You still need to find a way to make people aware of your free demo, and get them to want to play it. That's where getting traction with popular Twitch streamers and YouTube LPers really pays off, because they have the audience reach to give your game a level of exposure it'd be most unlikely to achieve otherwise.

Yeah, I think the limiting factors are both time and attention.

Twitch and youtube are great for when you have some time, but not much attention. Maybe you're doing something tedious on the side, or you just got back from a long day and aren't in the mood to spend the mental energy learning a new system/paying attention to dialogue, whatever.

And things like audiobooks and podcasts are great for when you have attention, but no time - you're stuck on the bus, out on a jog, whatever. You can pay attention to something interesting an novel, but you probably don't have time to dedicate to sitting down and focusing on one thing.

To pick up a new game, you need both time and attention. How often do those two things overlap? I'd guess not very often for most people. During the week, work takes a lot of time and drains a lot of mental energy. If you also have a family, you might not have many large empty time blocks to dedicate to anything.

So compared to picking up a new game, youtube and twitch videos are super cheap. A lot of people already have sizable backlogs of titles that they are pretty confident they'll really like.

I concur, tons of Kickstarters dupe people out of their money and deliver a really bad product. Pewdiepie once played a game like that and trashed it rightfully which lead to the developer crying online and throwing a fit like "I give up" which was sort of big news in video game forums and websites. Seeing a good product is what helped.

Off topic, they're still calling them "anti-semitic videos" straight faced which would lead someone to believe they weren't "jokes" but serious posts which is not cool.