Keemstar AdPocalypse Game Gathers YouTube's Top Content Creators

Keemstar, YouTube’s famed DramaAlert host, just released a new mobile game starring some of the site’s top content creators. AdPocalypse is a tongue-in-cheek freemium tapping game, where you clone and combine different YouTubers to generate the most views possible. It’s not the most complicated, in-depth or particularly engaging mobile title I’ve ever played, but for an audience obsessed with these YouTubers, it could be the next big thing. Keemstar has made a YouTube empire off of talking about the “drama” on the video platform, now he’s found another way to get more money out of his young audience.

AdPocalypse’s gameplay is as simple as it gets: you click on boxes dropped by drones with orange goo inside, which you drag together to create YouTubers, getting more clicks with bigger names. Billy The Fridge combines into Anything 4 Views who transforms into Ricky Berwick, etc. The views you get from corralling these clones earn money, which you can spend on buying clones or upgrades. You can earn money with the app off, but you need to buy “auto-watch bots” to keep the cash flowing. Spending real money to buy in-game money or diamonds allows you to evolve faster, or add cosmetic upgrades for your YouTube fish tank. There’s also boosts from watching ads, which is the norm of any freemium game looking to make money.

Anyone one can play this game, but it will mostly attract fans of Keemstar’s DramaAlert channel, which skews towards a younger demographic. Keem has bottled his angst and emotions up into tight 10-minute videos that turned a dying channel into one of the fastest growing on the platform. Since July, DramaAlert has earned itself more than one million new subscribers after making videos about Jake Paul, the site’s biggest vlogger. “Jake Paulers” and “Logangers” watch his videos every day to catch up on the newest gossip that’s traveling around the web. In AdPocalypse, you can even buy a Keemstar buff, which allows you to monetize the “drama” that comes from all these celebrities gathered in one room.

With hundreds of different YouTubers available to collect, Keem has managed to create the ultimate game for his audience. The game promises larger YouTubers, like Philip Defranco and Pewdiepie, if you spend hours slapping orange blobs together and maybe drop a few dollars to speed up the process. What kid that considers themselves a diehard fan and already owns all their favorite content creators merch wouldn’t want a little floating head they keep inside their phone?

There are dozens of YouTuber personalities in the game, some of which seem out of place. In my first few hours of play, I managed to stumble onto Sargon Of Akkad, a right-wing talking head who’s been banned from Twitter for his “controversial” views on race and “SJWs.” JonTron appeared on his livestream first, before the Destiny debate, where the two spewed some truly hateful rhetoric on eugenics. The channel seems out of place in an otherwise harmless game where you click orange goo until it evolves.

Keemstar hasn’t made a truly amazing video game, but he has created something unique. AdPocalypse won’t be the only game to feature this many talking online personalities in one place, but it’s definitely the first. If you follow Keem on Twitter or watch any of his videos, this game is probably already on your phone. If you don’t follow YouTube culture and still don’t understand what a Pewdiepie is, then you should stick to one of the hundreds of other mindless tapping games for your phone.