Creating a Virtual Influencer to Cover Every Game

Video game streaming is hugely-competitive, with literally millions of channels on Twitch vying for viewers' attention. To build a substantial audience, streamers do everything from hosting marathon streams, to constructing crazy-pants video thumbnails (see below, assuming it didn’t already shove its way into your visual cortex), to collaborations. Many will go where the viewers already are, which means many focus on popular games rather than the unknown.

Streaming a hit title like Fortnite, Minecraft, or League of Legends instantly taps into fanbases with massive existing audiences, many of whom are specifically seeking out more content about these games. This isn’t a guarantee of success, but by aligning with these popular titles, streamers can ride the wave of existing interest, and discovery algorithms can help increase their chances of being found by new viewers.

“Don’t you want to cover something nobody else has?“

We devs may say, “Hey, we have this great new indie game! Cover us! Don’t you want to cover something nobody else has? Oy!” While carving out a niche with lesser-known games may seem appealing, spending hours researching and playing a bunch of unknown titles can be a tough sell. Streamers overwhelmingly ignore outreach from smaller studios, or—if they’re being confessional, give polite but blunt replies like this:

"Your game looks great. it's just too small for me to cover.”

- An actual message we received from a popular YouTuber.

This lack of visibility then trickles down to storefronts—if you go to the Switch eShop, for instance, the top titles they’ll feature will primarily comprise well-known properties:

Valve tries to widen the top of the sales funnel with events like Next Fest. But even those benefit hugely from bringing your own audience, where the top of the list goes to those who already have the highest visibility outside the platform.

This Lack of Coverage Ain’t Helping the Ecosystem

A recent VG Insights report claimed that last year, ten games captured an unprecedented 61% of all revenue on Steam. That is, 10 titles released in 2023 made over half the money of that year’s launches.

Here in 2024, we’re seeing closure of studio after studio after studio, and while there’s been a lot of ink spilled on how it’s rising costs, industry consolidation, or investors bearish from inflation, I think it’s simpler:

We Need to Improve Games Discovery.

Here’s an example of a game dev who’s created something great, and a streamer’s waving their hands in the air, wondering why they don’t already know about it:

To which I say: wouldn’t it be neat if all games started out with coverage?

Let’s Cover All Games in 2006

Those of you from waaaaaaaay back may remember my 2006 attempt to cover every single game, called Indie Superstar. I’ll spare you the whole show, since it was pretty crude, but for kicks, here’s a shot from when I was 20 years younger (I’m the one with shorter hair):

Perhaps if I'd continued doing them, I'd have become an early influencer, and would now be on a yacht somewhere. A superyacht? Who knows? The thing was: it took a solid 8-hour day to research, script, set up, film, break down, edit, and post. Yeesh.

It Took Me 8 Hours to Produce One Episode

There simply wasn't enough time for me to cover every single game, even back then.

About a decade later, I did some writing about automating these shows—I called it What's On Steam TV, and that led up to my working at Valve on a proper Steam Labs Experiment 003 - The Automatic Show. It worked, but the content was kinda dry—a verbatim statement of facts about games. Which was boring. Show cancelled!

Let’s Cover All Games in 2024

One thing we have in 2024 is tech that can digest a pile of info and summarize it in an interesting fashion. I figured it was the perfect time to revisit the concept. So, for my new independent site, We Love Every Game, we whipped up a new feature—three new 5-minute Steam shows to celebrate both hits and hidden gems. Check ‘em out:

Show #1: Hits and Hidden Gems with Untextured Cube John Tadpole

Untextured Cube John Tadpole has a knack for finding the diamonds in the rough. With his signature blank, slightly-reflective affect and cube-like insight, he guides viewers through what players love about each title.

Show #2: Steam Deck Picks with Legally Distinct Robot

Next up is Steam Deck Picks with Legally Distinct Robot, which focuses on highly-rated titles for Valve's portable powerhouse. It picks games that have the full Steam Deck Verified green badge.

Show #3: Games On Sale With Asset Store Bear

Finally, there's the bear with a nose for bargains, Games on Sale with Asset Store Bear—titles discounted to $5 or less, also with high player ratings.

How it Works

At the heart of the show is a custom-built system that mashes APIs, AI language models, and video production tools to create high-quality content at scale.

We start by pulling in info from the Steam API to identify the right titles for each show (for instance, John Tadpole's show snags everything with 80%+ user reviews and at least 50 reviews).

Then it uses the API to grab info about each game—everything from the developer's marketing copy to tags to player reviews and trailers. Here’s what that looks like for Million Monster Militia (a great game, if I may say so myself):

1. Short Description (this is marketing copy): "🎲 UNHINGED ROGUELIKE DECKBUILDER 🎲 Draft a rag-tag army of laser frogs, dragons and lawyers (among 150 other bizarre units.) Deploy your army to the grid with a single click. It’s all strategy and no tactics. To win, you’ll have to find synergies so strong that they break the game."

2. Long Description (this is also marketing copy): 🎲 UNHINGED ROGUELIKE DECKBUILDER 🎲 Draft a rag-tag army of laser frogs, dragons and lawyers (among 150 other bizarre units.) Deploy your army to the grid with a single click. It’s all strategy and no tactics. To win, you’ll have to find synergies so strong that they break the game. Deploy and Attack! 50 giant bosses have taken over 50 cities in the United States (including recently-annexed Montreal). It's your job to cross the country, gathering troops to free the terrified population. Start with a bunch of Civilians (armed with nothing but hope) and Solders to train them up: Recruit Your Militia Will you pick the Soldier who will turn your citizens into hard-bitten troops, or the Succubus, who will turn them into power-leeching Vampires? If you dabble in the occult, bring along a Priest to channel the power of your Undead. Backed into a corner by Nyarlathotep? Deploy a Tactical Nuke to concentrate your militia's attacks into a single mega blast...

3. Steam Tags: Early Access, Roguelike Deckbuilder, Deckbuilding, Auto Battler, Strategy, Roguelite, Roguelike, Procedural Generation, Creature Collector, Turn-Based Strategy, Turn-Based Combat, Turn-Based Tactics, Choices Matter, 2.5D, Isometric, Pixel Graphics, 1990's, America, Funny, Combat

4. Release Date: 2023-08-17

5. Developers: Space Capsule Games; Dejobaan Games, LLC

6. Publishers: Dejobaan Games, LLC; Space Capsule Games

7. User Review Overview: 49 player review(s), 94% positive

8. User Reviews:

8-1. User Review #1: "Mechanically this is similar to Luck be a Landlord. I think that is great, because LbaL has an original feel and its approach to a 'builder' is fresh, I could play many more games in the same vein."

(etc.)

If you stuff all that into an LLM and ask it to summarize what players love, you get something like what we have below, which is much better than just spouting a laundry list of facts at the viewer:

Players love Million Monster Militia for its deep, strategic gameplay that rewards discovering powerful synergies between the game's diverse cast of units. With a wide variety of combinations to explore, the game offers immense replay value as players aim to break the game with increasingly overpowered builds. The humorous presentation adds to the entertainment factor, while the satisfying learning curve strikes a balance between accessibility and challenge, making it easy to get hooked on "just one more run."

From there, we composite this into a show script—everything from scene changes, subtitles, and spoken lines are timestamped to the 100th of a second:

AI VO, in particular, has come a long way in the past few years (check out my post comparing 50 different voices, from last year). ElevenLabs is still the reigning champion. We use a modified version of their “Fin” for the voice of Untextured Cube John Tadpole:

From there, our "Showrunner" system takes the finished script text, the voiceover'ed lines, trailer footage from the Steam store, and some pixie dust, and composites that into a polished video, complete with visual flourishes.

The “showrunner” is written in Unity, and composites all of this to video.

That gets rendered to video, shoved at YouTube, and if everything goes right, you should get a new show every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Fun side note: I was initially worried that we'd run out of games to cover, given the 3x weekly pacing. As it happens, there are 16,265 games on Steam with an 80%+ positive player rating and 50+ reviews. Even if no more games were created, that’d take us into the 2080s.

There are enough games on Steam right now that it would take Untextured Cube John Tadpole 63 years to get through them all.

Replacing Human Streamers?

An interjection: We’re seeing piles of AI slop vying for content on Facebook, TikTok, and, in fact, the entire Web, and I’d prefer not to a) add to that or b) exacerbate the decline of those streamers on YouTube willing to cover small titles. My hope is to:

1. Cover all games in small bites so that players, streamers, and journalists might learn about all sorts of new stuff, and

2. Link to human streamers where possible so that viewers can move on to deep dives created by actual people. YouTube and Twitch actually make automating this surprisingly difficult. But a) that’s another story, and b) we’ll tackle that one yet.

Watch the Shows Here!

Go on, then! Watch the show. Like and subscribe. Thumbs up. Thousand points of light. Tell me what you think of it, and how it might improve.

Future Plans

Focus testing the videos has been pretty positive—people seem to appreciate both what we're trying to do and the fact that there’s some character behind the shows. I'd like to expand our coverage, since right now, the three shows cover pretty broad-interest topics.

The ideal here is that we represent categories that don’t really exist on Steam. For instance, the We ❤ Every Game Logic Puzzle Hub is a refinement of Steam’s Puzzle tag, which I feel is way too broad (e.g., it includes games like Hitman: World of Assassination, which has puzzle elements but isn’t really a logic puzzle title).

We also do Sierra/Lucasfilm Game style Point & Click Adventures because Steam’s Point & Click tag includes stuff like Inscryption, and their Adventure tag includes stuff like Far Cry 6.

The best compliment I receive when showing people We Love Every Game is, "I just picked up a title I didn't know about." The system works! Now, all I have to do to do this for every game.

Wish me luck!