Everybody's gone to Sky Island
Happy TotK Day
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is out. Entire years go by without a game release on this scale. Everyone’s going to be floating around in the sky and welding obscene sculptures together for at least the next week. That means a possible lull in general internet madness (despite the advent of traditional Meltdown May) but a historic spike in the number of Zelda guides uploaded to YouTube.
You wouldn’t download a Zonai construct
Ill-gotten copies of Tears of the Kingdom leaked to emulation communities a couple of weeks ago and many people have played the game already. This was a boon to any new game guide channel trying to get a “Best Zelda Weapons” video up on Day 1. But you couldn’t upload them too early because Nintendo was maniacally copy-striking everyone.
Channels have been building up a reserve of these and waiting to upload them. If you checked on Monday you could find shrine solution videos that were scheduled to premiere as soon as the game was officially released in the US. But by Thursday you could see that a bunch of channels like JoWolf, Game Guides Channel, and GosuNoob decided to be first and drop a ton of guide content early:
It was kind of beautiful to see a bunch of baby channels bloom in the search results for “totk shrine guides” early on TotK Eve. Giant creators will surely dominate these search terms as soon as they unseal their content vaults. But it’s funny to me to picture a few of these channels sprinting off the starting line while everyone else waits for the starting pistol. You either get way out into the lead or Nintendo loads a live round into the gun and shoots you.
The king of transitions
Shorts don’t follow the same rules as the rest of YouTube — the most popular content is often low-effort, the views are juiced, and the pay isn’t great. (VidIQ reported earning less than $17 for 468K views.) I would guess you’re mainly advertising to the parents who briefly see what’s on the screen as they take the iPad away from whoever is watching these.
One recent trend to blow up among ???-age viewers who will watch the same Short 1,000 times: looping videos of Fortnite animations. The latest wave of these are almost all called “CLEANEST GODLY TRANSITIONS” (+ some emoji) and use match on action cuts to show characters switching costumes during an animation.
The most notable thing about this video is that YouTube’s official account (which loves Shorts!!) commented on it. The creator here, Caaje, is a single-purpose Fortnite transition channel with more than 165M views. Their 69 Shorts’ titles are exactly the same apart from the emoji, and many of the uploads themselves are the same but with the characters presented in different order.
A bunch of other Fortnite channels make almost-identical videos set to the same K/DA song, many of them predating Caaje; the format goes back at least to March 2022. Some of the same channels, like Momo Studios, also upload these to Tiktok, where creators use a wider variety of backing tracks for some reason.
These videos are somewhat entrancing, they serve as a decent trophy case for Fortnite skin collectors, and they’re much easier to make (process: record purchased game assets) than the flashy transitions that usually impress people. But let’s be real: this is not the nutrient-enriched video content that growing minds crave. This is some lizard-brain sludge that machines might learn to make soon.
What is this thing?
Dice Kingdoms (April 2023) is a fast-paced multiplayer Civ-like where dice rolls determine your resources. It’s another strategy title that caught on among daily variety channels Retromation, Wanderbots, and Orbital Potato, who all played it together.
HROT (Jan 2021), a gloomy boomer shooter set in the Soviet Union in 1986, is coming out of early access on May 16.
Silica (May 2023) is a multiplayer RTS/FPS hybrid — one commander player plays Starcraft, other players play Halo by jumping into the role of individual units. There seems to be a ton of enthusiasm about this Early Access title after coverage by popular FPS creator jackfrags, whose audience seems pretty sick of their shooter options at the moment. Everyone agrees Silica is currently in a rough state, so maybe check back in a few months.
Wildfrost (April 2023) is a cute roguelike deckbuilder with a steep difficulty curve. It’s been covered by channels like Northernlion and Retromation this month, and they seem to have moved the needle on its review average. Several positive reviews, including the top English-language review, say they decided to try it after Northernlion mentioned it had a Mixed average due to players who thought it was too hard. The average has since risen to 76% positive.
Your Only Move Is Hustle/YOMI Hustle (February 2023) is a stick-figure fighting game that made a splash when it left early access in Feb. It’s still got a small following on YouTube. The trick is that the game is actually turn-based, with none of the traditional fighting-game execution barriers; the dynamic full-screen battles you see in clips are replays.
Thanks for reading
That’s it for this week. Let’s make a clean and godly transition into the weekend.