"We have seen many people post our entire game on YouTube with little to no commentary. ... We’ve also seen many, many Let’s Players post entire playthroughs of our game."
"If a fraction of those who viewed a let’s play or twitch stream of our game left us a $1 tip on our website (less than the cost of renting a movie), we would have the available funds to continue to work and create for the benefit of the gaming and the Let’s Play community."
- That Dragon, Cancer developer Ryan Green
Let's Plays can be a double-edged sword for game developers; they have the power to raise the profile of a game immesurably, but they can also leech away potential players, particularly of linear, story-driven games.
That Dragon, Cancer dev Ryan Green has penned a blog post -- co-signed by the entire Numinous Games development team -- about how he believes Let's Plays affect his game.
"We’ve watched the playthrough videos and we see the value that this community is adding to our work through sharing themselves," he writes. "However, for a short, relatively linear experience like ours, for millions of viewers, Let’s Play recordings of our content satisfy their interest and they never go on to interact with the game in the personal way that we intended for it to be experienced."
"We have seen many people post our entire game on YouTube with little to no commentary. ... We’ve also seen many, many Let’s Players post entire playthroughs of our game, posting links to all of their own social channels and all of their own merchandising and leaving out a link to our site."
It's something to mull over, at the least, and you can do so at the Numinous Games blog.
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