Introducing VGC First Play, our video series aimed at covering a wider range of games

“There are too many games” – it’s a phrase often said these days when discussing the options available to players. You’ve likely said it yourself at some point.

At VGC, it’s a particularly frustrating dilemma, because as a fairly small team keen to give coverage to as wide a range as titles as possible, there really are too many games. Far too many for us to handle.

As you may have noticed or heard, the current games media landscape has looked healthier in the past, and numerous factors I won’t bore you with just now mean it’s getting increasingly more difficult for some websites to keep the lights on.

It’s the main reason we launched the VGC Patreon last year, which – if you’ll forgive the pitch – isn’t just the best way to support the site, but also offers a bunch of extra written, audio and video content as well as other features like ad-free browsing and the ability to comment on our articles.

The challenges we face as a site also have a major impact on the games we review. As a team of just three writers, it’s crucial that we’re selective when it comes to which games we want to give our full attention.

First Play is our solution to this. The concept is this: we get a new game, start our capture equipment and microphone immediately, and play through the first part of the game, commenting with our immediate reaction as we do.

First Play videos won’t be a set length, it’ll depend on the type of game. For a story-based adventure it could be the first hour, for an indie 2D platformer it may only require 15 minutes. We’ll call it as we see it each time, stopping when we feel we’ve reached a point where enough of the game has been shown to give viewers a grasp of what’s going on.

Each First Play video will have two versions: a standard YouTube version, and a Patreon version. For the Patreon versions, which will be available to all paid tiers on our Patreon page, we’ll continue to record after the standard video ends, showing even more of the game. The Patreon versions of the videos will also be demonetised, meaning there’ll be no ads no matter how long the video is.

Naturally, while First Play isn’t designed for triple-A games, if we do find ourselves reviewing a high-profile title and the terms of the embargo allow for long, unedited videos (which isn’t always the case), we may do a First Play for that too.

While our time and resource constraints mean the vast majority of the games we make First Plays for won’t be followed by full, scored reviews, we hope that by creating these on a regular basis we’ll be able to draw your attention to a wider range of games than the big names you may be used to, while ensuring we can give at least some coverage to the games we really want to take a look at but wouldn’t otherwise be able to fit in.

Our aim is to eventually build the series up to the point that VGC readers will watch each new video, even (or especially) if it’s a game they haven’t heard of before.

With that in mind, I hope you’ll give our First Play content a go. My first one, Mullet MadJack, has just been posted (and can also be seen above), so give it a watch and see what you think. With any luck, we’ll be be able to continue to grow this series and expose our audience to a much wider range of games.