I learned fast that you can’t run a channel mixing up games, unless your channel specifically mixes up games. Very early on, before I even had a hundred subscribers, I would make a DCS video and get 100 views, make an Xplane video and get 10 views. I thought they were both flight sims, I thought people would be interested in the genre. I was wrong.
So to give the game I love most its own space, DCS world, that is going to be the sole focus on Fox 3 Simulations youtube channel.
I thus created a tiny, secondary channel to cover everything that I like, that’s none-DCS related. It now covers Xplane, eurotruck, hearts of iron 4, soviet workers party, MSFS2020, Uboat, Destroyer hunter, and anything else that tickles my fancy. The channel is games with brains, and as the channel suggests, only covers games that require a little bit of thought to them. Mindless shoot-em-ups that rely on lightning reactions and quick movements of the mouse, might be fun to many, and there’s plenty of channels that cover them, my 2nd channel caters for the minority (and I mean a TINY minority) who prefer something “realistic” over “fancy graphics”.
I remember attending i32 down in southern UK, where about 2,000 PC gamers brought their rigs down to hook up on a massive multiplayer network. I was with a small group of about 6 friends, and we were in one of the side rooms that maybe held about 30 people. I remember catching a lad behind us looking at our screens, and sniggering as if to say “that game looks terrible” – and he was right… While he was playing COD4 (or whatever it was at the time) we were playing Armed Assault 2 (aka ArmA2). To him, our game did look crap. It was horrific. But what he didn’t know, we sniggered walking past his little group, at the linear story line, the “corridor of map” where at best he could only ever wander 20 yards either side. Where firing 10 bullets into a bad guy doesn’t kill him, but merely knocks points off a health-bar, one that can be instantly “healed” with a healthpack, found hovering somewhere down a very fancy graphics, no doubt about it, corridor.
We had the freedom to roam around anywhere we wanted on this huge island hundreds of square km in size, we could go by boat, plane, chopper, by foot, tank or truck, and we could ride together as a team, split up, and a million other things. We knew we we’re looking at the future of gaming, and since then, so many titles, including DCS world, are open map. Yes you still got your mission, just like Call of Duty, except we don’t always have to go through the front door. We can choose to sneak in the back, air-lift in at the sides, or balls to the wall, M1A1 knock the front door off too.
Granted, a game that only has to draw 20 yards either side of a pre-defined path, is ALWAYS going to look better than a game that has to render thousands of kilometers square.