The reason new Gaming channels don't succeed is you're all doing the same thing
A lot of the posts I see in New Youtuber subreddits and threads are starting out in gaming, usually with faceless playthroughs and lets plays. This is not a viable strategy for new YouTubers to experience meaningful growth and is essentially playing the YouTube lottery.
To give you some context about my channel, I run a small gaming channel with 1.2k subscribers, my 8 most recent uploads have averaged between 2-5k views with two now exceeding 6k and still growing
When I was originally making content for the channel I was averaging around 30-80 views per video, I grew from 20-150 subscribers in this time and managed to build a small community who helped with contributing video ideas and challenges.
Between mid 2021 - 2026, I wasn't uploading to my channel, 3 of the tutorial videos I made became the go to tutorials within the community, each of those videos climbed above 70,000 views over the time I wasn't uploading.
I started making videos again in March with each video having a more focused and complete goal and paying more attention to my thumbnails. In the 4 weeks since returning to the YouTube sphere I have again managed to build a core audience of over 500 returning viewers across multiple videos.
The largest problem I find with 'let's plays, playthroughs, first looks and update thoughts' is that style of content is directed towards viewers who watch YouTube with the question, 'What did [YouTuber] get up to today?'
It is very difficult to expect growth especially early on in personality based spheres because paradoxically, you need a core audience already and dedicated subscribers willing to click on videos like this to boost your initial CTR, retention and engagement.
You can't expect a viewer to want to keep watching a slightly poorer edited version of someone playing through a game as any other big name YouTuber whose brand they're already familiar with. This isn't to say you shouldn't make this style of content at all but when it's the only type of video on your channel, it makes it very hard to get into your content.
I welcome any and all questions, I am happy to take a look at some channels in my free time as well and provide a personalised review after some time. I am also happy to answer questions related to the video making process from other similar channels who are struggling to get off the ground.