Mildly Interesting

It's a couple things converging.

1. Game devs have embargoes where they provide early access to content creators and then set a date when they're allowed to talk about it. They publish as early as they allowed to but they're contractually obligated to not publish a moment sooner.

2. YouTube tends to show you streams or scripted videos about a certain game genre if you've watched even one video of that type before. So if you watch someone's Day Z video you're gonna see recommended videos like this.

3. Some creator discovered they get like 3 times the views if they have a conspicuous gun in the frame of the thumbnail. The only way to do that in a lot of extraction shooters is to reload the gun (or do the weapon inspect action if the game has that) and take a screenshot mid animation, so now they all do it.

Hence you get similar content and similar thumbnails at the same time.

What am i meant to be seeing?

To be brutally honest with you, the left one has a terrible thumbnail and an even worse title if the goal was to gauge interest and get people to check the video.

The right one has a thumbnail that says the name of the game and "First Look" which tells you everything you need to know about what you're going to watch.

The first look at a new game called ____.

Meanwhile "GREY ZONE GREY ZONE GREY ZONE," while flashy, doesn't convey anything to someone who hasn't already heard of the game. The actual image used is also better on the right, they're both reloading, but the right one at least has something going on with the two teammates and not just a non-descript background, right one is even framed better with the mountain and field being clearly separated by the text.

As for the titles, "So I played ____..." only works for games that already have some sort of buzz around them, whether that's because they're popular, infamous, controversial, etc. otherwise people aren't going to have a clue what the video is going to even be about. Is it a review? or just someone talking about their experience playing it? is it going to be gameplay footage? That title gives the audience nothing to work with. For example, "So I played The Day Before..." would work as a title because that game was getting a ton of coverage across the board due to the controversy surrounding it, most of it was commentary about it so seeing that someone actually played it would grab the attention of a viewer wanting to see/hear first-hand experience.

The other title, while verbose, says everything enough that needs to be said to grab anyone's attention. The only thing that irks me is the "that's actually real" because it just come across as a shallow clickbait tactic. The rest of the title is rock solid:

New [genre/type of game] - [game name] [video content]

Yeah, I'm not at all surprised why one video is greatly outperforming the other. Not sure what the point you were trying to make was.

The sin is that both videos are 30+ minutes, when in 10 minutes top anything relevant could have been said.

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Two people posting similar videos at similar times?

Dead internet theory in action

What am i looking at here ? I am geniunly curious .