Single Player Games VS Multiplayer Games (A YouTube Performance Study)

If you've read some of my other blog posts, you will know that I greatly prefer multiplayer games over single player games for getting more viewers on your gaming channel.

In fact, I had a whole 2,500 word post on what you should and shouldn't record to earn more subscribers and viewers.

You can read that post here.

However, some people are still unconvinced, so I decided to do a little case study of my own YouTube channel and show why I absolutely hate single player games for earning subscribers.

Keep in mind that I LOVE playing single player games, and I even recorded some for my channel, but if your goal is increasing the number of your subscribers or viewers, then there are many other things you can do to get the best bang for your buck.

Single Player Games Dissection
The analytics of all the single-player games I have played are on the right.
As always I can't show you my earnings, but you can see all of the important statistics.

As you can see I have 6,776 views. Which isn't that bad in itself. Until you see that I have 49 videos in this group!

That means that on average every single video I created got 148 views.

Which wouldn't have been that bad...


However, the Top 10 Videos bar tells a completely different story.
You can see that 3 of my videos account for almost 64% of all my views.

In fact, if I only had my Top 10 videos up, I would have 5,552 views!

This means that the hours I spend on my 39 videos only yielded 1224 views!

That's only 31 views per video!

Now I don't know about you, but I want more than a measly amount of 31 views per video.
It usually takes me around an hour to record, edit, and upload a 10-15 minute video, so that's around 30 hours I spent, all to get 1224 views...

At the very end of this post, I will do a side-by-side comparison of the views, and engagement per video for multiplayer vs single player games, so stay tuned!

Multiplayer Games Dissection
What's the first thing that you notice when you look at my Multiplayer Analytics?
Probably the fact that my overall statistics are much higher.

I have a total of 93,429 views which is a pretty high number.

However, I also have 198 videos in this group, compared to only 49 videos in the single player group, so the increase in views is expected.

The average views per video is still higher than in the single player group! It sits at right around 472 views per video, which isn't bad. But are the Top 10 videos eating up over 81% of my views?

My top 10 videos amount to 63,152 views total, which is right around 67.5%.

What does that mean for the rest my videos however?

That means that on average, my multiplayer videos not in the top 10, have about 161 views per video.


The best part about all of my multiplayer videos however, is the engagement!

I have over 1000 likes, 2000 comments, and I got over 200 subscribers, just from my multiplayer videos!

I even have over 100 dislikes!
You might be wondering why I'm happy about dislikes, but even dislikes help your video rank higher, because it means someone dedicated his time to pressing that dislike button.

 Single Player VS Multiplayer Comparison
Now the moment we've all been waiting for!
Here is the side-by-side comparison of the views and engagement for single player VS multiplayer with the winner of each category bolded:

	Views	Likes	Dislikes	Comments	Favorites	Subscribers
Single Player Totals	6,776	106	6	109	89	13
Multiplayer Totals	93,429	1,143	110	2,219	84	211
Single Player Average/Video	138.3	2.16	0.1	2.2	1.8	0.3
Multiplayer Average/Video	471.9	5.8	0.6	11.2	0.4	1.1

Even though the single-player game videos had more favorites, the multiplayer game videos blew them out of the water in all the other categories.
For those of you who prefer a more graphical way to think about things, here's a YouTube Analytics comparison!

Just click on it to make it bigger!

As you can see, the blue line, easily beats the orange line almost every single time.

What Does This Mean For You?
Does this mean that you should completely stop recording single player games, and completely dedicate your YouTube channel to multiplayer games?

Simply put: NO! 


But doesn't that contradict everything that I was just talking about?

Not necessarily.

It just means you should be more choosy of what single-player games you're recording, and that you should always do the YouTube Search Check, before recording it for YouTube!

It also means that you should play multiplayer games first to build up a base of loyal subscribers and then add some single player games in the mix later.

If you liked reading this post, then you might be interested in my post about what you should record to increase your YouTube views. In that post I go in depth on what you should and shouldn't record, so check it out!

As always, thank you for reading, and please leave a comment if you have any questions!