As an indie-game developer, I can confirm that we view Twitch as a leading discovery platform for our games. We see Among Us, Phasmophobia, even lesser-known, non-emergent titles like Gunfire Reborn that did well on Twitch and sold copies. Steam discoverability is highly-tied to spending, and severely favors incumbents. Because of this, and of course, better networking solutions, expect more and more indie multiplayer or co-op titles that allow for more emergent gameplay and crazy moments that you won't want to miss live. Emmet Shear made a comment about user-progression on Twitch to the following effect in a recent interview: - A new user comes to Twitch looking for specific gaming content - "What they are watching" - Then they attach to a specific streamer - "Who they are watching" - Finally, they attach to the community and chat - "With whom are they watching" Think this comment supports the collab-meta hypothesis. Keep killing it Mr. Nash.
This meta isn't actually new, its just the latest iteration. Seananners, Goldy, Hutch, Chilled Chaos, etc all started this like 8 years ago playing garys mod stuff. It was massive at the time.
@@feeblemind if you bothered to watch the whole video he goes over the fact that it's not actually new and that you could easily predict this by watching how youtube developed in the past.
Toast did such a good job of marketing and presenting himself as the early GOAT of the among us explosion, and tripling down as the go to among us content guy, with the full backing of OTV. Additionally, his upload time is extremely early for PST time / early EST time / end of work day CEST which is rare among RUclipsrs in his realm, and catches a lot of people in that “wake up and check notifs” window. Edit: coming from the very small world of smash bros -> Ludwig, I didn’t even know the vast majority of the rest of variety twitch until this game. now I could confidently name most of the top 100 on a sporcle quiz because of the among us into the collab meta.
@@Materialist39 Toast the goat of Among Us? He’s not even good at the game lol. The people he plays with are just bad so it’s easy to make highlights of them.
@@ZxChrono you misunderstand what I wrote. It doesn’t matter whether he and the people he plays with are good or not, he’s gotten a million new YT subscribers on top of his already massive following since the Among us explosion. Not only that but a meta definitely evolved and Toast has highlighted some of those developments on his channel. If being good at a game translated into impressions/views/cash, every esports org wouldn’t be picking up variety streamers right now. And as Devin himself says, most esports teams are glorified clothing companies.
It works for the same reason The Avengers, Infinity War and Endgame works; all our favorite content creators collaborating and interacting with each other.
Vannos/wildcat/nogla/etc did it earlier. And Hermitcraft did it on Minecraft even before Dream. It’s not that crazy it’s been replicated, since Dream SMP is itself a replication of the success! It’s a great strategy to build a following. Just share content/audience with other creators.
when you said "this is not the type of content i get jazzed to watch" about the pink and purple sections.. i kinda agree. the content itself i have never found to be extremely entertaining because it has gotten so repetitive, but im more fascinated by the effects of what they are doing and the growth and analytics from it! it jazzes up my math brain
Kind of weird to think about how the pattern that Twitch is showing is kind of similar to the old Marvel and DC comics. In their early days, it was rare if we got to see a collab between superheroes, and now we see them forming superhero teams all the time. The same can be said for streamers. A couple years back, if there was a collab to be had, it was a big deal, it was a selling point. It still is, but its uniqueness is becoming progressively diluted. This also might be another reason why Cyberpunk 2077 didn't gain much traction on Twitch, because it was a purely solo game coming into a collab heavy environment.
i also think that this just plain shows us the influence that the top 1% of streamers have and how the others generally follow suit with whatever they decide to do as a collab. i never really saw people jumping at the chance to play rust before the server was announced, then all these people started playing it after never or rarely playing it before hand. idk why that is, but im sure this would happen with any game after rust.. all it takes is for the most popular to announce a giant collab in any game, and it incredibly boosts interest in that game. i have an idea of what this could mean for game marketing in the future.. content creators are a powerful tool. imagine a bunch of big streamers next decide to play stardew valley MP next, probably the same thing would happen even though right now its moderately popular in viewership on twitch.
Always good to hear Devin talk about Twitch/YT meta. Feel like collab meta has been around for ages but it's difficult to find qualified collaborations with similar interests
It's not just collab content, I would even say that it's "reality show" content, since a lot of the content revolves around drama, competitions, backstabbing as much as it does on big streamers playing together.
In a way this "new" meta isn't anything new, it's just more striking now, but we've seen it in the past, when there was gtarp servers with lots of streamers, when twitchrivals and league of legends started doing their Tyler1 vs Yassuo matchups, Austin's show (previously rajj), mizkif and all the Austin/texas streamers who collab a lot, offlineTV and their friends, or even Train and his podcast, somehow people just love it when their favorite streamer interacts with other streamers and the views get multiplied by those types of content. Why would probably be explained by something you said at the start of your video, you like to watch a streamer and have a relationship with that particular individual, but it seems that a lot of viewers identify to their favorite streamers and live through them and want to see them make friends with other streamers i guess ? But even years ago this type of stuff was visible looking back at for exemple Reckful and Mitch jones or Sodapoppin when they'd stream together they'd get more viewers and hype than they would on their own.
Which is why mizkif is building another house for streamers and Esfand is building his own house next to miz with their own large peice of land. Streaming is so much better with maximum content in reach and guys like Mizkif feast off of content and by having more possibilities on his doorstep I can imagine him growing
@@anders630 It's not even just gaming, any interactions between Streamers makes them feel more "real" if that makes sense thats why people love IRL bc they loved seeing their streamers interact with the real world as well as collabing with other streamers
there is always stream/flows aka OffMeta stuff going on its not always only meta... they have eisted before, but they weren't as successful/as popular.
Videogamedunkey covered the "youtube meta" so well in his I'm Done Making Good Videos video. And then succeeded in the weeks following by satirically sticking to it.
I thought "Among us" would be dead in 2 weeks... and I did indeed get bored of that kind of content after 2 weeks... I still cannot believe that Toast keeps hitting those numbers! 🤓 You are right Nash, it's mind-blowing.
Yeah same here, but I saw that the game stayed relevant in content for so long. It's obsoletely nuts, but it's kinda the nature of the game and how it's played.
As a occasional Toast viewer, I understand the high views. Creators have diversified Among Us content so it’s less boring, and I know clicking on a Toast video will give me good wholesome consistent content. It’s like watching Ludwig every day. I don’t care what the title and thumbnail are, I’ll enjoy Ludwig’s content no matter what it’s about. Same goes for Toast, it’s consistently good and he’s created a reliable audience so most people just watch every video
When he said when it doesn't make sense "its kids" now I understand what he meant... because I myself was mindblown with Toast's Amoung us spam cuz I usually just watch streams most of the time if its Amoung Us... because videos are always too scripted in youtube and apply to niche audience that usually have all the time world to keep up with the video spam...
its because he already put himself as the sole autoritative in among us video, its only him who put daily video of it, other content creators only do it like weekly etc, also devin is wrong, among us video has low cpm, like around 1, maybe even lower than 1, only young adult and teenager who has adblock watch it, no way it reaches 5, if that the cause, other content creators will def also milk it for easy money
Hey Devin, just wanted to say I really enjoyed this vid. Particularly, I thought that was pretty cool that you noticed the Twitch meta is following what RUclips did earlier with reacts to collabs. Please keep these meta vids coming! Thanks!
Collaboration has always been prominent on many platforms, it's an easy way for a different audience to experience you and decide if they like the content you produce, same for the person you're collaborating with if your audience enjoys their content.
I agree with Devins assessment personally. Unlike that Twitch chart which seems very centralized around people like xQc, RUclips as an entire platform doesn’t have that meta, it’s not centralized. The audience is so big that every audience has their own little ecosystem of creators
First ad on this video was in Spanish, I've never seen a Spanish language ad on RUclips, so there's that. RUclips auto transcribing audio and placing ads accordingly is a neat thing to experience. Great vid, too, as usual!
You are right that RUclips is at an algorithmic point where it just recommends more of what you've seen, which it always did, but it used to be more daring in recommending other content, now it's gotten so boring... it could also be that certain genres have grown significantly so it's harder to the algorithm to recommend something obscure you might like. I figure the algorithm gets slight updates all the time, but I do hope they make it a little more daring to show you something you've never seen before.
"Its just Rust with hola" I was not expecting that and lost my shit. But, its a damn good talk and like alot of Devins talks I feel like a have a slightly better understanding of whats going on afterward. Now i just have to find the way the fits me to utilize that slight bump in content creation IQ.
You should not forget that playing togethe is also just plainly more fun. As you said, a lot of streamer seem to have a limited idea what they are doing and seem to mostly go along with the flow. So why not do the fun thing that seems to work?
Toast's formula is the same one sitcoms have, a format with rules that almost never change, very predictive, very self-contained (there is almost not relationship between one session and another), but the situations triggered in each chapter are always different, and even the people involved changes constantly. It will die eventually as sitcoms also finish, but it's not that hard to understand.
Toasts Among Us videos are so successful because they are consistent in content, consistent in quality, and he puts out a new one every day. And they are high quality. Toast is a very creative guy and even in such a simple game he's constantly trying out new interesting strategies, and funny antics. So there are two big features to Toasts success: -Consistency in quality and premise -Extreme creativity within the premise, and pushing the premise to it's limits. I guess there is also a the third feature that is the wild popularity of the premise ie. Among Us, but the other 2 feature are what set Toast apart and are visible in his previous endeavors in Hearthstone and TFT.
Toast's videos are essentially a series, the "IQ number" is pretty much just him saying "ep 1, ep 2, ep 3..." but in a much more entertaining way. It's really not that shocking that he tops the charts with them, because if you enjoy Among Us he's a top player to watch- entertaining and very intelligent make for a great combo. Every single video is different from each other, they're just the same game so he essentially sorts them into a series. He's not just pushing out an identical video again and again, which is what Devin is making it sound like.
The Rust data would probably be even more striking if they went back to Dec 26th. Jan 7th was when they opened the split servers PVP/RP, but the first server opened right after Christmas, with mostly the Offline TV extended universe for the first few days. By Jan 3rd, there was already plenty of drama going on.
Interesting to see how this will infuence game dev further. Before it was very centered on genres that saw explosive growth but now it seems like it could revolve around what streamers can make events out of. In short we will see the rise of new games outside of genresplosions that are focusing on whats easy for streamers to colab on.
i just wanna say, you mentioned everyones heard of you in this vod - but i only came here and found you following your recently "collab"? stream with ttv/imjasmine which i must say was a hoot :) nice vod keep up the good content.
14:17 the colors seem to be roughly grouping streams of the same type. Teal: Fortnite Orange: League of Legends Pink: OTV people and friends Purple: Just Chatting / Variety streamers but of course the colors aren't 100% accurate, we'd need a gradient of colors if we wanted it to be accurate
I didn’t realize the scale of RUclips until I discovered toddler song RUclips, and it terrified me to stare into the size of that abyss. That entire twitch galaxy is a tiny, tiny chunk of the supercluster that is online video content.
It's fascinating to see these trends. You did a great job of explaining using anecdotes and data, the things we'd been observing for the past few weeks.
It’s funny how much I agree with devin. Ever since ludwig started with the collab stuff I’ve watched more atrioc and stanz who are similar but have continued the solo content mainly
Large AAA games like League of Legends or Valor enter Call of Duty will always be near the top of twitch. They just have the largest mass-market appeal and that's by Design. But it's always the indie games that make a big impact on internet culture thinking all the way back like 2012 with Minecraft that took the World by storm a game that was primarily developed by one person for a number of years. Indie Games just feel so much more genuine and real and when they take off they take off in a way that triple A titles just simply can't do and it doesn't happen very often we maybe get one or two a year of these Indie success stories think Hollow Knight or Celeste or Shovel Knight cuphead please little games that just blow up because you can feel the love in them
Just thank you for the class, man, Really insightful PS: the green pocket from above is the Brazilian meta, a mixture of collab and everybody hates Chris reruns
I’m curious actually on if this meta applies to RUclips Live-streaming content as well - considering that RUclips Live-streaming really blew up last year. Like, has YT Live actually caught or even surpassed Twitch? Has what happened on Twitch in terms of management ended up tuning viewers away from Twitch to RUclips (especially those leaving Twitch to watch VTubers groups like Hololive and Nijisanji)?
I like collaboration content to an extent. It’s nice to see some streamers interact every once in awhile to make good content. But the problem is with mass collaboration like this is that the main driving force is exposure not content. You could see on the Rust server where 1k Andys would just follow around bigger streamers. Among Us had all of the smaller streamers try to get into lobbies with xQc even when they hated how he played the game. I get that people want to grow their channels and it’s an easy way to do it, but the content takes a hit when all people want to do is collab just for the sake of growth.
Very insightful, the only thing id argue is that reacts meta thing. It was def popular and like twitch youtube will have these trends where certain types of videos start trending but i wouldnt say its the same as twitch. Because like u said youtube has gotten so big that all of its content is very diverse. And im pretty sure youtube was already well into being mainstream when that whole react videos started
Collabs - because discoverability on Twitch was so bad the streamers had to create it for themselves. But let's talk about TTRPGs! Arcadum and Critical Role both have had some incredible success streaming a game that was basically dead five years ago. But there's a format which could be even more successful: West Marches. West Marches is basically the Among Us of D&D, or at least has the potential to be. I believe this for two reasons: 1) It's a large scale collab. In a normal D&D campaign, you'd have a fixed roster of 3 to 8 players. In a West Marches style campaign, you instead find a couple dozen players, and a few DMs, and you put all of them into a single town out in the badlands. They interact with one another, and the consequences of one party's actions can and probably will be felt by other parties. Some players can be chosen to be the villains, either publicly or secretly, and it can turn into a social deduction game if you want it to. The potential for collabs here is just amazing. 2) It's low commitment. In typical West Marches, you don't know which players or how many of them are going to show up. Players join games whenever they want to and are available, they're not expected to follow a strict schedule. We've seen Arcadum's Broken Bonds, Matt Colville's Chain of Acheron, and a bunch of other campaigns get indefinitely delayed or even cancelled throughout the years - but West Marches campaigns don't ask for nearly as big of a commitment, and thus are much less likely to fall apart. 3) It's episodic. Every session is basically a self-contained one shot. Again, that's a consequence of the more flexible nature of the format. But this is also great for viewers, who can hop in without having to be up to date on every single detail of the lore. I know I've had a very hard time getting into Arcadum's and Critical Role's content, because there's just... Too much of a barrier to entry. This barrier still exists, but is much lower in West Marches. So yeah. That's my 2021 Twitch/D&D meta hard read. Somebody out there's gonne set up a West Marches campaign, and it's gonna explode every metric. By the end of the year, you're gonna have Matthew Mercer playing at the same table as Sykkuno and Gawr Gura.
I found audio levels were a bit low in the past couple vids, especially compared to most other content on youtube. I'd advice tweaking the levels. But great talks and always a pleasure.
Question: With the current meta being so exhausting to some viewers, could this be a chance for smaller streamers who aren't joining in on the collabs to grow? Obviously it will still be difficult because of the draw of the larger streamers, but maybe the right combination of personality/game being played/good community and not being in that big collab group could make the difference for a few of them?
This could either f or save smaller streamers , if they can make contacts they`ll surely exponentially grow their communities but if they know no one they`ll be doom to anonymity
Do you have the circle plot of streamers and views on Twitch available for us to view? I’d love to look at it just cause I think it’s cool. (I’m also curious to see how small the EFT community is lol)
The Collab Meta will also probably solidify itself more within the english speaking crowd as the Minecraft bubble will expand with a new SMP server being announced that features somewhat big names
I remember before among us, OTV/Friends did minecraft (summer 2020) which they returned to during among us (you could look at the second one as a test case for the rust server)
What kind of content do you guys prefer to watch on Twitch? I would love to view more live content, but I suppose I’m more interested in event streams where something is purposefully happening then a 8 hour stream where “nothing” happens.
I would really talk to you about it,cause there is a point on this that will destroy streamers in a long range view unless they have a community brand. If this meta gonna go long enough,big streamers gonna lose their power on the contracts,cause ,no singularity means no one is needed. They will push the next group on discover ability and fuck the cache.
You're by far the most thought provoking content in a sea of mindless crap, Devin! Keep doing what you're doing, I'm fascinated by the gaming/streaming industry and you blow me away every talk.
Collaboration is realistically one of the only ways to grow on Twitch natively, you always speak about how discoverability is so limited and it’s very true
Lots of great points and love the data driven chat, but I feel you've really overlooked one massive driver. Among Us popped off right as covid was hitting the world. I know because I started watching more once I was working from home. More people working from home, or not working at all and needing distractions. Perfect storm with most of your points about how easy it is and how viewers like it. I personally don't think rust will go as well. It's good for content clips, but not as easy to jump into streams and watch as Fall guys or among us.
To be honest with you man those huge collabs do take alot of work, not only getting everyone together but also making sure your content is fun to watch but also other people's, for example someone that works super hard to not only ensure their content is good but those around them as well is Toast, and an example of someone who doesnt work hard to make sure everyone is getting good content would be Zuckles, collabs take alot of work to maintain and make sure things run smoothly it's just a different type of work from planning out a solo stream
@Lunatic41521 but even with the amoung us, just look at the difference between randoms playing it vs toast and his crew, they constantly ham things up create "drama" within the game, third impostered ect ect, whatever it is to make the content more fun to watch than any regular game, it's very easy for people to get mad or pissed playing amoung us for long periods of time which doesnt end up being fun for anyone involved including most (obviously there are people watching that like seeing people get legitimately angry but I feel those are the minority) viewers. Again it's not work in the sense that hes talking about in the video but there's alot of mental drain involved and it really is hard to keep 10 people playing having fun and making fun content to watch over the course of a 4 hour amoung us stream
You should play one day (4 hours, whatever you can afford) of the new big game (rust, among us, fall guys, etc.) just to see what happens - as a marketing project. As soon as the wave hits get on it for a day and that’s it.
His dating is a little off. The OTV server was first announced December 25th, and rust averaged 14k viewers. It opened the next day and spiked to 228k viewers, so 17x the viewers, then climbed to about 400k. They planned a reset because of problems and that's what they announced on January 1st, and in those time periods between, you could still play on the old server. The Jan 3rd spike was because a Spanish rust server was opened and the 7th and 8th spikes were because the 2 new OTV rust servers opened.
its kinda funny watching this as a german... the german twitch scene really shows this... something pops up in America... (for example Soda play among us and everybody jumps on the hypetrain) then here in Germany 1 or 2 days later everybody does it aswell... it spreads like wild fire... its happening again with rust... they started a streamerserver and 2 days later the german twitch/youtube community got a rust server. EDIT: don't know how that is going in other countries... germany is yellow on the graph so you can see that they are somewhat connected to the purple and blue area. I wonder if its the same in Russia, as they are not connected to the "meta/Mainstream" area.
how is it that i absolutely hate all thoose trendy games ... like literaly if some game is "meta" then you can take a bet that its a game that i hate and wont play/watch
I can some what agree most of the games I won't touch and when people do stream them then change games later the following drops. I feel like there's a bit of foot fake it to make it when you stream/play meta.
Just found out about your channel through Ludwig. Loved the video but I will add on that Atrioc made the same kind of video a while ago. Also the colors are different communities like u talked about. To add onto your take, collab content has been on a rise since late 2018-2019 with the whole Smp Live rise. Smp live pulled thousands of views and even started many people’s careers on twitch
Devin, I think it's worth you to look at other linguistic "regions" on Twitch to see whats treading. I say this because this "colab Meta" has been happening in Brazil for a long time. A year ago a streamer called "Yoda" opened a Conan server for other streamers to do RP and was a huge success ( basically what is happening now with Rust), until he had a problem with toxicity and closed the server . And things like that have been going on for a long time. Ex: Since the beginning of the pandemic some 10+ relatively large streamers have come together every week to play Table Top Simulator via discord/ Wee have a big RPG campaing (with big streamer), with extreame broadcast quallity, in the 2 or 3 season, that took the Brasilian community by storm. Anyway, there are other examples, but I found it interesting to mention that because a lot of what you said made me think "wow, but this has been happening in Brazil for a long time". I love watching your videos, good job man!
Couldn't find a solid video to download for my walk and Devin pulled through 🙏🏽 Post walk edit: Is it new? Cause I wonder if this meta has & will just repeat with any 'easy collab game' or is that what you mean by twitch is stuck on collab meta?
I do think it has always been there, but the scope of it is different now. I think creators did it a lot, but then eventually moved on. BUT I think collabing now is different then it was back then. Some streamers have more influence, more people are home, platforms are evolving, etc... just really interesting to see
Looking forward to listening to this! I'm (almost) exclusively a Jackbox Games streamer so this info is moreso for fun/general interest than actionable insights for me.
When you pull up the Rust watch hours graph you say that post server announcement the server is not up but that's incorrect. The Rust server began late December and grew out of control. The main server is up and has all content creators on it but after the 7th they divided it into a pure PVP and an RP/PVP server. So the watched hours are still the OTV Rust Server and it'd be interesting to see the watched hours in the days prior to the graph because it was taking over Twitch then.
I dont understand the numbers at 23:40, why theres so many bots in one day? It is related to the drops? Dont know if you will see this comment but if you may please try to abstract about it @devin
I also find it intresting that Twitch in a way dictates "Gaming Meta" in terms of which games are played or not, pretty sure Fall guys blew up on Twitch than RUclipsrs followed through and so did gamers, same with Among us and Rust. Even tough Twitch does not have a massive user base compared to RUclips I feel it has a massive influence on the gaming industry more so than youtube has at this moment
Feels good to be one of the good ones
Aaaayyyeeee EazySpeezy!!
Yooo the best speedrunner in history is here too
Speezy!! Love your vids man, cant wait for Papa Louie's: When Pizza's Attack!!
Damn straight gamer
Epic gamer watches epic youtuber?
Devin "Wouldn't be anything without notepad" Nash
Any truers?
Trueee
D'Angelo watches the greatest RUclipsrs
The King watching the King 🧐
Epic youtuber watches other epic youtuber?
As an indie-game developer, I can confirm that we view Twitch as a leading discovery platform for our games. We see Among Us, Phasmophobia, even lesser-known, non-emergent titles like Gunfire Reborn that did well on Twitch and sold copies. Steam discoverability is highly-tied to spending, and severely favors incumbents. Because of this, and of course, better networking solutions, expect more and more indie multiplayer or co-op titles that allow for more emergent gameplay and crazy moments that you won't want to miss live.
Emmet Shear made a comment about user-progression on Twitch to the following effect in a recent interview:
- A new user comes to Twitch looking for specific gaming content - "What they are watching"
- Then they attach to a specific streamer - "Who they are watching"
- Finally, they attach to the community and chat - "With whom are they watching"
Think this comment supports the collab-meta hypothesis. Keep killing it Mr. Nash.
This meta isn't actually new, its just the latest iteration. Seananners, Goldy, Hutch, Chilled Chaos, etc all started this like 8 years ago playing garys mod stuff. It was massive at the time.
100% this, seananners meta is coming back and so is seananners himself! Coincidence?
twitch people live in their own bubble world and think they create everything and do everything first. welcome to the culture.
@@feeblemind if you bothered to watch the whole video he goes over the fact that it's not actually new and that you could easily predict this by watching how youtube developed in the past.
Yes this isnt new to youtube. But twitch has never been this collab heavy
That huge collab was only RUclips, they didn't stream on Twitch.
Toast knows how to milk among us, he and his viewers are aware about his blatant click baits because it's ironic. He's been doing it since HS.
Toast did such a good job of marketing and presenting himself as the early GOAT of the among us explosion, and tripling down as the go to among us content guy, with the full backing of OTV. Additionally, his upload time is extremely early for PST time / early EST time / end of work day CEST which is rare among RUclipsrs in his realm, and catches a lot of people in that “wake up and check notifs” window.
Edit: coming from the very small world of smash bros -> Ludwig, I didn’t even know the vast majority of the rest of variety twitch until this game. now I could confidently name most of the top 100 on a sporcle quiz because of the among us into the collab meta.
For the record, there's literally no clickbait in his titles tho
@@AwesomeNuke that's the irony of it. It's so click bait, it isn't.
@@Materialist39 Toast the goat of Among Us? He’s not even good at the game lol. The people he plays with are just bad so it’s easy to make highlights of them.
@@ZxChrono you misunderstand what I wrote. It doesn’t matter whether he and the people he plays with are good or not, he’s gotten a million new YT subscribers on top of his already massive following since the Among us explosion. Not only that but a meta definitely evolved and Toast has highlighted some of those developments on his channel. If being good at a game translated into impressions/views/cash, every esports org wouldn’t be picking up variety streamers right now. And as Devin himself says, most esports teams are glorified clothing companies.
It works for the same reason The Avengers, Infinity War and Endgame works; all our favorite content creators collaborating and interacting with each other.
This exact meta was kind of what happened that propelled everyone on the Dream SMP, kind of crazy that it can be replicated.
Vannos/wildcat/nogla/etc did it earlier. And Hermitcraft did it on Minecraft even before Dream. It’s not that crazy it’s been replicated, since Dream SMP is itself a replication of the success! It’s a great strategy to build a following. Just share content/audience with other creators.
They definitely succeed for similar reasons. The most surprising thing to me is that it works specifically for twitch streamers
when you said "this is not the type of content i get jazzed to watch" about the pink and purple sections.. i kinda agree. the content itself i have never found to be extremely entertaining because it has gotten so repetitive, but im more fascinated by the effects of what they are doing and the growth and analytics from it! it jazzes up my math brain
It's more than kids watching, Its young people stuck in quarantine watching people be social.
Kind of weird to think about how the pattern that Twitch is showing is kind of similar to the old Marvel and DC comics. In their early days, it was rare if we got to see a collab between superheroes, and now we see them forming superhero teams all the time. The same can be said for streamers. A couple years back, if there was a collab to be had, it was a big deal, it was a selling point. It still is, but its uniqueness is becoming progressively diluted. This also might be another reason why Cyberpunk 2077 didn't gain much traction on Twitch, because it was a purely solo game coming into a collab heavy environment.
i also think that this just plain shows us the influence that the top 1% of streamers have and how the others generally follow suit with whatever they decide to do as a collab. i never really saw people jumping at the chance to play rust before the server was announced, then all these people started playing it after never or rarely playing it before hand. idk why that is, but im sure this would happen with any game after rust.. all it takes is for the most popular to announce a giant collab in any game, and it incredibly boosts interest in that game. i have an idea of what this could mean for game marketing in the future.. content creators are a powerful tool. imagine a bunch of big streamers next decide to play stardew valley MP next, probably the same thing would happen even though right now its moderately popular in viewership on twitch.
Always good to hear Devin talk about Twitch/YT meta. Feel like collab meta has been around for ages but it's difficult to find qualified collaborations with similar interests
When he pulled out a notepad, I felt that.
It's not just collab content, I would even say that it's "reality show" content, since a lot of the content revolves around drama, competitions, backstabbing as much as it does on big streamers playing together.
In a way this "new" meta isn't anything new, it's just more striking now, but we've seen it in the past, when there was gtarp servers with lots of streamers, when twitchrivals and league of legends started doing their Tyler1 vs Yassuo matchups, Austin's show (previously rajj), mizkif and all the Austin/texas streamers who collab a lot, offlineTV and their friends, or even Train and his podcast, somehow people just love it when their favorite streamer interacts with other streamers and the views get multiplied by those types of content.
Why would probably be explained by something you said at the start of your video, you like to watch a streamer and have a relationship with that particular individual, but it seems that a lot of viewers identify to their favorite streamers and live through them and want to see them make friends with other streamers i guess ?
But even years ago this type of stuff was visible looking back at for exemple Reckful and Mitch jones or Sodapoppin when they'd stream together they'd get more viewers and hype than they would on their own.
10:51
Which is why mizkif is building another house for streamers and Esfand is building his own house next to miz with their own large peice of land. Streaming is so much better with maximum content in reach and guys like Mizkif feast off of content and by having more possibilities on his doorstep I can imagine him growing
Yes this collab has been the minecraft meta for a long time, maybe its not been as prevalent in other games.
@@anders630 It's not even just gaming, any interactions between Streamers makes them feel more "real" if that makes sense thats why people love IRL bc they loved seeing their streamers interact with the real world as well as collabing with other streamers
there is always stream/flows aka OffMeta stuff going on its not always only meta... they have eisted before, but they weren't as successful/as popular.
Videogamedunkey covered the "youtube meta" so well in his I'm Done Making Good Videos video. And then succeeded in the weeks following by satirically sticking to it.
The 3rd january is when the Rust spanish server was open, thats why there is such a big peak
Yeah there's not a lot of talks about the spanish twitch community in these circles. Which recently saw a guy hit 2.4 Million on Twitch.
The First Rust Server started 29.12.2020 btw
He forgot the OTV Minecraft server that started all of this meta.
Pretty sure that was Dream SMP that started Minecraft,
OTV and friends started the rust trend.
I thought "Among us" would be dead in 2 weeks... and I did indeed get bored of that kind of content after 2 weeks...
I still cannot believe that Toast keeps hitting those numbers! 🤓 You are right Nash, it's mind-blowing.
Yeah same here, but I saw that the game stayed relevant in content for so long. It's obsoletely nuts, but it's kinda the nature of the game and how it's played.
As a occasional Toast viewer, I understand the high views. Creators have diversified Among Us content so it’s less boring, and I know clicking on a Toast video will give me good wholesome consistent content. It’s like watching Ludwig every day. I don’t care what the title and thumbnail are, I’ll enjoy Ludwig’s content no matter what it’s about. Same goes for Toast, it’s consistently good and he’s created a reliable audience so most people just watch every video
When he said when it doesn't make sense "its kids" now I understand what he meant... because I myself was mindblown with Toast's Amoung us spam cuz I usually just watch streams most of the time if its Amoung Us... because videos are always too scripted in youtube and apply to niche audience that usually have all the time world to keep up with the video spam...
its because he already put himself as the sole autoritative in among us video, its only him who put daily video of it, other content creators only do it like weekly etc, also devin is wrong, among us video has low cpm, like around 1, maybe even lower than 1, only young adult and teenager who has adblock watch it, no way it reaches 5, if that the cause, other content creators will def also milk it for easy money
probably among us will stay for 1/2 years
Hey Devin, just wanted to say I really enjoyed this vid. Particularly, I thought that was pretty cool that you noticed the Twitch meta is following what RUclips did earlier with reacts to collabs. Please keep these meta vids coming! Thanks!
Collaboration has always been prominent on many platforms, it's an easy way for a different audience to experience you and decide if they like the content you produce, same for the person you're collaborating with if your audience enjoys their content.
I would argue that the RUclips meta now is “family friendly content”
I agree with Devins assessment personally. Unlike that Twitch chart which seems very centralized around people like xQc, RUclips as an entire platform doesn’t have that meta, it’s not centralized. The audience is so big that every audience has their own little ecosystem of creators
@@certifiedlivingdeadmeme.7943 fs, but I don't think that's a meta in the same way that collaboration is...
thats not a meta thats carried out compulsively by youtube
Open up just chatting scroll down a bit and tell me if what you see is "family friendly" 🙃
no, tiktok, large scale content (mrbeast0 , podcast
First ad on this video was in Spanish, I've never seen a Spanish language ad on RUclips, so there's that. RUclips auto transcribing audio and placing ads accordingly is a neat thing to experience. Great vid, too, as usual!
"When you dont understand something about views, its kids". Me having watched at least half the toast videos of "xIQ" at my 23 years of age
This is underrated comment
cough
#me too
You are right that RUclips is at an algorithmic point where it just recommends more of what you've seen, which it always did, but it used to be more daring in recommending other content, now it's gotten so boring... it could also be that certain genres have grown significantly so it's harder to the algorithm to recommend something obscure you might like. I figure the algorithm gets slight updates all the time, but I do hope they make it a little more daring to show you something you've never seen before.
I agree which is why I make new accounts to see new stuff
"Its just Rust with hola"
I was not expecting that and lost my shit.
But, its a damn good talk and like alot of Devins talks I feel like a have a slightly better understanding of whats going on afterward.
Now i just have to find the way the fits me to utilize that slight bump in content creation IQ.
Devin “and I’m gonna explain what that means” Nash
I hope Twitch comes out with a feature to show the community you like to watch and what other communities are like this graph
You should not forget that playing togethe is also just plainly more fun. As you said, a lot of streamer seem to have a limited idea what they are doing and seem to mostly go along with the flow. So why not do the fun thing that seems to work?
Toast's formula is the same one sitcoms have, a format with rules that almost never change, very predictive, very self-contained (there is almost not relationship between one session and another), but the situations triggered in each chapter are always different, and even the people involved changes constantly. It will die eventually as sitcoms also finish, but it's not that hard to understand.
Toasts Among Us videos are so successful because they are consistent in content, consistent in quality, and he puts out a new one every day. And they are high quality. Toast is a very creative guy and even in such a simple game he's constantly trying out new interesting strategies, and funny antics.
So there are two big features to Toasts success:
-Consistency in quality and premise
-Extreme creativity within the premise, and pushing the premise to it's limits.
I guess there is also a the third feature that is the wild popularity of the premise ie. Among Us, but the other 2 feature are what set Toast apart and are visible in his previous endeavors in Hearthstone and TFT.
Toast's videos are essentially a series, the "IQ number" is pretty much just him saying "ep 1, ep 2, ep 3..." but in a much more entertaining way. It's really not that shocking that he tops the charts with them, because if you enjoy Among Us he's a top player to watch- entertaining and very intelligent make for a great combo. Every single video is different from each other, they're just the same game so he essentially sorts them into a series. He's not just pushing out an identical video again and again, which is what Devin is making it sound like.
The Rust data would probably be even more striking if they went back to Dec 26th. Jan 7th was when they opened the split servers PVP/RP, but the first server opened right after Christmas, with mostly the Offline TV extended universe for the first few days. By Jan 3rd, there was already plenty of drama going on.
Interesting to see how this will infuence game dev further. Before it was very centered on genres that saw explosive growth but now it seems like it could revolve around what streamers can make events out of.
In short we will see the rise of new games outside of genresplosions that are focusing on whats easy for streamers to colab on.
i just wanna say, you mentioned everyones heard of you in this vod - but i only came here and found you following your recently "collab"? stream with ttv/imjasmine which i must say was a hoot :) nice vod keep up the good content.
14:17 the colors seem to be roughly grouping streams of the same type.
Teal: Fortnite
Orange: League of Legends
Pink: OTV people and friends
Purple: Just Chatting / Variety streamers
but of course the colors aren't 100% accurate, we'd need a gradient of colors if we wanted it to be accurate
I didn’t realize the scale of RUclips until I discovered toddler song RUclips, and it terrified me to stare into the size of that abyss. That entire twitch galaxy is a tiny, tiny chunk of the supercluster that is online video content.
It's fascinating to see these trends. You did a great job of explaining using anecdotes and data, the things we'd been observing for the past few weeks.
this thumbnail/title will do well, placing my bets
Investing in this video
He's cashing in on the Tier List meta! haha
Collab meta is how gaming on youtube blew up in the first place almost a decade ago.
It’s funny how much I agree with devin. Ever since ludwig started with the collab stuff I’ve watched more atrioc and stanz who are similar but have continued the solo content mainly
I don’t even stream but this is gold. Love hearing you talk, Devin
Large AAA games like League of Legends or Valor enter Call of Duty will always be near the top of twitch. They just have the largest mass-market appeal and that's by Design. But it's always the indie games that make a big impact on internet culture thinking all the way back like 2012 with Minecraft that took the World by storm a game that was primarily developed by one person for a number of years. Indie Games just feel so much more genuine and real and when they take off they take off in a way that triple A titles just simply can't do and it doesn't happen very often we maybe get one or two a year of these Indie success stories think Hollow Knight or Celeste or Shovel Knight cuphead please little games that just blow up because you can feel the love in them
Just thank you for the class, man, Really insightful
PS: the green pocket from above is the Brazilian meta, a mixture of collab and everybody hates Chris reruns
I’m curious actually on if this meta applies to RUclips Live-streaming content as well - considering that RUclips Live-streaming really blew up last year. Like, has YT Live actually caught or even surpassed Twitch? Has what happened on Twitch in terms of management ended up tuning viewers away from Twitch to RUclips (especially those leaving Twitch to watch VTubers groups like Hololive and Nijisanji)?
'Im reading a newspaper from the future and that newspaper is youtube'
Really enjoyed the video, especially the part where you pulled out the note pad
I like collaboration content to an extent. It’s nice to see some streamers interact every once in awhile to make good content. But the problem is with mass collaboration like this is that the main driving force is exposure not content. You could see on the Rust server where 1k Andys would just follow around bigger streamers. Among Us had all of the smaller streamers try to get into lobbies with xQc even when they hated how he played the game.
I get that people want to grow their channels and it’s an easy way to do it, but the content takes a hit when all people want to do is collab just for the sake of growth.
Very insightful, the only thing id argue is that reacts meta thing. It was def popular and like twitch youtube will have these trends where certain types of videos start trending but i wouldnt say its the same as twitch. Because like u said youtube has gotten so big that all of its content is very diverse. And im pretty sure youtube was already well into being mainstream when that whole react videos started
Collabs - because discoverability on Twitch was so bad the streamers had to create it for themselves.
But let's talk about TTRPGs! Arcadum and Critical Role both have had some incredible success streaming a game that was basically dead five years ago. But there's a format which could be even more successful: West Marches. West Marches is basically the Among Us of D&D, or at least has the potential to be. I believe this for two reasons:
1) It's a large scale collab. In a normal D&D campaign, you'd have a fixed roster of 3 to 8 players. In a West Marches style campaign, you instead find a couple dozen players, and a few DMs, and you put all of them into a single town out in the badlands. They interact with one another, and the consequences of one party's actions can and probably will be felt by other parties. Some players can be chosen to be the villains, either publicly or secretly, and it can turn into a social deduction game if you want it to. The potential for collabs here is just amazing.
2) It's low commitment. In typical West Marches, you don't know which players or how many of them are going to show up. Players join games whenever they want to and are available, they're not expected to follow a strict schedule. We've seen Arcadum's Broken Bonds, Matt Colville's Chain of Acheron, and a bunch of other campaigns get indefinitely delayed or even cancelled throughout the years - but West Marches campaigns don't ask for nearly as big of a commitment, and thus are much less likely to fall apart.
3) It's episodic. Every session is basically a self-contained one shot. Again, that's a consequence of the more flexible nature of the format. But this is also great for viewers, who can hop in without having to be up to date on every single detail of the lore. I know I've had a very hard time getting into Arcadum's and Critical Role's content, because there's just... Too much of a barrier to entry. This barrier still exists, but is much lower in West Marches.
So yeah. That's my 2021 Twitch/D&D meta hard read. Somebody out there's gonne set up a West Marches campaign, and it's gonna explode every metric. By the end of the year, you're gonna have Matthew Mercer playing at the same table as Sykkuno and Gawr Gura.
Oh yeah, the thumbnail (and everything in the video ofc) was on point.
I watched the stream last night and here I am watching the video again lol
Where I can find the graph? Great talk as always btw
I found audio levels were a bit low in the past couple vids, especially compared to most other content on youtube. I'd advice tweaking the levels. But great talks and always a pleasure.
28:10 Asmondgold next to Maximian Dood. Those two are the heart of Twitch.
Question: With the current meta being so exhausting to some viewers, could this be a chance for smaller streamers who aren't joining in on the collabs to grow? Obviously it will still be difficult because of the draw of the larger streamers, but maybe the right combination of personality/game being played/good community and not being in that big collab group could make the difference for a few of them?
I absolutely love that graph
it's 100% how my brain works
so satisfying seeing it in a graph
This could either f or save smaller streamers , if they can make contacts they`ll surely exponentially grow their communities but if they know no one they`ll be doom to
anonymity
Im kinda surprised no one has said anything. When big streamers do this it almost kills all growth for the smaller streamers in said category.
Do you have the circle plot of streamers and views on Twitch available for us to view? I’d love to look at it just cause I think it’s cool. (I’m also curious to see how small the EFT community is lol)
The Collab Meta will also probably solidify itself more within the english speaking crowd as the Minecraft bubble will expand with a new SMP server being announced that features somewhat big names
I remember before among us, OTV/Friends did minecraft (summer 2020) which they returned to during among us (you could look at the second one as a test case for the rust server)
I would love to see a RUclips version of that graphic.
What kind of content do you guys prefer to watch on Twitch? I would love to view more live content, but I suppose I’m more interested in event streams where something is purposefully happening then a 8 hour stream where “nothing” happens.
Devin just provides so much value. Thank you for this!
I don’t think the collab meta is that bad. It’s clearly having a positive impact on the streamers participating
I would really talk to you about it,cause there is a point on this that will destroy streamers in a long range view unless they have a community brand. If this meta gonna go long enough,big streamers gonna lose their power on the contracts,cause ,no singularity means no one is needed. They will push the next group on discover ability and fuck the cache.
I like the editing of the recent videos. Great work lab!
You should talk about the rise of Dream SMP / Tommyinnit
Agreed! His growth has been amazing. But it's also interesting how fast other members of the smp grow when they get added or start participating.
yeah! he literally got 250k yesterday on a speedrun stream
Especially Technoblade...
Dude had 500K+ viewers at one point.
that would be cool because tommy thinks a lot about some of the content he puts out
@@shadesinsertlastname1631 Yeah I remember him talking about being up with Tubbo for hours tweaking thumbnails and figuring out their content.
Really enjoy ur videos Nash especially looking at numbers. Appreciate you & your content❤️
You're by far the most thought provoking content in a sea of mindless crap, Devin! Keep doing what you're doing, I'm fascinated by the gaming/streaming industry and you blow me away every talk.
Collaboration is realistically one of the only ways to grow on Twitch natively, you always speak about how discoverability is so limited and it’s very true
Hey Devin. Where can I find the graph you were showing with all the different pockets of streamers? Thanks!
Lots of great points and love the data driven chat, but I feel you've really overlooked one massive driver.
Among Us popped off right as covid was hitting the world. I know because I started watching more once I was working from home.
More people working from home, or not working at all and needing distractions. Perfect storm with most of your points about how easy it is and how viewers like it.
I personally don't think rust will go as well. It's good for content clips, but not as easy to jump into streams and watch as Fall guys or among us.
it's kinda insane how small is twitch...
To be honest with you man those huge collabs do take alot of work, not only getting everyone together but also making sure your content is fun to watch but also other people's, for example someone that works super hard to not only ensure their content is good but those around them as well is Toast, and an example of someone who doesnt work hard to make sure everyone is getting good content would be Zuckles, collabs take alot of work to maintain and make sure things run smoothly it's just a different type of work from planning out a solo stream
@Lunatic41521 but even with the amoung us, just look at the difference between randoms playing it vs toast and his crew, they constantly ham things up create "drama" within the game, third impostered ect ect, whatever it is to make the content more fun to watch than any regular game, it's very easy for people to get mad or pissed playing amoung us for long periods of time which doesnt end up being fun for anyone involved including most (obviously there are people watching that like seeing people get legitimately angry but I feel those are the minority) viewers. Again it's not work in the sense that hes talking about in the video but there's alot of mental drain involved and it really is hard to keep 10 people playing having fun and making fun content to watch over the course of a 4 hour amoung us stream
Bro you have to get some lows and low mids in your microphone mix your voice sounds like it's coming through a telephone speaker. Excellent content
Devin just have me as your protege already. We all know its what you want 🤠
You should play one day (4 hours, whatever you can afford) of the new big game (rust, among us, fall guys, etc.) just to see what happens - as a marketing project. As soon as the wave hits get on it for a day and that’s it.
His dating is a little off. The OTV server was first announced December 25th, and rust averaged 14k viewers. It opened the next day and spiked to 228k viewers, so 17x the viewers, then climbed to about 400k. They planned a reset because of problems and that's what they announced on January 1st, and in those time periods between, you could still play on the old server. The Jan 3rd spike was because a Spanish rust server was opened and the 7th and 8th spikes were because the 2 new OTV rust servers opened.
Collab meta was around with Podcasts, That weird talk show where it was like a battle royale and viewers voted off people, would be similar?
What should you do if get botted on the smaller side?
its kinda funny watching this as a german... the german twitch scene really shows this... something pops up in America... (for example Soda play among us and everybody jumps on the hypetrain) then here in Germany 1 or 2 days later everybody does it aswell... it spreads like wild fire... its happening again with rust... they started a streamerserver and 2 days later the german twitch/youtube community got a rust server.
EDIT:
don't know how that is going in other countries... germany is yellow on the graph so you can see that they are somewhat connected to the purple and blue area.
I wonder if its the same in Russia, as they are not connected to the "meta/Mainstream" area.
I was hoping minecraft would be talked more about, but great video altogether. Imma need all the guidance I can get, I appreciate your content❤️
how is it that i absolutely hate all thoose trendy games ... like literaly if some game is "meta" then you can take a bet that its a game that i hate and wont play/watch
I can some what agree most of the games I won't touch and when people do stream them then change games later the following drops. I feel like there's a bit of foot fake it to make it when you stream/play meta.
Just found out about your channel through Ludwig. Loved the video but I will add on that Atrioc made the same kind of video a while ago. Also the colors are different communities like u talked about. To add onto your take, collab content has been on a rise since late 2018-2019 with the whole Smp Live rise. Smp live pulled thousands of views and even started many people’s careers on twitch
OTV blew up cause people are in quarantine. OTV and friends shows a great chemistry and friendship that people are missing nowadays
Essentially people are living through them
I'm glad I discovered you this past summer. Great video as always. Gonna go watch some El Rusto.
Devin, I think it's worth you to look at other linguistic "regions" on Twitch to see whats treading. I say this because this "colab Meta" has been happening in Brazil for a long time. A year ago a streamer called "Yoda" opened a Conan server for other streamers to do RP and was a huge success (
basically what is happening now with Rust), until he had a problem with toxicity and closed the server . And things like that have been going on for a long time. Ex: Since the beginning of the pandemic some 10+ relatively large streamers have come together every week to play Table Top Simulator via discord/ Wee have a big RPG campaing (with big streamer), with extreame broadcast quallity, in the 2 or 3 season, that took the Brasilian community by storm. Anyway, there are other examples, but I found it interesting to mention
that because a lot of what you said made me think "wow, but this has been happening in Brazil for a long time".
I love watching your videos, good job man!
Couldn't find a solid video to download for my walk and Devin pulled through 🙏🏽
Post walk edit: Is it new? Cause I wonder if this meta has & will just repeat with any 'easy collab game' or is that what you mean by twitch is stuck on collab meta?
I do think it has always been there, but the scope of it is different now. I think creators did it a lot, but then eventually moved on. BUT I think collabing now is different then it was back then. Some streamers have more influence, more people are home, platforms are evolving, etc... just really interesting to see
I literally watch every DisguisedToast Among Us video haha
Looking forward to listening to this! I'm (almost) exclusively a Jackbox Games streamer so this info is moreso for fun/general interest than actionable insights for me.
Simple but funny line. “El Rusto”
When you pull up the Rust watch hours graph you say that post server announcement the server is not up but that's incorrect. The Rust server began late December and grew out of control. The main server is up and has all content creators on it but after the 7th they divided it into a pure PVP and an RP/PVP server. So the watched hours are still the OTV Rust Server and it'd be interesting to see the watched hours in the days prior to the graph because it was taking over Twitch then.
I dont understand the numbers at 23:40, why theres so many bots in one day? It is related to the drops? Dont know if you will see this comment but if you may please try to abstract about it @devin
Can you talk about the just chatting meta?
love this guy analysis for every aspect he talks
this reminds me of back in 2008 when every hip-hop artist started doing collabs.
can you link us the bubbles chart reddit thing?
Imagine the Niestat influence to be similar graphic because that network is deeper than what we thought
Gotta say people from germany have nice crossover... The "Mainstream xqc,Soda,shroud area and the german are is where im home.
I also find it intresting that Twitch in a way dictates "Gaming Meta" in terms of which games are played or not, pretty sure Fall guys blew up on Twitch than RUclipsrs followed through and so did gamers, same with Among us and Rust. Even tough Twitch does not have a massive user base compared to RUclips I feel it has a massive influence on the gaming industry more so than youtube has at this moment