How to GROW a Gaming Channel in 2023

There are 4 crucial things every gaming channel needs to understand when struggling to get more views and subscribers.

CHAT WITH US!
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#moresubscribers2023 #moreviews2023 #GrowYourChannel

[SmileR-]

To the person reading this you are going to have a successful YouTube channel 😊

[BCGaming]

thank yall, this helps alot and its great to hear things that you've already figured out to be true and that your already on the right mindset. learning to edit has been an adventure in of itself. learning to edit is one thing but learning editing strategy to keep people watching is a whole other monster which I struggle with because I usually have such a limited time to edit. i can make great videos on 5 to 10 min tutorials because I don't have to filter out 2 hours of a playthrough and cram it under 30 mins. so I can spend time adding in a making better transitions and finding the perfect music choices and all that. even started to force myself to make B roll footage for tutorial videos, which is something I've never had the patience for before. the biggest thing I struggle with are livestreams because I'm not an overly social person its hard to be communicative while concentrating on a game. when recording I plan out a lot of my scenes to a certain extent, not scripted at all but I start of like ok im gonna talk for this amount of time while doing this certain thing, give myself a timeframe to get my point across then shut up until the next thing happens. so streaming is just non stop talking which I can do but its kinda cringy to watch, so usually alcohol is involved in most of my streams lol. i do agree shorts are becoming crucial to game channels. its a great way to recycle content. even though my channel is 6 years old I can only recycle about a year and a half of it because my content was so horrible before then. production wise it was great but me on the other hand lol i was attrocious . do yall have any advice on stretching out your gaming channels niche. i keep trying to get away from ranch sim a little but no real luck. playing games that ranch sim players play isn't really helping. some do ok overtime like ark tutorials or random shorts will get an uptick in views but i cant seem to repeat the success of ranch sim. I've exhausted all content ideas for this game, went over every type and step of tutorials i can think of including a couple themed series but there's nothing left until they come out with an update to the game which is months away. luckily the game is steadily growing in popularity so i get around 600 views a day minimum on ranch sim tutorial videos. which will be great when i hit my 1000 subs to have that continuous viewing and have a very large video library to draw views from. but if anyone has had to de-niche themselves from a game and have done it successfully please let me know how you did it.

[SUSUGAgaming]

For those struggling with their channel, don't give up. You always hear about those stories of channels that exploded overnight but there are far more people putting in the grind. I am approaching my 2 years and am at just over 500 subs a majority of those actually coming in the last few months. Don't give up and your time, effort, and patience will pay off.

[nicplaysstuff]

Thank you, Dan. I've been really struggling with the confidence part and appreciate your thoughts and action plan to move forward on my nano-channel. While I've been uploading voiceless videos, my plan is to make my next short using my voice. It seems a little less daunting to practice that on a shorter piece of content. Anyway, I really needed this video today. Thank you again.

[TheMovieCriticVoice]

It doesn't depend if it is gaming channel or some other niche. We all need to focus on how we are planning to take our channel forward on engaging with audience. Persistence is key but we have to adapt a behaviour of being persistent in the manner of time and content

[MrAngryTroll]

I would also say don’t forget to use the community tab on YouTube. It helps show your character and even use the poll to have people vote what they may be interested in seeing next

[CatLevel]

I have my channel since forever, but I decided to streamed on Twitch instead. Eventually i moved back to YouTube, because I couldn't handle the social aspect of Twitch, it was always getting too close too soon.😢 I guess, I'm easily discouraged, because my contents don't get the engagement I wanted. I've watched countless videos like this, but it doesn't seem to help, so I start hiding my contents. I think I know the problem is my consistency, I don't improve or too lazy to be one. So, I need to fix that, but honestly it's hard. It's very discouraging to see the numbers I see. Then I came across a video similar to this one, and she said, it's a good practice to be equinamous, not getting too excited or sad with the result my contents bring, and to start making videos for myself from a few years back, what I would like to watch, not fussy about the niche yet, and not too worry much about the numbers yet, but just to practice my skill in making videos, editing and writing the scripts. In many ways, it helps relax me a bit, to have this thought that it's okay even if I don't make it big, it's still fun to make videos. I guess Kratos also had to do a ton of training, before he went out to kill all of those gods hahahahahaa😂 maybe one day I can go defeat the YouTube god 😂 jk

[drjones]

Another piece of advice...
If you have ever watched regular TV aka network television
You are making your network on YouTube or Twitch
What would you want to see on your gaming network
Turn that into your channel for any topic
Don't forget to your audience you are doing a service you are a network to them so deliver to your audience on your TV network

[kumu.]

So much educational content. Thank you for your advice.

[mayhemcarlos]

Great video VidIQ team but one thing i would add is once you build a community of say Sim gamers and you want to create other gaming content on your channel you should use your community tab and creat a poll asking your community “what other games they like to play?”

In that poll add 2 similar games to the sims and 2 games you want to play, and see what they choose. Also having them drop their games in the comments is useful information too.

[ScottyGG]

Great stuff vidiq, ty! I have to admit, all this 'other' stuff that's needed now to be noticed is kind of putting me off from continuing. I just want to make really good, polished videos. But these days I feel like I have to spend more time on other stuff, thumbnail, shorts, go live, captions, , , , than on making the actual video. I mean I do see better performance when I do all that stuff, but it's a lot to stay motivated thru. Maybe I'm lazy. :)

[Anti-Villain-Wolf]

I found out that doing the shots thing actually does work. My only short, and it's not even related to gaming even though that's the main focus in my channel, is my most watched video, and one of my most liked. Now I just need to learn how to make a short from an upload that isn't from my phone lol. Thanks for the video, it's helpful like always

[HolxMusic]

Great advices! Although, I think you should also do a video for music channels like mine for example. Many of the advices are not very applicable. As instance, subtitles. I cant put subtitles anyways, so what can I improve on instead. There's also thumbnails. What thumbnails am I supposed to do as a producer... I feel like the music department is harder but that may be just me😅 But as I said, great video!

[Pennox]

I'm a gaming channel, when I started I wanted (and still do) to play different games on my channel, for now I'm playing battlefield games, but eventually want to play other games, Cities Skylines being a big one.

I have an idea how I can do things, battlefield Monday/Tues and CS on every other Friday (takes a while to make cs videos)

And throw in some other games in between.
I know people say focus on one or 2 games, but for me it's mainly just for fun, I wanted to be an "overall verity gaming channel" of course sticking to a few.

[emperorcolton]

I also think it's important to show yourself having fun playing a game cause I think that's one thing people can feel through the video!😊

[RandumBoi]

This is gonna be sooo helpful, thanks VidIQ!

But, the only problem for me is I dont know how to *properly* turn my long form clips into shorts 🤔

[minecraftingmom]

I feel the community page is where you can bring your viewers together

And apparently the comment section here is where you can get weird replies.

[MegaMGstudios]

Maybe this is a very niche tip, but I'm gonna give it anyways: If you do livestreams on Twitch, don't just post your clips to YouTube. Make other forms of content too. Clips are a highly saturated place. Personally I've seen that my longer videos (full let's plays, theories) get way more views than my clips, 22 times more in the first 12 hours if you take my most recent video & clip as example. Also, your long form YouTube videos and streams don't have to be a separate thing, I just download my whole stream afterwards and cut it into episodes.

[thedadamer]

Hey @vidiq thank you for the help you give on gaming videos. I wonder if you could make a video geared toward gaming channels who cover more the gaming landscape/current events in gaming rather than let’s play channels. Examples are gaming channels like RGT85, Spawn Wave, Dreamcast Guy, Beatemups, Wulff Den, Review Tech USA, Yong Yea, Gameranx and Jake Baldino.

[Frankabyte]

I have some bizarre issue that is starting to plague my channel and it seems to defy explanation: even with keyword optimization, great audience engagement and watchtime, high views per viewer, and good CTR, the past several videos I've uploaded are getting abysmal impressions from only 300 to 1400. Even god-awful minecraft let's plays I made nearly two years ago (with no thumbnails and bad retention) have nearly double the impressions, while brand-new uploads with far better editing and pacing stop getting views only a day after release. I was thinking this may have to do with extremely varied subjects, but even then, random niche videos get more publicity than relatively popular ones that have come out this year. Does anyone have any suggestions for ways to fix this?