If a YouTuber creates a Let's Play video of a game, does that tend to have a positive effect on the attention the game recieves? If it does, is it significant enough to rationalize seeking YouTubers to create a review of the game?
I don’t have anything empirical, but I’ve come to the conclusion that this mostly depends on the replay value of said game.
YouTubers might hinder story-based games, should they do full playthroughs and so spoil their audience. I’ve seen some publishers explicitly request them to not finish any let’s play, or they set a hard line. Something like this was done by the devs of At Dead of Night.
EDIT: I don’t mean to imply story-based games have zero replayability. One could have branching paths, alternate dialogue, easter eggs, yada-yada.
There's a YouTuber I really like (I can't remember their name rn ;-;) who plays a lot of indie games. His general rule of thumb seems to be "play the first half of the game, let viewers get a taste of what they can expect from it, but don't reveal any spoilers". Ngl, I have looked into some games he's played simply because I was engaged with the story and wanted to know more.
I feel full play throughs should be done only for major games that are already really popular(Undertale, Skyrim, etc.) but not everyone has the chance to buy but they still wants to be a part of the phenomenon.
If you mean engagement in terms of views/ plays, then usually very little unless it's a big youtuber. The only time we've noticed a real increase is from a Twitch streamer who happened to get a big raid when she was playing our game.
Many of the big indie streamers- like ManlyBadAssHero- specialise in horror, which is why those games tend to do so well here.
I'd definitely recommend devs reach out to small Youtubers for other reasons, though. It's always good to make new friends and you can learn a lot from seeing your games being played through different eyes.
I'm lucky enough to have been played by a YouTuber with 2 million subscribers (wow now he's at 11 million), the video got 1.1 million views. It is tough to gauge if the game got traffic from the video, because the game was already #1 on a website for 24 hours before their video came out. Looking at the video, they never bothered to have a link to the game below. It's just all links to their social media.
Looks like the game was still getting 1,000 demo downloads a month for several months after release, with a 1:2 download to page view ratio. The #1 method for people finding the game was a direct link (53% of players found it via that method). The #2 method was the website itself with 35% or so, and the lowest method was 6% finding it via YouTube, so someone linked the game. Probably in the comments of the 1.1 million viewed video.
Does that mean people had to watch the video, then visit the website, and look for the game? Or did people just see my game was #1 that first day and flood in from there? Perhaps the 1:2 download to page view means people saw the video, and they know they're interested in the game.
To continue this, perhaps a better analysis is "the next game," after the one that got all the attention. The next game had a lot of minor attention. YouTubers with 10 - 100 subscribers. That game had 33% of the traffic that the previous game had, with a 1:4 download to page view ratio. 90% of the game's traffic came from the website itself. This could mean that the previous game did get a bump from the popular YouTuber.
If you release a sequel to another game and the people who played the previous game are waiting for the next part, if they just watch it's video on YouTube and find out the plot ot will kill their suspense and sometimes they won't bother to buy the game as they'll already know what will happen in it.