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The story
On 5ch’s Hardware/Industry board (Geha), a thread blew up over the view count for PlayStation’s “State of Play (Japanese)” broadcast: it sat at around 100,000 views by 10pm on the day it aired, but climbed to nearly 800,000 in under two days. Posters pointed out that YouTube changed how it counts views around August 24, 2026, making it easier for even brief watches to register — but others noted a similar spike happened around the same time on the “PLAY!PLAY!PLAY!” show slot, splitting opinion on whether this is a site-wide YouTube change or padding by a specific channel.
Why does a broadcast that started at 10pm — prime time for Japanese viewers — cap out at only 100,000 views,
then explode to several times that in just two days…
They’re 100% buying views…
Source: youtube.com / Original article here
What people said
Yeah, been in effect since August 24 — it's a free-for-all now.
Just checked — every single video is sitting at a steady 300,000 views.
PLAY! PLAY! PLAY! playlist
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOkZyHIVzUcMEAbfT5qwFmaXURb9snw1U
Lmaooo, and this is for Tokon, a game that only sold 2,814 copies domestically.
MARVEL Tokon's PLAY!PLAY!PLAY! Vol.1, aired 3 days ago: 120,000 views
MARVEL Tokon's PLAY!PLAY!PLAY! Vol.2, aired 2 days ago: 100,000 views
Given Tokon's actual concurrent-viewer numbers, this feels completely off.
Lol, it only had 4-digit views at first, then suddenly spiked.
YouTube's apparently been declining lately, so some say this is just padding numbers to impress advertisers.
For what it's worth, a higher view count doesn't change what YouTube actually pays the channel.
>That said, this has no effect on revenue. Ad revenue calculations and eligibility for the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) still rely on 'engaged views' and engaged watch time — a metric counting views that lasted beyond the first few seconds, which is essentially how view counts used to be measured. This can be checked in YouTube Analytics' detailed mode.
You can check it in Analytics, so someone go look, lol
The numbers are gonna be a whole different order of magnitude, lmao
It already couldn't beat past Nintendo Directs, so this'll just widen the gap.
Popularity doesn't grow without consistency.
But when the first one's like that already, lol.
Normally Vol.2 sees a big drop in views,
but they tuned it to match Vol.1 almost exactly, lol.
Earth Defense Force 6's episodes only had 4 digits from Part 2 onward, lol.
They only started adjusting Part 2 and beyond partway through, so the difference really shows.
So you're saying way more Japanese viewers watched it starting the day after
than at 10pm on day one?
No way that's true.
Since when did it change?
or does it cut their income instead?
I think they made views easier to rack up because monetization gets suspended below a certain view threshold.
Whether that actually boosts revenue, I couldn't tell you — I'm not the one running a channel.
To bring it in line with other platforms' specs.
In the end it's all about ads.
State of Play | June 2, 2026 [Japanese]
560,000 views
The spec had already changed by then… at least according to what I found 🙄
They were all sitting at like 150 views when they started,
and then somehow ballooned to 2,000 times that — no way that's real, lol.
Nobody on Geha even knew this show was airing, lol.
That's because the count is tracked internally right away, but the displayed number is delayed.
Having practically identical average view counts across the board is basically a confession that something's being done.
If you're gonna do it, at least do it so it's not this obvious.
This is the kind of move that says you don't even care if you get caught.
Before, if you hit play, thought 'this sucks,' and hit back within a few seconds, it wouldn't count.
Now all of that just gets counted evenly as a view — that's all this is.
Hyping up view counts is outdated to begin with.
Nobody's been going on about view counts for Shorts, which have worked this way for ages.
They've been pulling this kind of thing ever since the David Manning affair (the fake-film-critic-quotes scandal)…
Sony's been doing this since the company was founded, lol
The view count tied to revenue works the same as before
and can be checked in Analytics,
so revenue doesn't actually increase.
Looks like a move aimed at sponsors who only ever look at the raw view count.
Sony's got way too much of a rap sheet for stealth marketing,
so nobody's gonna believe them, lol.
Isn't that just you talking to yourself and making noise all alone? lol
Background and Key Points
YouTube treats view counts as two separate metrics: “engaged views” (views watched for more than a few seconds), which is used to determine ad revenue and eligibility requirements, and the plain “view count” that’s simply displayed on screen. The spec change around August 24 that sparked this thread only made the latter, on-screen number easier to inflate — YouTube itself has stated that the standards for calculating revenue haven’t changed. In other words, even a sudden surge in views doesn’t mean more ad revenue for the creator; it only changes how things look to advertisers. What still stirred controversy was the observation that only videos tied to titles with poor domestic sales showed an unnaturally uniform pattern of view growth — a pattern the spec change alone doesn’t fully explain, keeping suspicion alive. Sony has history here too: its stealth-marketing tactics were called out in the past over the “David Manning affair,” in which it used quotes from a fabricated film critic in its ads, so this incident drew suspicion once again, even with the truth still unconfirmed.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “State of Play (Japanese): view count that stood at 100,000 during the broadcast suddenly jumps to 800,000“.
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