In a digital world where so many people and content creators are chasing the next viral sensation, the symbiotic evolution of gaming and content creation has surfaced as an unforeseen powerhouse in capturing huge audiences around the world. Here I tell my tale of 'The FarmSim Guy' which would cultivate my lifelong passion for gaming and sprout into a thriving platform with half a million monthly viewers.
When we were stuck in the first lockdown, to keep me from working through the entire Netflix back catalogue, I decided to find myself a challenge. The first was to master solving the Rubix Cube… a month later that was done. I needed a fresh challenge...
The back story
I’ve been a gamer all my life, I feel privileged to have lived through every stage so far of gaming, from its infancy, playing pong on a black and white TV with cables draped all over the floor to today’s quite frankly, insane graphics, VR and immersive gameplay. When my poor son complains it takes too long for his PlayStation to load a game, he unfortunately gets the full back story of waiting 5 minutes for Spy Catcher to load from a cassette tape on my old Commadore 64.
I’m a proud nerd!
I’m a self-confessed geek and proud of it. From living in the World of Warcraft in the early 2000’s to attempting to keep up with my 14-year-old son’s lightning-quick reactions in Fortnite, I’ve always enjoyed the escapism and distraction gaming offers from the real world. Its ability to transport you to another dimension far removed from your day-to-day life is far more visceral than I’ve ever experienced through a TV show or movie (Star Wars being the exception to that rule!).
The unlikely nexus of agriculture and pixels
The second part of this relates to the fact I grew up on a farm, I come from farming stock and have always loved the outdoors and spent my university holidays driving tractors at harvest time to fund the next semester’s studying (...partying!) budget.
The final part of this is a game I discovered a few years ago, and played on and off alongside many other games. But in early 2018 Giants Software released their latest incarnation of their Farming Simulator franchise, Farming Simulator 19, and I was hooked!
It essentially does exactly what it says on the tin, you plant crops, you grow crops, you harvest crops, you tend to animals, and you sell the products you make to generate income to plow (pun intended) back into your farm, buying more animals, better equipment or bigger fields.
But not only that, it’s a brilliant marketing/business model. As well as a licensing model that allows the world’s biggest agricultural companies to have their products in the game, they have an open game architecture that allows modders to create new vehicles, maps and buildings for the game with new mods launched daily.
These are then released through their in-game mod-hub which allows them to monitor the quality and standards of the mods to ensure the best experience for the player. All this leads to a game that doesn’t stay the same, it’s an evolving ecosystem with new and different choices for players to select from on an almost daily basis.
The more I dug into the game, the more I enjoyed it and turned to YouTube to learn as much about the game as I could. I started watching content creators playing the game and learning different techniques and ways of playing. And thought… why don’t I give this a go…
For 20 years I’ve worked as a designer, web developer, and video editor, and always loved the process, so I thought to myself, let’s make a YouTube video and see what happens… No one watched it.
BUT, making the video was the most fun I’d had in a long time, I loved everything about it, from working out the tech to capturing the footage, editing it, and creating the graphics and thumbnails, even getting my head around YouTube and how the algorithm worked was fascinating.
So, I did another video, then another… a few more people watched it, then a few more, and then a few more after that…
Things went crazy almost overnight
By Christmas 2020, I had over 5000 subscribers. Fast forward nearly three years The FarmSim Guy (my YouTube alter ego) is Scotland’s number one Farming Simulator YouTuber, closing in on 90,000 subscribers, 18.6 million video views and an average of between 400,000 to 600,000 viewers watching around 45,000 hours of my video content on a monthly basis. And when they launched the latest version of the game Farming Simulator 22 in November 2021, I streamed live to over 6000 people on the weekend before release.
I’m now partnered with GIANTS Software the game developer, who provide me early access to new game developments to show the community ahead of them being publicly released and have travelled to Germany and Boston to different gaming conferences representing them, I have my own range of gaming PCs and sponsorship from Thrustmaster one of the biggest gaming peripheral manufacturers in the world. It’s gone from a simple hobby to a genuine side hustle, and now a professionally run business. Not bad for something I do for a few hours in the evenings and in my spare time at the weekends.
It’s been a crazy, surreal, and unexpected journey, but I’ve loved every second of it. I regularly get asked by my viewers, what’s the best way to get loads of subscribers on YouTube, and my answer every time is...
Don’t try to do it because you love it, enjoy the process and the satisfaction of creating the content. That will shine through to your viewers and will in turn attract more viewers.
It’s not always easy, hard work and time and effort go into everything I do on the channel, and you have to be prepared for things to fail to understand what does work. But for me, that’s the best way to learn and grow. No one got successful only focusing on the things that went well.
Lessons learnt
One of the benefits of running my YouTube channel is that I have been able to apply all I’ve learned to my professional life at LOOP Agencies too. Being able to work with clients on social media growth strategies and understanding how to create content that will resonate with their audiences always carries more weight if you’ve been there, experienced the pitfalls and understand the channels in depth.
When I’m not enjoying myself building in-house agencies for our clients at LOOP, you can find me on YouTube youtube.com/@thefarmsimguy - come and say hi!
Read more on the LOOP Agencies blog to inspire you including Creative consultancy: Lessons learned from a pro-bono campaign for a charity and how we worked with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival on their Fill Yer Boots campaign.