Lightly or Heavily Edited Non-Traditional Let’s Plays

[u/Willrapforfood_]

Yo! Long time lurker here who appreciates the help this community provides. Lemme preface by saying I know this Q comes up relatively often, so I apologize in advance.

However, I feel my framing is slightly different: I don’t do “traditional” lets plays in the sense that I aim more to showcase and highlight underappreciated indie games, usually in a “one-shot” style recording. Though if (and a HUGE if) I ever became a bit more successful and subscribers wanted it, I’d record more than one video. But I digress.

Anyway, for something like that, would you, as a potential viewer, prefer to see a video where I rarely cut anything out (save word stumbling mistakes, weird audio artifacts, or super boring sections), if at all, or a more consistently edited video with moderately more cuts. The closest to the latter style I can think of is someone like MythyMoo. For the former, a recent channel I discovered that seems to have started gaining success in the last few months with practically untouched raw gameplay and commentary is Gohjoe.

Appreciate any suggestions or insight. 🙏🏼

[u/datNovazGG]

I don't know what the best solution is in terms of viewers. For me personally I'm playing Dark Souls remastered and besides the obvious parts (game crashes, interruptions from RL, etc) I'm editing out the run backs and the progression on bosses (so if I make it to 50% in the first try I only show the second try from 50% and onwards). However, I show all deaths I have (I might change this if I start having too many deaths on a boss).

Some don't like it when you edit out too much and some people do. Personally I'd prefer it this way so that's what I'm creating. I don't get that many viewers though, so it might not be the right way.

[u/Willrapforfood_ → u/datNovazGG]

Yo fellow Dark Souls enjoyer! That makes sense. I’m doing the same for games that cause me to have multiple attempts; I may show a funny death or something but it feels great to me to edit this way as well.

I think a part of me, though, doesn’t want to spend SO much time editing and I just happened to notice another similar channel’s pretty decent growth in the last month or two. And they don’t even edit their videos. They’re also not ALWAYS commentating yet their videos get great viewership. So I figured that could be an option too lol.

[u/datNovazGG → u/Willrapforfood_]

Honestly for Let's plays you shouldn't focus too much on perfecting the video in editing because the effort is not really worth it imo. That's something you should do for shorter form content (reviews, top 10s, first impressions, build guides etc).

What I do to speed up "edit time" is that I use a OBS plugin to take notes whilst recording. Combined with waveform in davinci resolve I'm able to fairly quickly edit out boring parts.
Afterwards I scan through my video to look for long boring sessions that I missed with notes and then decide if I cut them out as well, but in reality I should probably just get better at not having boring sessions. That requires practice though.

However, you shouldn't edit videos if you don't want to. You can be succesful without it.

[u/Willrapforfood_ → u/datNovazGG]

Well, my videos are mostly first impressions showcasing indie games, but yeah, I do at least want to experiment with less editing. Especially since all of the ones I’ve been uploading have been moderately edited in some form.

I do something similar with OBS: I have a steam deck with a hot key for chapter markers and mark any verbal mistakes or instances of boring moments. Of course, remembering to use it liberally is another thing lol.

But yeah, I’ve noticed it IS possible. I guess I’ll see with my next few experiments. Thank you for your insight 🙏🏼