YouTube production studio Rooster Teeth has launched a new channel, Game Kids, aimed mainly at children.
The channel will focus on games including The Sims and Minecraft, with videos featuring Rooster Teeth staff and their children, and the promise that the content will be “family-friendly”.
In a Q&A on the company’s website before the new channel launched, Rooster Teeth’s Caleb Deneour and Geoff Ramsay gave more details of their plans, which they said “has been in the works for years”.
New videos will be released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, averaging 10-20 minutes in length in the “Let’s Play” format. The comments section will be “heavily moderated” but not disabled, and the channel will not be used to promote other Rooster Teeth content.
Rooster Teeth’s main channel has just under eight million subscribers on YouTube, and 3.5 billion views since its launch in 2006. Some of its content – the splenetically sweary Rage Quit strand, for example – may not be seen as child-friendly by some parents.
“Our goal is to create family friendly content for all ages. Basically, I want to make content that my daughter can watch,” wrote Ramsay in the Q&A.
“The content is meant to appeal to a younger audience. I don’t want a 7 year old kid watching a Game Kids video, then watching Rage Quit. I also don’t want that kid’s parents to murder me.”
Game Kids sits neatly at the intersection of two big trends on YouTube: gaming and children’s entertainment.
The top 100 games channels on YouTube generated nearly 4.4 billion video views in September alone, led by channels including PewDiePie, Stampy, Vegetta and The Diamond Minecart. All are part of multi-channel network Maker Studios, which was acquired by Disney earlier in 2014.
Two of those channels – Stampy and The Diamond Minecart – have large audiences of children. But non-gaming children’s channels are also popular: the biggest channel on YouTube in October was toy-unboxing channel DC Toys Collector, with nursery-rhyme channel Little Baby Bum also in the top five on YouTube that month.
• YouTube, apps and Minecraft: digital kids and children’s media
