How come Americans are so prominent when it comes to "Let's playing"?

[Deleted]

I guess PewDiePie really is the best example against your statement, since he's not only the most famous Let's Player but also the most famous Youtuber in the world.
Also I can really say that the LP-scene in terms of people creating & watching LP's is really present in many countries.
I'm from Germany and we have a very large and diverse LP-scene with the most famous Youtuber being Gronkh with nearly 4 million subscribers.

Also, as other people in this thread said before, there are many LPers speaking English who are not from the US.

I'd still believe the US has the most LPers and even Youtuber, though. Since the Internet and its culture mostly originated in the US.

[Graeham]

I'm not American but I've never cared for the 'Let's Play' culture myself. If a particular game intrigues me enough then I'll just go with my gut instinct - which is rarely wrong - and purchase it. I prefer to play stuff for myself instead of watching other people do it. Plus a lot of the commentary and theatrics often injected into 'Let's Play' videos feel very forced and contrived.

I don't really like talking at length when I'm playing a game or watching a movie either. It just distracts me and ruins my sense of immersion. It's why I hate making extensive use of Mumble/Vent when playing MMO's.

[Axelond]

I think mostly because EU is so split in languages you don't see a lot of LPs from Europe. French and Germans are super anal about only speaking their own languages so you hardly ever see them on the internet.

UK probably has too terrible internet connection to be able to pump out 2 hours of lets play content a day.

Gaming is not really a thing in a lot of poorer EU countries like Romania ect.

So that pretty much leaves Scandinavia and although we are pretty huge on the internet compared to our population. But kids here don't really speak English fluently until 12-14 years old so the main demographic of LPers like 8-12 year olds follow native speaking LPs I guess (I don't know any but I never followed the scene).

[Deleted]

I think it's just a question of numbers in English speaking countries. The US has 300 million people in it compared to 50 million in the UK so naturally there will be a higher percentage of American LPers.

[Deleted]

Well, the US have more native English speakers than all other countries combined. And, since "Let's play" is an English sentence, well... Most people from non-English speaking countries do "Let's play"s in their first language, and sometimes they even write the phrase "Let's play" itself in their language, so it doesn't show up in the results of your search.

Well, I've been thinking of doing some LP's and I'm quite profficient in English, even if it's my second language. I wouldn't really start doing LP's in Swedish eh?

[May90]

Well, I've been thinking of doing some LP's and I'm quite profficient in English, even if it's my second language. I wouldn't really start doing LP's in Swedish eh?

If you are proficient in English, I would go for English LPs if I were you, since the English-speaking audience is incomparably larger than Swedish-speaking. However, it depends on your preferences. In Russia, for example, many people do LPs in Russian, even those who speak English quite well - Russia culturally is quite different from the West, and I suspect many people there just don't feel like sharing their experience with English speakers. Many other countries, like China or India, with sizable populations, would also probably have a lot of non-English LP content. Latin America must have a lot of LPs in Spanish or Portuguese. If you sum over all this, plus add those Swedish and other Europeans that don't speak English very well, add people from dozens of other countries... well, English LPs won't look that widespread.

Still, English is the most popular second language in the world, and English speaking countries have a total of over 400 million population. Given that these countries are highly developed and nearly everyone in them has Internet and many play games, it is natural that English LPs are more widespread than any other LPs.

[Shibito]

Splattercat ftw!

[breadisfunny]

canada and the scandanavian countries along with the u.k. have strong let's play communities as well.
as does brazil.