To be perfectly honest, like EVERYONE started playing Surgeon Simulator at once. I've seen small time and big time people all playing it at the same time. I believe it was a GameJam game, and people were simply anticipating the release of a bunch of games to screw around with. The Yogscast were relatively late to it. I remember seeing a small YouTuber put up a video, then several hours later PewDie, then many people even within the same day who wouldn't care for either of them putting up videos. For once, you can't centralize the cause of an indie game's popularity to a single person on the website YouTube.
I'd agree with this.
I saw a large number of Let's Players and Game-Based YouTubers create videos on Surgeon Simulator within a few days of each other.
Obviously it had it's own appeal to those players and their channel, hence the wide coverage it got for it's comedy value.
And it's quite possible that some of the later videos were created at the same time as some of the earlier videos, as many of the larger video channels, such as The Yogscast, create rather specific timetables for releasing their videos, so as to spread out their videos into regular times, prevent sporadic uploading, and to account for upload times.
So, for Surgeon Simulator at the very least, it earnt a lot of attention from numerous sources in a relatively short amount of time. It's no wonder it was found to be popular and voted for. You can't truly blame a specific YouTuber for it's popularity, so much as you can blame many YouTubers.
Blockland just isn't their kind of game I feel.
Like, I don't expect them to sit down and build something worth mentioning.
My personal view on the subject of a Blockland Let's Play, atleast by people like The Yogscast, or Nerd
3 for example, is as such;
1) Blockland is a rather pure sandbox game. When you start a game, there is very little awaiting you. You have a blank slate, some customisable environment settings, a few tools, and a tray full of bricks.
If I wanted to make a quick video, then I'd start the game and find myself void of content.
If someone wants to make a good Let's Play, then they first have to build something, which takes time.
2) These Let's Players tend to make short, sharp videos. They don't dedicate long periods of time to them. They have such a choc-a-bloc schedule that they can't. If creating a video of Blockland means that they first have to dedicate a large amount of time into building something they can show off, then they are likely to avoid it.
3) Blockland's controls are, initially, confusing and perhaps slightly hard to grasp. Some Let's Players like the Yogscast might take a bit of time to learn a bit, and atleast have one person aware of how to play.
Others, like Nerd
3 might jump into the game at the absolute beginning, avoiding tutorials, and trying to go from square 1. In this situation, working out the controls is much more difficult, and comes off as annoying on video. It suggest that the game is poorly designed, which isn't a fair accusation.
Blockland has a very decent Tutorial, but if someone skips it, you can easily make Blockland out to be overly complex.
4) Most of Blockland's gameplay will often be based upon Online Interaction.
The unusual spontaneity and sporadity of servers upon Blockland mean that at any one time, there may be numerous empty boring servers, or multiple interesting servers, with or without a population of players.
It could be very easy for a Let's Player to start up, join a server, and find nothing happening.
Or, they join and find no one there.
Or it's a game-mode which doesn't translate to Let's Play well, like the early stages of a CityRp.
It's so difficult to be certain that you'll get a good quality set of servers, that you might find that you won't get any good or interesting footage, or anything that is a good representation of Blockland in any time that you are filming.
To sum it up, Blockland is slightly too unusual for the type of games that these Let's Players film.
It's not exceptionally easy to get started, the game takes considerable time, there's little beyond a blank slate given to you to begin with, and the online play is exceedingly unpredictable.
While all of this doesn't prevent Blockland from being enjoyable and entertaining for countless hours, it does make it very difficult to fairly condense into an interesting and fun 20-30 minutes video on YouTube.
And the problem with big Let's Players is that they can hold a very surprising amount of power, in terms of public opinion.
If they give a good review/good video, then a game might find itself undergoing a surge of purchases.
But if it has a bad review, or the video appears to shine negatively upon the game, then it can possibly undergo a small increase in purchases (Bad publicity is still publicity), or even undergo some form of "internet boycott".
And I personally think that Blockland is a game that is very easy to edit it's apperance from brilliant to dreadful with just a few choice decisions in creating a film. And while I would love to see a Yogscast video, or a Nerd
3 video, I would also be anxious that it could be unfairly made and have a negative effect on public opinion on Blockland.
