big Expo dumps or putting notes 30 seconds into your game that are two paragraphs long right that's too heavy-handed and that's that's going to work against you subtle cues um I think there one good example was was this one about uh dinner with an owl um yeah this one here so it had

some decent holds upon being introduced to this interesting odd kind of ominous character of this this this owl guy and actually let me go specifically to like One of these parts where we're introduced to him and you can see also like this is why it's kind of difficult right it's because it's like if you've got one of these kind of slow Burn games it could be tough because it's like how long is it going to take you to get to the point where you can show something ominous right it's like you got to do it

as soon as possible but um that can be difficult very well guys That's Mr what's going on here yeah he's literally saying it himself he's he's accentuating the conflict what is going on here there's something odd something strange is a foot yes very true great observation and then the last thing is um kind of subtitles again this is kind of one of these things that um or subtitles in voice acting not really much in the way of specific specific stats here but Something that I wanted to mention um kind of in the same vein as

notes and Expo dumps uh basically when it comes to subtitles notes and any other important onscreen text and I guess I already kind of mentioned this but make sure that the text font size is large enough that people can read it um you know ideally don't use any like super stylish creative wacky fonts it like it should just be readable right people should just be able to read it ideally um even If they're like watching on their phone you know that this doesn't necessarily apply to like press e to interact it's like okay the person

watching on their phone doesn't need to know that press e to interact is on screen that can be small you can do whatever with that but if it's information that a person watching should be able to follow along with then it should be readable right so um as well as that I think in most scenarios anytime where it would could Make sense to have voice acting I think you should have voice acting because again I think it makes stuff easier to digest but again it's like it it would definitely be better in a no commentary

context but in a commentated context there's also a good argument to say that it would be better to not do voice acting because then uh the YouTubers can do their own voice they could do goofy voice and make it more entertaining or they could read it Faster right maybe the maybe your voice acting um is like kind of slow and methodical and it's like maybe it's you know it might be really really good but it might be too slow for their specific YouTube audience and they're going to know Their audience better than you do so

they might be able to cater their voice acting right that their voice over that they're doing better to Their audience so you know it's just again that's why it's in The nuanced feature section because it's one of these things where it's like you got to kind of weigh both sides and just see what makes the most sense so wow big video that's probably going to be the biggest video on this channel probably one of the most valuable videos on this channel um obviously I'll have plenty more but this is this is definitely a big one

um so couple other notes kind of on this topic so There's kind of a spectrum here when it comes to virality and the level of formatting that you're putting into your game um a game like Chucho Cho Charles happens to be really really well formatted for long form content for content on YouTube decently well formatted for live streams but very very good for um long form as well as for short form right because you can just take a a 20 second clip of being chased by Charles and go vir on Tik Tok with You know

10 million views I mean not anymore but you used to be able to right and so that's how it got out there and that's because it was super specific in its formatting right it's super super specifically like okay you're being chased large enemy very imposing right all of the stuff that we've talked about but the problem is that while it is very predictably viral it is limited in how far can go and how long the lifespan of That game would be because how many viral videos can you make out of this game it's like ultimately

not many right it's like most YouTubers that are covering or that did Cover Choo Charles they'd make like one maybe two videos you know maybe they do it in like a two or three part series um maybe if they're really stretching it they'll do like a I don't know a a couple of mod videos where they'll mod the game or maybe they would Do a story explained video right if you're like really stretching and it thin but it's like ultimately even if the content is still getting great view counts and great retention it's like you

run out of content really quick you hit this roadblock where because it's like even though it's formatted really well there's only so much of it there for people to make content out of so this is where you start balancing longevity and specificity So if you wanted a game to go more viral you have to be less specific with your formatting in a more open-ended way that's essentially leaning closer to like a Sandbox game um so like with cuff bust what I'm trying to do is format it in such a way that people can come up

with kind of some of their own goals some of their own challenges their own play Styles so that they can create more content out of it even if You know like the game by default like here here's the deal right with choooo Charles any random person any random person could upload a video of being chased by Charles and it's perfectly formatted to go viral right you could have 100 followers and still go viral because the game itself is just it's formatted that way with cuff bu it's not going to be as easy for just anybody

to go viral it takes a more skilled YouTuber who understands Their Audience and understands retention and the algorithms and all this stuff to use the game as a tool creatively to make good content but if they can do that then they could potentially make 10 20 30 50 100 videos out of it right so you're teetering the it's it's the balance so you have to weigh kind of the the level of precision that you want based on how much longevity you want um I think trying to make a game that has more longevity requires more

Precision and is probably a little bit more difficult having a game that's more specifically formatted though you can better ensure that you're going to go viral but you're not gonna have quite as much longevity most likely that's kind of the main stuff that's kind of the main stuff to keep in mind here I don't know I'll just link whatever I think is relevant I guess and you can take a look at it more there I'll probably link some of the documents that I've been showing Throughout here so there you have it that's that's your that's

your movie for the day