4 key takeaways from YouTube Creator Towns
Dec 22, 2022 – [[read-time]] minute read
Earlier this month, we hosted the fourth YouTube Creator Town in Korea. Started in 2019, YouTube Creator Town has been offering an opportunity for creators to bond and network with creators, fans, users and YouTube, amidst the pandemic.
From online to offline to hybrid
The first YouTube Creator Town took place in Busan in 2019, where gaming creators gathered to attend one of the largest gaming conferences in Korea. We invited winners of the first NextUp program in Korea, a training course to empower the next generation of creators, and offered them and top gaming creators chances to network with each other, space to shoot, edit, rest and charge their devices, a livestream booth to engage with their fans and many more.
A few months after our first event, the world started to shut down due to the pandemic. To continue our efforts to build the gaming creator community, we switched to an online event, where we invited creators to join us at an online exclusive community building event on Minecraft, powered by Google Cloud.
In 2021, we developed this even further and hosted the Creator Town event with the theme of ‘Sports Day,’ enabling creators to team up with others, accomplish different missions and engage with their fans.
This year, we were back with Creator Town: Gaming Competition, where we had three hosts, Testerhoon, Sleepground and Netmarble, to host game tournaments and to engage with gaming fans across the country. For the first time since the inaugural event, we were able to see some offline collaborations between creators, and hope to create more opportunities for fans to engage with their favorite creators in the future!
True multi-format experience
For this year’s Creator Town, creators delivered content across different formats — tournament matches were live streamed, while highlights were captured in both long-form videos and Shorts.
We also invited fans to join the experience by asking them to join the #ItWorks Shorts challenge. By posting Shorts with their epic game plays, fans were given chances to get tickets to the final tournament matches happening offline and also win some special gaming items and merchandise.
Celebrating the ever-growing gaming content ecosystem in Korea
Testerhoon hosted the League of Legends Masters Invitational Tournament at the YouTube Creator Town this year.
Our first YouTube Creator Town was focused mostly on supporting creators during the gaming conference. However, after we saw the valuable interaction between fans and creators at Creator Towns during the pandemic, we wanted to expand the event so that the entire gaming community could benefit from the event.
To do so, we teamed up with two gaming creators and a game developer for this year’s Creator Town. Testerhoon and Sleepground hosted tournaments and matches at the Creator Town and shared them with their fans, while Netmarble hosted a gaming tournament with their new gaming title HypeSquad, inviting creators and gaming fans for the match live streams, award ceremony and many more.
Sleepground hosted the Legend Crew Match at the YouTube Creator Town this year.
Hear from our hosts
We also asked our amazing hosts to share their thoughts about this year’s Creator Town.
“After years of hosting master players of ‘League of Legends’ on my channel through the ‘Masters Invitational’ series, I finally had the opportunity to host a real, well-laid tournament with the support of my fans and YouTube. There were great and small issues along the way but I feel happy and fulfilled that we did it! I’ll never be able to forget how my fans came together to enjoy the final match.” — Testerhoon
"Truly a special experience to showcase the Legend Crew Match that Minecraft fans have all been waiting for at the YouTube Creator Town. I look forward to seeing more of such collaborations between game creators and fans!" — Sleepground
Netmarble hosted the HypeSquad Super League at the YouTube Creator Town this year.
“It was amazing to watch the creator live streams, user live chats and so many videos created after the event and get to know what the fans love about our game ‘HypeSquad’. The award ceremony at the end was really an unforgettable experience. A huge thank you to the YouTube team, our HypeSquad team and last but not least, every single one of the creators who played with us for such a long time!”
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We’d like to thank our hosts, gaming fans, creators and the gaming community in Korea for joining and supporting the YouTube Creator Town. We can’t wait to see what you play next!