I watch a lot of youtube, have I said that?
Wut?I play a lot of video games too. I may not necessarily play them well, and I don't complete them all, but I do play a LOT of video games. With that said, League of Legends is the one I probably play the most. Have I said that?
Yes, I realize I'm a bit redundant. Anyway, League of Legends is a completely free game. The game can be played without ever spending a dime on it, and can be enjoyed to its fullest in such a fashion. Real world money can be spent on skins and icons and such to make the a little prettier and to give your account a unique feel, but you don't have to buy any of that. It's not like some other games where it's free to a point, or you can't experience the full game without paying money, everything can be unlocked through gameplay.
That used to be a slightly ridiculous statement, because random free skins were a rarity and in turn you could argue that you can't get the FULL experience. But you really can, skins do nothing for gameplay. Anyway, all of that aside, Riot has introduced a new mechanic to the game called hextech crafting that allows you to get chests for performing extremely well with a champion and then randomly drop keys to those chests after matches.
This essentially means you can unlock anything in the game for free, through random chance. I've seen people get several legendary skins and ultimate skins (these are aesthetic changes to the game that cost around $20.00 by themselves) from these chests. What's the catch? There is none! Well...there's one.
That's $270.00...Whatever money Riot loses by giving away free content once or twice a month to players ($40.00 or so worth of stuff each year according to some youtube experts) they more than gained back in the first two or three weeks of the new system's launch. There's an equation out there somewhere that probably can't be fully relied on and probably doesn't actually represent real math, but I suspect it goes like this:
X=Y*Z^3
Where x=number of subscribers, y=amount of money spent on games/merchandise and z=number of videos featuring games/merchandise.
The first video posted appears to be a pretty well established youtube personality, while the latter is a not-so-established one (215 subs at the moment) but you'll notice his video as of 4:23 p.m. has broke 14,000 views. Why? Because he spent $270.00 on a completely free game to take advantage of a free system. Additionally notable is that there are SEVERAL well-established League of Legends based youtubers out there and at least two others have spent $100.00 on hextech crafting.
What am I getting at? Well, in a matter of two or three weeks, Riot Games has made, at the very least, $970.00 on a system that was introduced as sort of a free system for players to get rewarded with items that would otherwise need to be purchased. The guys no how to make money. And so do these youtubers. I realize that $1,000.00 is hardly a drop in the bucket for what it costs to program all of these things, but $1,000.00 is also just a drop in the bucket compared to what has actually been spent, and what will be spent I suspect, on hextech crafting alone. Think about it, if one video can get 14,000 views based solely on spending money on a game, that draws the necessary attention to get a fanbase, which eventually leads into youtube advertisement partnership, which then leads to the youtuber making enough money to waste more on games, which leads to exactly what got them started, more unboxing videos.
This isn't the only instance where random chance and wasted money leads to youtube view spikes either, people do unboxing videos all the time, most of them are pretty popular, even if the youtuber isn't.
Did I get all of that out? Cool, then I'm about to go spend $1,000.00 on Hextech Chests and make four youtube videos off of that experience and get youtube famous. Roflcoptermao
Thanks for reading!
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