All my YouTube subscriptions are to gamers. As I don't have great technological knowledge or the money to buy many different games, they’re an excellent resource into titles that you either don’t have, have no access to, haven’t completed, stuck with e.t.c… It’s also a great resource to compare a gamer going through a game you may have just completed yourself – to see if they had similar reactions at certain points, found secrets e.t.c…
Sure, it's a lazy way of 'gaming' (if you can call it that). I'll be first to accept that. However, it doesn't half save you some serious cash…!
Why did I start doing this instead of actually playing as much as I used to? For reasons I’ve already stated. I only have spare cash to buy around three or four games in any given year, now. I think I only bought two games in the whole of 2012. The whole online gaming business is interesting but how you actually go about it remains completely over my head of how you actually go about it. Most console games are now some sort of FPS title (a vastly oversaturated genre) of which have pretty much no interest to me. I discovered a lot of quality indie and sandbox titles via YouTube. Also, without the cash for a PS4 yet, my entire gaming experiences of the PS4 have so far come from YouTube…
The first YouTube gamer I found and subscribed to is 'AzuriteReaction' (his channel comes under 'AzuriteYT' now). He basically shares the same feelings I have over a lot of modern games and developers, and he generally sticks to much older material and some abstract Japanese games. He places some truly bizarre games now which even I struggle to get into, so I don’t really watch as much of his content as I used to though. You should listen to his rants on today's FPS games though – he's basically my double!
My favourite overall YouTube gamers have to be Markiplier and his chums. He only had around 2000 subscribers when I found him and now he’s somewhere in the region of 2.5 million. There’s not much from him that I’ve not watched simply because he seems to share very similar interests to my own at the moment. His humour can be slightly over the top these days but he's generally really decent to watch. His long running Drunk Minecraft series has had me genuinely creased with laughter before now…
For general mainstream, full-game walkthroughs you'll struggle to beat 'The RadBrad'. He's generally comprehensive and not too over the top with funny remarks or laugher (just sensible amounts). He's a really decent all-round quality commentator. I've been subscribed to him for around three, maybe three and a half years now.
Two more recent ones I've subscribed to over the last six/seven months (much smaller channels) are 'Kage848' and his friend 'FatPlanetLP'. They mainly play sandbox titles such as '7 Days To Die' – a game I really can't get enough of. Kage848 offers a similar commentary style to TheRadBrad, but goes into way more depth on the actual game he's playing. Neither often upload a video which is less than around the 25 minute mark. For those not really into the more humerous style of commentary, I highly reccomend these two also.
I've seen quite a few Pewdiepie videos as I know he's generally very highly rated. However, I just don’t like his style of videos. He's too comedic for my own tastes. I do like some comedy in videos but he takes it to a level where I personally find it too overwhelming. Markiplier, to be fair to Pewdiepie, is very slowly turning this way which is worrying as I've followed him almost from the start, but fortunately he doesn't really irritate me when he does so. Perhaps because I've watched him for so long... Prediepie just grated me more or less constantly when I used to view some of his material…!
