Well this was an awkward thing I didn’t think I’d be writing, but a whole bunch of recent events regarding well, everything had me pondering about my Youtube channel and how I stopped it when I did, after it was clear it wouldn’t work out as a side thing alongside my main SFG writing and after I nearly let one video consume my desperation.
To keep things very short for those newer here, I used to run a SFG Youtube channel. It’s still up, and the vids will remain there just fine. I mostly use it to comment/watch stuff on my own accord nowadays, but otherwise in terms of video production I all but retired from the platform around 2023. And I think looking back, I picked the perfect time to bail and not ramp up my video production even more, which would have absolutely destroyed my productivity on SFG proper.
See, I always like the obscure, so I started off doing gameplay videos from a (very shitty) AV capture device, before upgrading to an Elgato HD in 2017. Those vids did quite well since being the only guy who made videos of some games, those would get a lot of views, and especially the ones with a lot of eyeballs on them; being one of the first to upload an ACA vid of VS Super Mario Bros, or the weird DBZ Super Butoden Promo game, or Bases Loaded 2016 on PS4 really did lead to some decent viewership success early on. My hope was to eventually get a casual setup going where I could easily record my casual gameplay and just push it to the SFG youtube if there was a new game I couldn’t find other videos for on the internet, so that I’d be a helpful resource for anyone else interested in weirdo, obscure video games. By and large I didn’t really care about views, and so the interest in my gaming vids kinda caught me by pleasant surprise. For everything I made that barely got eyes, there were other things that did, including some that felt like it’d come outta nowhere.
Unboxings became a common thing after a while, and those did pretty well when GoNintendo accepted my gameplay/unboxing videos as a news tip to push onto their site back in ye olden days of my internet wanderings. All in all I think I had a small niche of viewership and i was having fun making those videos back then, but then came what I think was my biggest mistake, even if the process of those videos helped improve my overall writing and shaped my SFG Website output; I wanted to make retrospectives.
Oh sure, I had my camera, I had my mic, I had burning ideas, and I had a semi-pre established community. Surely that would lead to some decent viewership, and even if not, I’d surely get some feedback on how to improve my stuff, right? Feedback makes the world go round, after all… Thus, Eternal Memories became a thing, which was a series of rambling retrospectives over games I grew up with at some point in time and me sharing my stories about them, since I did want to document all the interesting things I grew up with pre/post adoption and my thoughts on some games, since sometimes a game others hated I loved or vice versa.
I planned to go big; PMD is of course one of the biggest series core to my heart, so I wanted a full in-depth retrospective on Rescue Team as my debut episode. I had no way of capturing footage (And was very strictly anti-emulation), so I politely asked a lets player for their footage and got the greenlight from him. I was able to build somewhat hype off the Mystery Dungeon subreddit, and was off to the races on my biggest undertaking yet. Sure enough, in Sept 2015 I got my first episode out, and it was terribly rough, but did OK view wise and got enough feedback for me to keep going. I planned an epic, five part review series of how critical this key franchise was to my life, thinking the rest would be as easy as the first.
I only made it three episodes into it, where I realized I needed to split one into multiple parts to cover the behemoth of the Explorers saga. By that time I was getting involved in my own footage capture and whatnot, and the task became tougher and tougher; Explorers of Sky being on the Wii U helped things for me, but I knew when it came to the games after I would have immense difficulty due to my anti emulation stance. How would I get the Wiiware games? Would I have to capture a 3DS screen from the postgame of Gates to Infinity and loop that footage for an hour since I couldn’t fully replay that game with such a setup? That was the increasingly daunting reality of the matter, and so I quietly shelved that, although each new part I did make was as I got better at video editing, so at least I did some kinda productive work.
I then took my ideas elsewhere, focusing on other things I enjoyed growing up like the Pokemon Mini, and my obsessive love for Turbografx games like Bonk. I experimented with (terrible) skits and other things in hopes of entertaining new and old viewers and most importantly to me, getting that feedback to make things better and better. I saw other youtubers I admired rising in the ranks, and even remember some instances of youtubers who were pretty niche for a while blowing up all of a sudden, (such as Chadtronic, back in the days when he had a purple background) which made me pretty proud of them. Of course, there was the fact my gameplay/unboxings still did pretty decently too and if I wanted consistent views, I could stick to that.
Yet part of me wanted those retrospectives to be the thing that’d come out on top; it was me, myself! My true, unfiltered opinion and memories documented and preserved for as long as youtube would exist. I’d grown obsessed with other creators and their great retrospectives and wanted to join the fray, maybe even make some friends along the way, and that I did! Alas, no matter what I tried none of the Eternal Memories episodes really took off, with barely any of them cracking the 1K view mark, and even still, I barely was getting comments or feedback, which bugged me more than the low view count.
I’d hardly mind if I just got like 200 views but a bunch of helpful comments, since those comments would make my day! I also think I was spoiled from the 2011 era of youtube, where I could upload whatever dumb thing to the platform without much effort and get some kinda comment, even if they weren’t always the nicest ones. Anyhow, all of this rambling is to pretty much say that the stuff I got more eyes on for my YT was stuff I didn’t feel any attachment to, while my true passion project stuff just never, ever took off the way I wanted to. I almost thought I had an opening on Vidme (remember that?) but then the site shuttered because shocker, it wasn’t practical at all.
Still, by and large this wasn’t much of a bother for me for the longest time. I knew what could probably bump those views up on the retrospectives, but I never wanted to do so to keep my dignity. No, I would not play Minecraft or Fortnite for the first time ever to make a video on them. No, I would not speedrun a video of Pokemon Sword and spend the whole video ripping into it because that’s what was trendy back in 2019. No, I would not do the red circle thumbnails. I just wanted to be myself, and be good at it, working at my own pace. While I was working on SFG this is how I ran the Youtube channel for a good several years, and I probably would still be doing it like that today if it wasn’t for the day I realized I needed to step back, calm down, and just refocus my priorities.
The Video that Broke me
See, my proudest accomplishment here on the SFG site, and as a whole was my interview with the scenario writer of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series. It was multiple months of work and lots and lots of coordination with a translator pal of mine. So many of my questions got answered and it was a lifelong dream of mine, finally at an end. I posted a teaser video to hype up the article and it did far better than I expected, so I figured why not do a full blown video of said article, plus more new info and fun facts I could round up? I was in the middle of my fourth season of Eternal Memories, commissioned a real fancy official logo, (which the artist never uploaded to their portfolio or publicly acknowledged/promoted, so it’s not easy to link to just it as a standalone thing) and went off to the races on making this video the grandest thing in the world.
It had to be perfect, it had to be my max potential, and most critically in my mind, it had to outperform anything else that came before it. Those older episodes I wasn’t proud of years down the line? Yeah, if the video didn’t outperform those, I was a failure. This negative emotional inspiration is what led me to going so hardcore on the video I ended up with pretty extensive, negative health benefits to myself. Late nights, crunch time, running out of storage space on my devices, dealing with the mental aftermath of my 2022 data crash, all of it I endured as I chipped away at it over the next few months, plotting each and every aspect, commissioning a bestie to make an incredible thumbnail for it and framing it in the way of this being a Special Episode of my retrospective series, almost as if it was the movie for my main series.
For the first time in ages I felt invigorated and motivated to break myself more and more and more, and was confident like how the Tomie article did very well, got me a lot of feedback and nice comments about how inspirational it was, this video would do even better. After all, Youtube retrospectives were nearly an hourish by that point and did quite well, so surely helpful feedback would be in my future, right?
Sadly, it was not to be. I debuted the video in early December 2022, right before I went off to a big convention that weekend and had an amazing time with friends, and was eager to see if the video would take off soon, even if it would have a slow start. If not, I at least hoped for some helpful comments, since I really wanted to know if I had nailed the crunch time and all that effort I poured into this magnum opus of a project. I shared it on Twitter, I shared it in discords, and I even shared it in that hellhole known as Cohost. Now all that was needed was for the feedback to pour in, people to see the video and the magic to pour in.
I waited a few weeks. Decent like ratio and several hundred views, but no dice.
I waited a few more weeks. It started slowing down, I got panicky and started to reshare the video. No dice.
I waited even longer; worried I was being suppressed I dug all around, hoping for some secret trick I could pull off to get people to look at it. I sent it in as news tips to sites ala the written interview; no takers. This is where the me of now would have acted far differently than the me of early 2023, still reeling from the mental health stress of the data crash plus the loss of both Toony and my grandfather in 2019, and increasingly working himself to death trying to get this as “perfect” as possible, putting my own self reputation on the line to get the video as good as it can be. So to hear not much of anything about it besides praise from people I already knew were gonna like it kinda broke me in a way I hadn’t felt previously.
Nowadays I would just go “well dang, that didn’t work out, but I’ll just use what I liked from the process of that video, and what I didn’t, and stick to what I did like.”, and move onto my next project, deliberately making it so I wouldn’t crunch and basically kill myself working on a video for many many months ever again. I still ultimately made it for the fun of it all.
Unfortunately, the me of 2023 wasn’t as wise. I became increasingly paranoid and convinced something was wrong, it wasn’t me that was the issue, it was the youtube algorithm, and not only was it not just being lucky to my video I spent half a year busting my ass on, it was deliberately censoring me. Twitter not showing my vid to people? Clearly because of the recent takeover, even though pre Elon twitter wasn’t the best with sharing your content to people either. Cohost being sucky and it being hard to discover content there? Well, that was actually the truth for that platform, so…
Either way, this was dangerous thinking, and you can probably guess what search results showed me when I looked up “Youtube censorship/shadowban”; a lot of dweebs on the internet complaining about their video (usually some lets play, stream archive, or review vid or whatever) not doing super well, and asking for youtube alternatives. I knew alt right dogwhistles well enough to know those threads weren’t gonna help me and managed to avoid that, but what I almost didn’t avoid was a youtuber who, I will not name, but seemed to be having the same mentality, and his channel was several thousands of subs big!
I enjoyed his documentary stuff about Japanese gaming culture, so I was bummed seeing some vids I really did enjoy not doing as well as they should have, and I just figured it was due to niche subject matter. But no, he was convinced it was just due to him refusing the dark nature of Youtube and wanting to do things the honest way: No sponsorship crap, no e-begging like a serial loser, he was making things the REAL way, out of pocket, with full transparency of his income from ad revenue. He pondered in a discord, and it made me ponder too; if he was one of the only people doing that, what did that make the rest of Youtube? The rest of online culture?
Stupid loser shills who were milking the platform dry and responsible for those red circle thumbnails I hated? Were the friends I made, both in the gaming writing space and on youtube, secretly losers trying to just make a quick buck and get rich, while people like me that busted our backs were thrown under the bus? It sounds so absurdly stupid now, but I believed it because I thought the guy with several 10K subs was smart because he had several 10K subs and he seemed deadset on this being the reason why his own videos didn’t do so great, even though I did point out I’d have loved to have a video where the “underperforming” one got several thousand views with plenty of supportive and feedback-heavy comments!
Nevertheless, this being introduced in my brain made me a little paranoid in 2023, and I absolutely crashed out and went to ludicrous measures to try and get my video to 1K views, thinking if it happened it would somehow do super well and soar up from there; I’d set a timer on my Twitter to auto reshare the video once a week, hoping maybe it’ll get lucky one of the times and be everywhere on the platform and the talk of the PMD community. I’d get more aggressive on Cohost, outright pushing the video onto other people via the comment sections of posts hoping to have anyone see it. I’d proudly proclaim I don’t take sponsors and I hate mentioning my Patreon that I had because I am a real worker, I do this for real with my real sweat and tears, all those other 100K youtube retrospective makers were clearly ABSOLUTE STUPID LOSERS.
I became insufferable in this aspect, and my friends in other discord servers began to notice. For a good bit of the middle of 2023, I was beyond desperate to get number to go up, slowly starting to care less and less what people thought of the video. I’d try to be more formal here since I had written reviews to do after all, but elsewhere I became hyper fixated on this one video hitting 1K views and watching analytics like a hawk. I fiddled with tags, I tried holding my other videos at ransom if it didn’t get a certain amount of views by a certain day. (I backed off on this upon being told it was real fucking stupid to pull)
I became more spammy with the video, and even was tempted by the same youtuber who got me on this spiral to try both Minds and Odyesse, two alt-right video websites that were framed to me as not that, but rather “algorithm-free, easy promotion video platforms with a smaller audience that will find the video easier”. Thankfully, the ick I got from spending time on Odyesse was enough to make me ask publicly on Cohost if I should go there, and was quickly told a resounding no and it was an alt-right pipeline, so I immediately refrained from such plans and quickly started to suspect the nature of this guy I had admired. Asking some of my closest online friends after some reflection and calming down, I quickly realized the dude was not a good faith actor and his rhetoric against people getting funding for their hard work was an incredibly dangerous, Us Vs Them mentality.
That’s when it all started to fall apart for me, and I realized that I, a pretty vocal ally of human rights and good causes, nearly got pulled down an alt-right pipeline due to desperation over a frickin youtube video. How I nearly fell for a bogus narrative of all patreon owners being greedy e-beggars who won’t get a true job, and that if you don’t do things the hard and dirty way and never take sponsorships ever and disclose all your earnings, you aren’t being truly transparent and are a bad person ruining the platform. Needless to say I quietly dipped outta that discord, unsubbed from that youtuber and never looked back.
Passion vs Bait
It was at that point that I felt content just letting the video be as it was. The whole process of crunching on it burnt me out big time, but in the end it still served as my biggest video to date, and with me uncertain if I even wanted to move on with more episodes afterward, I decided to quietly just make the big special episode my grand finale of sorts on youtube, and not even bother with unboxings or gameplay footage anymore. My elgato didn’t like my new macbook, and I had hugely cut off buying collector editions after realizing my overconsumption habits from a certain falling out in 2021. Deciding to not look at the youtube numbers after seeing it finally hit the threshold I was formerly obsessed with was the course of action I deemed healthiest for myself, and I only recently saw said video was at a nice 1,500 views, most of which were without any extra promotion from me and just organically from people discovering it on their own.
By and large, I just took a more casual approach, and refocused the time I would spend on my videos on the SFG site, which in turn helped me catch up on the legacy queue a bit more; more IRL time also was good, and helped for me going through several lifestyle changes later in the year. My mental health slightly improved, until certain world events that year stressed me out to crazy levels for over a year, but even still the rage and jealousy I was feeling previously was slowly subsiding. I even decided to open up a Ko-Fi in 2024, despite really hesitating to do that at first due to those words of worrying about coming across as an e-Beggar lingering in my head. Encouragement from friends made me do it anyway and it gets more support than I ever thought possible, which made me pretty proud.
Ultimately though, what made me real glad I made the choice I did with Youtube to retire it, and why I’m rambling about this today, is just looking at how the platform is right now with discoverability and what gets the most attention. Lame sponsors like Raid Shadow Legends are easy to poke fun of and all, but I’d much rather take a video with a mild annoyance in it than deal with the tidal wave of creators pivoting to the increasing prevalence of ragebait content. Sure, there’s always been more views from negativity vs positivity, that’s never been different, but in the past 3 years it seems like all across social media the landscape has become incredibly toxic.
Having “Hot Takes” that are meant clearly to inspire comments arguing about it have become more and more prevalent, instead of actually being a place to discuss valid differences of opinion. Twitter and Tiktok will literally pay you the more engagement you get, and with the US economy the way it is I’ve seen too many people pivot their entire brand to getting more clicks at any cost, to the point of it being genuinely unsettling. I think a recent big example of this on the Youtube side (where this has also become a big problem) was how the Switch 2’s been handled in video essays on the platform since launch. Are there things to critique about the Switch 2? Uh, yeah. Is it worth making videos with apocalyptic framing, as if picking one up and dare enjoying it makes you satan incarnate? Absolutely not, and there’s been a subset of youtubers who’ve pivoted hard to just doing this nonstop even if they don’t exactly believe what they’re saying!
It’s also not lost on me that a bunch of these more popular creators in the space are of the Alt-Right variety and have snuck dogwhistles into their videos, since that’s sadly yet another trend people pivot to if they think they can get a channel boost. I remember seeing an otherwise mundane youtuber I had followed since 2011, and had largely stopped watching for several years suddenly shift tone and make a video whining about the new Tomodachi Life being Woke, which means it’s bad apparently, while also having a picture of the new Nintendo of America CEO (who happens to be a Woman) in the thumbnail. It was not lost on me to see the comment section of that video filled with more alt righters than his other, pretty boring nintendo-themed content with clearly younger commenters leaving messages, and guess which type of content got him more views.
Youtube, and other such social media places, have increasingly focused monetizing content with a higher attention rate, which in turn encourages ragebait, grifting and outlandish things to get people to click on your video, which in turn spreads like a miasma and tanks the overall quality of the platform. It’s similar to people talking about politics increasingly framing things as “we’ve hit the end of everything, it’s all too late, curl up in a ball and cry” because that’ll get them more views than polite calls to action and encouragement for doing local community work, or how to actually encourage positive change. And I’m glad to see other people increasing sick and vocal about being against this, too.
It’s not lost on me that whenever the ragebait trend ends, those creators will pivot to the next thing to get them the most views and money, and so on, and so forth. Compared to popular youtubers who just do their thing consistently even with a sponsorship or an annoying, but inoffensive thumbnail now and again, I find the latter much more tolerable than those clearly in it just for the grift and not for the fun of building an audience or coming up with new video ideas. And that’s why I’m glad I retired when I did, since good lord, I shudder thinking about how I might have been hypnotized if 2024 me got tempted by the ragebait culture to reframe the video i worked so hard on as something negative and not even representative of my true feelings toward a series I deeply love, rather than being myself, even if it meant less views and next to no feedback.
Sometimes it’s just good to move on.
Conclusion
This wild ramble was something I didn’t plan on doing before my other planned opinion pieces, but I just had to after some recent events made me ponder if quitting when I did, how I did it via quiet retirement and ending on a good video I’m proud of was the right thing to do. If I could have stuck it out and kept crunching myself on more videos. And I think the answer is yes.
See, it isn’t just my content compared to the current domination of ragebait that made me feel better about myself, but discovering other obscure/niche youtubers over the past few years. I already interviewed one of my favorites, the FamiDaily guy, and he still consistently puts out fun retro obscurity videos on an every other day basis, with the same love, passion and care put into each one of them and just being made because he finds it interesting to talk about the games, even if it’s often the only video of said game on the english speaking internet. If he pivoted to ragebait ever I’d be immensely annoyed, though granted, I don’t know how you could ragebait something like a PC Engine Mahjong Game. Most of his episodic vids don’t get that many views, but he still does them because it’s fun and it’s for documenting purposes, which I respect.
I think my problem was my video output was slow due to the nature of my schedule, which meant that Tomie video was a huge crunch, making the whole experience less fun for me and thus, made my unrealistic expectations of the video stronger; surely I didn’t damage my body on purpose instead of taking things slow and easy for nothing, right? But rather than having it be a lesson to me to back off and maybe not do that again, my stubbornness nearly sent me down a dark place, one I’m still glad I avoided even now, and get increasingly sad about when I see someone else who does fall down those dangerous pipelines.
Either way, I just had to ramble about this. I was gonna basically do parts of this in the Game Key Card writeup I’m planning, but I think just focusing on how I retired something instead of forcing myself to wear out in hopes of a number on a screen was good for me to do; good to maybe educate readers who’re working on their own videos to just let them be itself, not have it consume your life and absolutely not have it make you desperate enough you fall into a bad pipeline or get so desperate to see a number hit a certain threshold you lose your own identity.
Maybe one day I will have time to make more Eternal Memories episodes. But for me, I’m content leaving it where it is. Regardless, I do hope my ramble inspires at least one person to maybe reconsider or be wary of their ways, in case someone reading this is going through the things I went through in 2023, and maybe I’m the one who indirectly is stopping someone from falling down a pipeline they’ll regret, the same way my dear friends did for me back in that year..