Hey guys, I wanted to give you a long and important update for my channel. I've talked briefly and vaguely about it in some of my last Q&As, but I don't want to make a video about it or a community post on my channel. Doing that would probably create concern or perhaps even panic. So I think this website, while it currently doesn't have a lot of readers, is still a better place to elaborate on the future of my channel.
You see, I've been somewhat depressed for the past several months. Since March of 2023 I started noticing some bad changes in my analytics, my revenue and my fanbase. I realized that inflation got the better of the USA economy, of which I depend since Google, a USA corporation, pays me my monthly revenue. So this hit YouTube harder than I thought and therefore revenue went down. It also went down because the US dollar came down hard, it devalued. I also noticed a ridiculous increase in gaming channels, including JRPG channels or pretty much hundreds of new Youtubers making JRPG top 10s and similar topics. This caused a massive drop in interest from viewers because now they've seen anybody can make them and therefore there's nothing special about them anymore. And that's what I want to focus this topic on.
The biggest reason for my depression was because on October of 2023, I made a video called "Top 10 Mature Rated Hidden JRPG Gems" which went viral... but only for a few days. Upon reaching 48,000 views, YouTube demonetized it. There's a video about this on my second channel if you want to look up what happened. Long story short, YouTube straight up refused to give me an explanation and nothing I could do brought back the monetization. From there, I started noticing an even bigger decrease in revenue, views and subscribers. I should've reached 100k subscribers last year but because of this incident, I got blacklisted on the website and my channel is nowadays shadow-banned. Fortunately, not that much, but most of my videos are only getting views from my usual viewers. They're barely getting recommended to new viewers, sadly.
As a result, I started trying different things to see if anything worked, but nope. Even videos like the one I did yesterday (Top 10 Best Modern JRPG Remakes So Far) which are usually the types of videos that would've gotten A LOT of views a year or two ago, was a MASSIVE failure. And that was the last straw for me. There's just no way to continue making the same content I've been doing for years anymore. The several issues I've been explaining so far have been, all at once, the cause for my current sad channel state. Being blacklisted and having to compete against hundreds of idiots that do nothing but rip-off any JRPG channel they see, has forced my hand. I need to take the channel into a different direction.
What direction, you ask? Well, I've been thinking hard about that for the past few months and I've decided on trying out different ideas for the channel.
What kind of ideas? They'll mostly be surprises, I don't want to spoil anything but I don't want to get you excited either. It's just something that's gonna happen in my channel pretty soon and you're just gonna have to wait and see. If you like it, that's great, if you don't, that's okay, not everybody likes change.
Will I still cover JRPGs? Of course! I wouldn't have this audience if I didn't cover JRPGs. I start covering other genres or topics and my YouTube career would be over. So of course the channel is still going to be RPG focused. But I've learned my lesson the hard way on certain things. It's now crystal clear to me that certain RPGs, or certain topics, or video ideas, are of no interest to most of you, sadly. Which is another reason why I need to reinvent myself.
Will I still do Top 10s and reviews? Reviews yes, for sure. In fact, one of the things I want to focus on is actually better reviews; I need to improve the quality and the scripting, but I also feel I need to cover only the games I am legitimately interested in. Top 10s, however, have been decreasing since last year on my channel and this one will be no exception. They will still be there, don't worry. But I think it's about time I got rid of certain topics that are considered as generic, or that everybody and their mom are doing nowadays. I feel that my Top 10s need to start being more original, more specific and more thematic than ever. Also to avoid repeating myself and covering the same JRPGs over and over again, which is also a big problem in my channel.
Will livestreams (let's plays and Q&As) continue? Yes, they will. Though I believe the Q&As are gonna have to evolve into something more interesting, entertaining and unique. But yeah, I'll keep playing games live and appear on camera to answer your damn questions every Sunday. Things might change in those departments but I've yet to figure out the best course of action.
I think that covers most doubts, but of course feel free to show up anywhere you want to to ask more if there's anything you didn't quite get.
That's all I wanted to say, just basically give you a heads up that I will be taking the channel into a slightly different direction, and that the content might change to something less stressful for me. One of the major reasons why I got depressed was because I kept expecting certain videos to succeed, only to see them fail miserably. The last Super Obscure RPG Gems video was also a HUGE failure and it broke my fucking heart. So I think creating content that makes me remove that fear, and those expectations, whether it succeeds or not, is the best course of action right now. I'm basically trying to say that I'm going to be true to myself more often and only create the content that I really and genuinely want to create.
Thanks for reading and take care.
