Guidelines For Making Your Game YouTube-Friendly

Gamers often like to immortalize their gameplay conquests by capturing video of it, but capturing great looking video can be challenging for location-based games. If you're aware of the problems that your end users are likely to encounter when capturing video, then you can design your game to mitigate these problems. Beyond that, you could enhance your game with features that support the complete video workflow—from creation to publication. The following table contains a set of guidelines that you can use to make your game more YouTube-friendly.

Degree of Support  Recommendation
Good:   Don't make your game video-unfriendly
  • Ensure that your core game mechanics don't involve physically moving the smartphone around much or else the portions of the video will look shaky (which could induce nausea).
  • Ensure that you don't inadvertently reveal the end user's location. You can do this by disabling game features that can be used to identify the end user's location (street names for example). This is especially important when live streaming.
  • Leave some space in your game interface for an image of the end user's face.
Good:   Make it easy for your end users to create video
  • Include a basic editing feature that allows end users to directly upload their video content to their YouTube channel.
  • Include a feature that allows end users to livestream directly to their YouTube channel.
  • Include a feature for recording Video On Demand (VOD), to allow end users to edit and upload their video content later.
  • Provide end users with the ability to manipulate the camera. Ensure that the default camera angle provides a flattering view of the end user when they perform key game actions (to guard against those pesky up-the-nose and mega-double-chin shots).
Better:   Help your end users create compelling video
  • Generate metadata for your end user's videos. This could include the name of your game, the current game level, the character's name, a list of their weapons inventory, and a list of their completed levels.
  • Include the ability to automatically create video clips for interesting game sequences. Examples of interesting game sequences might include things like unboxing, boss fights, and new unlocks.
  • Include a feature for capturing an image of the end user's face during these sequences.
Best:   Incentivize video creation
  • Allow your end users to provide viewing incentives to their audience.
    • Include support for account-linking.
    • Include support for loot drops.