Dani
On fire- Audio
- English
- Also in
- 🇪🇸🇵🇹🇮🇳
A Norwegian game developer shows the games he makes, the process behind them and how players react.
The best gaming YouTube channels
Gaming is the biggest category on YouTube and the hardest one to get a straight recommendation for. Search it and you get the same handful of channels with tens of millions of subscribers, which tells you what is popular and nothing about what is good. Meanwhile the person who explains a game well, or who is simply funny to have on in the background, is four hundred results down.
These are gaming channels somebody actually watched: people who make things, people who take a game apart to show you how it works, people whose commentary is the reason to be there rather than the gameplay underneath it. Each card carries the spoken language and the live subscriber count, and the review says what the channel is for, because "gaming" covers an eight-hour retrospective and a twelve-minute review of a game that came out yesterday.
- Channels
- 5
- Combined reach
- 4.5M
- Data
- Refreshed daily
Thomas Brush
New- Audio
- English
- Also in
- 🇪🇸🇩🇪🇸🇦🇧🇩+12
Analysis of game development, plus interviews with other independent creators.
- Audio
- English
- Also in
- N/A
A game designer breaks down new and in-development indie titles from a maker's perspective.
PAT in DEV
On fire- Audio
- English
- Also in
- 🇩🇪🇫🇷🇵🇹🇪🇸
A developer's devlog building an open-world game, chapter by chapter.
Why these made the list
Reaction content and rage-bait thumbnails were the first things out. What earns a place is a channel that adds something to the game it is covering: an explanation, a craft, a joke, an argument you had not thought of. Channels that upload daily by saying nothing were left out, as were the ones whose opinions turn out to track their sponsors.
If you came here for what to play next rather than what to watch, Playro is our own take on that question.
Questions
Is this about playing games or making them?
Both, and each review says which. Some of these channels take a game apart to show how it was built, which is as interesting to somebody who will never write a line of code as it is to somebody shipping their own.
Do I need to know the game to enjoy the channel?
For most of them, no. The ones that work best here are the ones where the commentary carries it, and the review tells you when a channel assumes you have already played the thing.
Are there long-form channels?
Yes. Video essays and multi-hour retrospectives are some of the best work on YouTube and they are exactly what a recommendation feed buries. Each card shows what a channel's typical upload looks like.