Preface
One reason I started Better Lete Than Never was to avoid a scenario where I'd play, then immediately forget, a game that I've played extensively (and probably enjoyed). Well, it almost happened with Youtubers Life OMG! Edition (henceforce just Youtubers Life despite the potential confusion that I'll talk about in a little bit). From late December 2024 and through the all-consuming busyiness of the holiday season, Youtubers Life was my consistent guilty pleasure game until I saw credits roll in January. All told, I probably had at least 20 hours in the game by the time I finally uninstalled after being satisfied with the postgame experience.
And then I proceeded to forget about the game almost entirely until now. Heh, no, that's not the review.
The OMG! Edition
Youtubers Life by Barcelona-based game studio U-PLAY Online (no relation to that blasted Ubisoft launcher) is actually two games: the 2016 original and the comprehensive overhaul tied to the OMG! update introduced in 2018. By most accounts, OMG! is an upgrade with added polish and QoL, but some players argue that the original version of the game was better.
As curious as I am, I have no way to roll back to the original version of the game (especially since I own it on Amazon Games, rather than the more-robust Steam), so the focus of this review is purely on the game post-OMG! patch. For readability's sake, I'll be referring to the 2018 OMG! edition that I have played simply as Youtubers Life.
The Pitch
The premise of Youtubers Life is dead simple: it's a life sim where you build your character's YouTube channel from after-school hobby to a giant, profitable enterprise. Choose a niche--gaming, music, cooking, or fashion--then record, publish, and network your way from being a nobody to the heights of fame.
The gameplay pitch is equally straightforward: Youtubers Life consists of Sims-style gameplay where your main profession is online content creation. The game offers a holistic variety of "stuff" to do beyond the already robust system of creating, publishing, and profiting off your videos. You manage your character's physical and social needs, make connections inside and out of your industry, attend events for influence, content, or just pure fun, and encounter a spread of different random events that shake up your journey.
I'll be honest: the e-celeb aspect of Youtubers Life was actually the part of the game that I was least interested in. I found the most fun in the tycoon-tyle way you create your YouTube empire, which kept me around until the credits rolled. Let's break it down.
What do you actually do? The Gameplay Loop
Youtubers Life is easy to explain at a high level, but more scattered when it comes to the moment-to-moment gameplay. It's not an unfocused game per se; there's just a lot of variety.
Making Videos
The most robust system in Youtubers Life is video creation. It varies depending on your channel niche, but the flow generally goes:
- Procure your materials for the next video topic, such as game console and game
- Record footage via a minigame that determines the things you'll do on-camera
- Edit your clips, with a minigame that determines the traits and quality of your final cut
- Upload your video, reaping the rewards for being timely and relevant, or dealing with the fallout of poor audience reception
The manual process is rather involved, and while it's initially fun to hand-craft each individual video, the allure wears off after your first dozen hours or so. Thankfully, you unlock options for automation right around that time.
Managing Your Character
Your character has some basic Sims-esque needs tied to food, sleep, social needs, and productivity. It's not too difficult to balance everything, and these meters are welcome in how they set a rhythm to your play. The cadence of work, punctuated with food, sleep, and social events keeps things from being a constant churn of content-creation minigames.
You'll also maintain your character's ever-growing network of friends that you can hang out and even romance. But the key part of relationship-building in Youtubers Life is all in the networking.
Networking on the Grindset
Youtubers Life has a pretty built-out social networking simulation. Sounds fancy, but it boils down to levels of acquaintance with other characters to unlock new opportunities like channel collabs, employment opportunities, and industry connections.
The theoretical social metagame is engaging, but the dry dialogue and repetitive minigame you have to tediously grind to make progress is not. Socializing and networking in this game are appropriately essential to your success, so it's a shame that much of that ends up being a slow, monotonous grind of mashing the same dialogue choices and topics as the friendship bar crawls very, very slowly up towards the next landmark tier.
Everything Else
Eventually you unlock upgraded recording gear, new living spaces, employees to manage, channel networks, and trade shows. Each of these additions feel like "capital S Simulator" modules that give you a new rule-based way to run your YouTube gig. As a whole, Youtubers Life gives you a lot to play around with, but digestible and manageable when you handle the game unit by unit.
Youtubers Life does best with variety and novelty. It might even be the only things keeping it afloat among its myriad little snags.
The Rough Edges
Watch gameplay footage, and you'd be forgiven for dismissing Youtubers Life as a messy jankfest. There's fun to be had, but even when giving it the best-faith attempt to enjoy it, the game often felt barely held together with masking tape and hope.
I won't belabor the point by listing off every single issue, but I want to cover the major ones that got in the way of gameplay.
Scripting oddities
In-game actions have a 90% of working properly. The remainig 10%? Interruptions, priority conflicts that contradict the UI, physical collision glitches, or the game just outright ignoring your commands as it sees fit to just do its own thing.
Rough translation
The English translation can be distractingly poor, at worst even entirely incorrect or incomprehensible. As you play the game you'll have to train a sense of what the game means to say, as taking the in-game text literally is a recipe for confusion.
Micromanagement required
The game features some automation, but it's still limited. The vast majority of actions have to be performed manually, then carefully monitored to ensure things are done right. Frequent interruptions and action queue resets and breakage make for a general sense of distrust as to whether the thing you wanted done was actually done.
It's not really a game that you can set on "auto" and watch your burgeoning YouTube empire grow--you are constantly required to intervene and manually keep the machine going.
Presentation hitches
We got a stubborn camera, transparent world geometry, slow UI animations, and plenty of unclear in-game decisions and actions that add up to a game that really requires you to learn its quirks to enjoy. Much of the "jank" can be sidestepped with the right knowhow of the game's "unspoken rules," but it's a lot of effort. Like how the apartment view can get stuck in the upper floor while the camera stays on the lower floor, making everything below non-interactible, or how social point changes are tied to the literal amount shown onscreen so you can interrupt bad conversations or actions to minimize loss, or how any social event you've RSVP'd for has maximum priority and you will not be able to sleep or eat once the action is queued (trying to preform those actions will simply queue them up after the engagement).
Are the problems too much?
Youtubers Life has its issues, and at its worst moments can feel unpredictable or unstable. To give the game credit, in my ~20 hours or so it took to complete my first playthrough and experience some of the post-game, I think the game might have crashed on me twice. You won't have many CTDs but you might have a couple soft-locks that require you to manually restart the game to fix certain in-game actions just not functioning properly, as happened a few times to me.
Are these deal-breakers? My answer is going to be a big "it depends." I'm personally okay with a certain amount (okay, generous amount) of hoop-jumping for a game that I think is, at its core, pretty compelling. But the problems that Youtubers Life has are not minor. They can and do get in the way of enjoying the game even when playing as intended and interacting with the game as designed. That's a lot to swallow when there are plenty other life sims out there with enough polish that you won't encounter any of those issues.
The Bottom Line
I wrote above that despite not being interested in the "glitzy e-celeb life" stuff that's front and center in Youtubers Life, I found the tycoon-style growth of your content creation career to be compelling, and the variety and novelty that the game continues to serve you up until the game's end to be reason enough to keep me playing. To me, that was just barely enough for me to put up with the jagged, rusty edges that this game has, and the reason that I've happily marathoned this game up to postgame, but will most likely not return for an alternate playthrough of the other channel niches.
To that end, I can't really recommend Youtubers Life, or at least not without a giant asterisk of a disclaimer. But I refuse to call it a bad game, because despite its technical hiccups it's still a fun little life sim with the unique selling point about being a Youtuber, or at least a romanticized facsimile of one. Heart and soul went into this game, and I'm tentatively hopeful that the sequel, which has a decidedly different direction in its design, will still bring that unique diamond-in-the-rough charm that its predecessor brought to the table.
This one gets a "check it out if you're really interested, and no sweat if it doesn't click with you" rating.