Most new gaming channels die the same way. Someone buys a decent mic, records forty minutes of a game with two million other videos about it, uploads, and waits for an audience that has no reason to ever find them. The video isn't bad. It's just invisible.
The thing nobody tells you at the start: in your first year, being findable matters more than being good. A rough video about a game with twelve other videos will out-earn a polished video about a game with sixty thousand. Not because it's better. Because someone searching can actually reach it.
This post is about that early stretch, when you have no audience and no algorithm goodwill. The rules change later. For now, specificity is the whole game.
Why covering popular games is a trap when you're small
Pick the biggest game of the moment and search it on YouTube. You will find videos from channels with staff, editors, and a thumbnail budget larger than your monthly rent. Those channels sit at the top of every result and recommendation for that game, and they got there first.
When you upload your video about that same game, you're not competing for attention. You're competing for the space underneath people who already won. YouTube has no reason to show a channel with forty subscribers over one with four million on the exact same topic.
Broad games feel safe because they have a huge audience. That's the trap. A huge audience with huge supply means your slice rounds down to nothing.
The counterintuitive move is to go where the audience is smaller but starving. A game with a dedicated community and almost no coverage has viewers actively searching for videos that don't exist yet. You can be the video that exists.
Find the games nobody is covering well
This is the actual work, and it's more fun than it sounds. You're looking for the gap between demand and supply.
Start with games you genuinely play, then check what's already there. Search the game name plus terms like "guide", "tips", "ending explained", or the name of a specific boss, quest or mechanic. If the top results are two years old, low effort, or simply missing, that's a gap.
Strong signals you've found one:
- A game with an active subreddit or Discord but a thin YouTube presence.
- A niche genre where the big channels can't be bothered — grand strategy deep-dives, obscure roguelikes, hard-mode challenge runs, non-English indie titles.
- A new update or mode for an older game, where the existing videos are all outdated.
- Questions people ask repeatedly in communities that no video answers cleanly.
Our games directory is a decent place to go spelunking for titles outside the top ten that still have real players. The goal isn't to find a game nobody plays. It's to find one people play and nobody films.
One warning. "Nobody covers this" sometimes means "nobody wants this." The difference is whether there's a community. A game with an angry, engaged Discord is a goldmine. A game with a ghost-town forum is a lesson.
Make videos people are actually searching for
Once you've got a game, don't make the video you want to make. Make the video someone is typing into the search bar.
The most findable early videos answer a specific question or solve a specific problem. "How to beat [boss] in [game]." "Best starting build in [game]." "[Game] secret ending, explained." These are boring to plan and brilliant to own, because search traffic doesn't care how many subscribers you have. It cares whether you answered the question.
This is the opposite of the "my thoughts on [game]" video, which is the single most uploaded and least watched format in the history of the platform. Nobody searches for your thoughts. They search for their problem.
Title the video like a search result, not a poem. If someone would type it, put those words in the title. Clever wordplay is a luxury you earn once people already know your name.
Production quality: what actually matters early
Here's the good news for your wallet. Most of what people call "production quality" is invisible to a viewer who just wants their question answered.
What actually matters, in rough order:
- Clear audio. People will forgive a soft picture. They will not forgive audio that sounds like you're broadcasting from inside a washing machine. A cheap mic in a room with soft furniture beats an expensive one in a tiled kitchen.
- Getting to the point. A ninety-second intro is where new viewers go to click away. Answer the thing in the first fifteen seconds, then expand.
- A thumbnail you can read on a phone. Not a good thumbnail. A legible one. Big, clear, one idea.
- Everything else. Transitions, effects, a fancy set, an intro sting. These are things you add when you're bored, not things that grow a channel.
Nobody has ever unsubscribed because a video lacked a lower-third animation. Spend your energy on the game and the answer.
Post consistently enough to learn something
Consistency matters, but not for the mystical reasons people imply. It's not that the algorithm punishes you for missing a week. It's that you learn nothing from four videos.
You need enough uploads to see a pattern. Which topics got found? Which titles got clicked? Which games brought people back? You can't answer that with a handful of videos, and you definitely can't answer it by staring at one.
Pick a schedule you can survive on your worst week, not your most motivated one. One video a week you can actually sustain beats three a week for a month followed by silence. Burnout is the most common cause of death for a promising channel, and it's entirely self-inflicted.
Treat the first twenty or thirty videos as research, not as your legacy. Some will flop. The flops are data.
When to branch out from your niche
The narrow strategy is how you start, not how you stay. Once a specific game or genre reliably brings people to your channel, you've got an audience that trusts you on something. That trust is portable.
Branch when you have a few videos consistently pulling views and a small core of returning viewers. Introduce adjacent games — same genre, same community, same type of problem. Let the audience follow you sideways before you ask them to follow you anywhere.
The mistake is branching too early, before anyone knows what you're for, or too late, staying chained to one game long after its community has moved on. If you're still the only person deciding what you cover, you're probably fine to widen a little.
Worth deciding early, too: whether YouTube is even the right home for what you make. Some formats live better as clips or streams, and our breakdown of YouTube, Twitch or TikTok for a games creator is a better place to settle that than a comment section argument with yourself at 2am.
When the money question comes up
It will, so here's the honest version. Ad revenue on a small channel is a rounding error, and chasing it early will make you copy the big channels — which is the exact thing that keeps you invisible.
The money that arrives first for a specific, findable channel is usually sponsorship, because a small audience that's genuinely into one genre is worth more to the right advertiser than a big vague one. When you get there, know what to charge — how to price sponsored game coverage exists so you don't quote a number you'll regret. And if you want to see how established creators position themselves, our influencers directory is a useful reference point.
Common questions
How many videos before I see any results?
Think in dozens, not handfuls. Search-driven videos can keep pulling views for months, so a video that looks dead in week one might quietly find its audience later. Give yourself twenty to thirty uploads before you judge whether anything is working.
Should I cover a game before it's popular or after?
Before, if you can spot it. Being early on a game that later blows up means you own the search results when the crowd arrives. The risk is that most games you bet on won't blow up — so treat it as a portfolio, not a single wager.
Do I need to show my face?
No. Plenty of guide, analysis and challenge channels never show a face. What you need is a recognisable voice or perspective. Face-cam helps with personality-driven content, but it's a choice, not a requirement.
What if the game I love has zero audience?
Then you have a hobby, not a channel strategy, and that's allowed. If you want growth, pair the game you love with games that share its community. Cover both, and let the ones with searchers subsidise the ones with your heart.
The one thing to do first
Before you record anything, open YouTube and search the game you're planning to cover the way a lost player would. If the top results already answer it well, pick a different game or a different question. Find the gap first. Everything else is easier once someone can actually find you.