My YouTube Channel is Dead. Good Riddance.
Starting a YouTube channel was the worst decision I’ve ever made.
In 2019, I left my job as Executive Editor and Lead Video Producer at a gaming website called Cliqist. I wasn’t happy with how it ended, and I was tired of working for other people. So, using my experience as a video creator, I started my own YouTube channel. At the time I called it Triple Eye, a nod to the so-called “Triple-I” level indie game, which would be my focus.
What followed was six years of struggle. Six years of trying and failing to make YouTube my full-time job. Six years of spending money on Google Adsense to inflate my view counts. Six years of chasing trends. Six years of long days and nights doing something I didn’t like. Six years of my life wasted.
The channel changed a lot over those years. Different logos, different thumbnail styles, different names even. I changed the focus of the channel from indie games to all video games, then to whatever I felt like, then back to indie games. Dozens of videos were uploaded and later deleted on a whim. Each time I thought I was doing the right thing. In hindsight, it’s obvious I had no idea what I was doing, or even what I wanted.
In the meantime, my writing career (which I went to college for and what I always wanted to do) evaporated. I wrote my last piece of fiction in 2017. My last article in 2020. My last freelance gig was in 2021. All I was writing anymore were video scripts, and I was putting less effort into them with each passing year.
It all came to a head in 2025. In January, the name changed again after hearing from an indie game studio with the same name. In April, I first thought about quitting. In June I put out a series of no effort videos that were my most successful in years. By July, I had quit.
I’m not arrogant enough to think that anyone cares about my 8,000 subscriber YouTube channel. This is about getting my feelings out there, for my own sake, to make sense of all this.
I Had Nothing to Say
In late 2024, I noticed my writing was slipping. That shouldn’t have come as a surprise, as I long dreaded the script writing process. I never had a problem with writer’s block before, yet there I was, so often staring at a blank page. It used to come to me so easily. I could write thousands of words breathlessly talking about a game I loved or hated, or delve into the history of some developer. That became harder as the years went on and by this point, I realized I had nothing left to say.
I would spend hours on the outline alone. Moving talking points around that, despite their length, didn’t say anything at all. After hours playing a game, I’d look at my notes and see nothing more than a variation of “this thing happened and I liked it” or “this is how this gameplay mechanic works.” How do you write a script out of that? You don’t. You write soulless drivel.
Take my review of Promise Mascot Agency, my favorite game of 2025. Most of its 16 minute runtime is explaining what the game is and how it plays. When I venture beyond mechanical descriptions, there’s little more than platitudes. “I love this aspect” or “it inspires me.” It’s filler, it’s boring, and its not helpful to anyone trying to decide if they should play the game or not. I knew when I was writing the script it was bad. I had no way of fixing it though, and a schedule to stick to. This is a game I love, my favorite of the year, and I can’t bring myself to articulate why?
I tried something different with my next two videos. Something I wasn’t proud of even then. One was a video about indie games on the Switch 2, made purely to capitalize on the system’s launch. The other was hidden indie gems in the Steam Summer Sale. With both videos, I effectively gave up. I put no effort into them. The Switch 2 video was a couple of hours of research on what indie games were on the console, a sentence or two describing them, and the first trailer I could get my hands on for each game. The Steam Summer Sale video was even worse. I assembled that script from past Summer Sale videos I had made, videos I had taken down years prior because I wasn’t happy with the quality of them. I stitched those scripts together, lazily recorded new voice over, and again slapped some trailers on them. Many of the trailers I had used in the Switch 2 video. It took about two days to make both videos.
The Switch 2 video got about 10,000 views, which was great for me. The Steam Summer Sale video got over 30,000 views in a few days, eventually becoming my sixth most-viewed video. I deleted them both two months later out of embarrassment.
Meanwhile, I spent five months working on a review for Our Adventurer Guild, another game I loved. I tried to push past this writers block and deliver something I could be proud of. It got 60 views in a week. A few months later it had climbed to about 1,000 views, but the damage was done. Its script wasn’t great either, it was too long and was also too mechanical, spending too much time explaining mechanics and story beats. But it still sucked to put that much time in a video about a game I love and realizing nobody cares, while this other video I crapped out in two days was so successful.
Re-watching the videos after, reading over the scripts again, I realized I was done. I didn’t want to make videos anymore, and I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I had nothing to say, and nobody was watching.
I Fell Out of Love With Video Games
I didn’t have anything to say because I fell out of love with video games. I was sick of them. I spent so much of my time playing them, writing about them, editing videos about them, researching them that it consumed me. I played more video games in the last ten years than I have watched movies or read books combined in my entire life.
I was having a hard time finding games I loved, too. The quality of new releases was dropping, there’s no doubt about that. I could, can, have, and will talk until I’m blue in the face about how bad the AAA industry is. However, I was finding more and more bad indie games as well. I grew tired of seeing awful asset flips, zero effort first-person horror games, generic 2D pixel-art platformers, and so, so many “simulators.” Now with the advent of AI generated slop, it’s only getting worse. I didn’t want to be that YouTuber that only makes negative videos, constantly complaining about everything.
There was another problem. I have very specific tastes. There are a lot of highly praised indie games that I don’t enjoy. Undertale, Stardew Valley, Mouthwashing, Pizza Tower, and Dredge are but a handful of games I don’t like. The list grows longer each year, and more potent. I hated Clair Obscur, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Blue Prince from last year. I mean, I really did not enjoy them in the slightest. That left me in a difficult position. I wondered if I should speak up and say I don’t like these beloved games. I chose not to, because I was afraid I’d be called a provocateur, somebody making negative videos about popular games for the sake of attention.
I was so afraid of negative reactions to my opinions that I decided I’d only make positive videos. Nobody gets mad when you like a game. Usually. That only made the problem worse, though. I went out of my way to be positive, to say nice things. I only covered games I liked, which made the channel one-note and dull. Nobody likes a critic who’s too nice or too mean, it comes across as disingenuous.
By 2023, I was no longer playing video games for fun, or even to make entertaining or informative videos out of. I was playing games on autopilot, plowing through a ton of them hoping to find something I liked and would make a popular video. I forced myself into the stupidest position imaginable.
Early in 2025, before I quit, I discovered two YouTube channels that talk about films – Bad Movie Bible and Accented Cinema. They opened up a whole new world to me, recommending films that I’d go on to love. It was so liberating to be able to sit down and watch a movie and not feel the need to make a video about it, to fit into some template you’ve created and put all these expectations on yourself as you watch it. I could sit back and enjoy the show. Or not, if I didn’t like it. It was like I was able to breathe again. I was so enamored with movies – and even picked up reading again – that between September and December, I didn’t play a single video game, the longest I’d gone in over a decade. I didn’t look up video games news, I didn’t watch video game channels on YouTube.
When I finally picked up a game again (Metal Gear Solid Delta, which my niece got me for Christmas) I was able to treat it like a film or book. I kicked back and enjoyed myself without worrying about the need to make a video. I didn’t have to worry about sounding too nice, or whether or not anyone would watch yet another Metal Gear video, or if my script would be too boring. I could simply play the game. It was nice.
Great Advice
What convinced me to give it up once and for all was a YouTube video. I stumbled on the channel Gosforth Handyman somehow. In this video, he talks about how he ripped up the floorboards in his house and found a ton of trash underneath. He had harsh words for the workers who came before him, treating his home like a trash can. That’s when he said this:
“Have pride in your work. The moment you stop having pride, find something else to do that's more enjoyable where you do have pride.”
I thought back to those Switch 2 and Steam Summer Sale videos. They weren’t made with pride. I made a lot of videos without pride, without care or effort, purely in the hopes that they’d take off. Did I really care about the work I was doing? I thought I was at least doing a service to the games I was talking about, recommending them to people. Is that really what I was doing? Or did I want views?
I came to realize I didn’t really care about making good videos. I enjoyed recommending great indie games, that was genuine. But I cared even more about getting views. I wanted YouTube to be my job, and while I had some lines I wasn’t willing to cross like sponsorships or paid reviews, I was willing to do just about anything if it got me more views. Anything to be able to do this for a living. I never stopped to think if this was actually something I wanted to do, that should be done.
Those words got me thinking about what I could take pride in, what I did find enjoyable. That’s when I remembered my writing career. I loved writing, it was what I always wanted to do, yet I somehow found myself making videos instead. I was never a great writer, but I did my best and I thought I was good at it, better than I ever was at YouTube. That’s where I found pride, not making videos.
YouTube is Awful
The other big reason I quit was YouTube itself. I’ve already written about all the terrible things YouTube/Google have done in 2025 that turned me off, so I won’t regurgitate that whole thing here.
YouTube was never great, problems have plagued the site for years. 2025 was the year it got untenable. They introduced a new ad system which automatically placed ads in videos after the creator put manual ad points in. I made one 13 minute video that got seven ads inserted into it. That sadly became the norm, and I had to go back into each video hours after uploading to remove them all, only to find them reinserted again later. Each time I did this, my view count plummeted, Google obvious upset at me for remove the ads so they’d stop recommending the video.
Videos would sometimes get copyright claims, and then suddenly those claims disappeared. I didn’t do anything, they suddenly claimed themselves and then… unclaimed themselves. They’d also sometimes get demonetized, meaning that not only did I not make any money off of them, they also weren’t being recommended on other videos or showing up in subscription feeds. They’d also sometimes get age-restricted for seemingly no reason, only to again un-restrict themselves at random.
This seems to be driven by YouTube’s new AI system. I made a short about a game called The Plucky Squire in which you play as a young boy. I mentioned the protagonist’s age, and the video was shadow-banned, only receiving two views in 24 hours. I took the short down, re-edited to remove mention of the child, and this version got 3,000 views in a day. All the while I was bombarded emails and notifications telling me to use YouTube’s “Inspiration” feature which gives you AI generated video ideas, thumbnails, whole scripts, and voice overs.
There are several more reasons to be mad at YouTube. Last year, I reached the point where even if I hadn’t quit making videos, I would have left YouTube anyway. And I briefly did, posting videos to Peertube instead before my computer died and I realized I was happier not making videos at all.
What Now?
This blog took a long time to write. I started it in April 2025 when I was first thinking about quitting. This whole thing may sound silly, and it is. I was so wrapped up in my YouTube channel that I let it consume me. No matter how bad things were going in my day job, in my personal life, or in the world, I always had this channel to go to. It was like a blanket. An itchy blanket that was too hot. It took too long to realize it was actually a prison.
I’m in a better place now, professionally, creatively, and mentally. This blog has helped me immeasurably. One of the few things I enjoyed about Triple Iris was the structure it provided. Working on one or two videos at a time, even if the work itself wasn’t enjoyable, provided stability. I knew what I had to do and when to do it. That’s something this blog has helped me maintain. I have a schedule that I’ve kept up since I started this block late last year, writing every day. Plus having an outlet to share my thoughts and feelings is only a good thing.
I don’t care about the stats here. Bear Blog has a feature that lets you see how many views your posts get. I’ve never looked at it. I’ve never felt the urge. Not knowing has taken taken the pressure off, I don’t ever feel like I have to chase trends or do any attention seeking nonsense. I write what I want to write and when, no matter how weird, uninteresting, or controversial it may be. That flexibility to write about whatever I want, not limiting myself to indie games, has also been a boon.
I’m also writing fiction again for the first time in almost a decade. I wrote a short story in October 2025, and am in the process of trying to sell it (these lit magazines take months to get back to you). In the meantime, I started another short that ended up being novella-length. I’m editing it in between blogs and time off from my day job, with the hope of finishing it by the end of February.
And if you’ve read my blogs recently, you’ll know I’m writing a book. It’s an epic science fiction story that so far has taken me eight months of planning. I’m excited about it, but also nervous. I don’t know what I’m going to do if I can’t finish it and find a publisher. I guess I’ll cross that bridge if/when it comes. My hope is that I can sell some short stories, and coupled with this blog I can establish enough of a name for myself to get an agent. But I’m not thinking about all that too much right now.
It’s hard to keep things in perspective. The world is crumbling around us, and that often colors our view of everything. How can it not? All things considered though, I’m in a good place right now. I’m happier now than I was one year ago. I have a clear idea of what I want out of life, and how to achieve it. I cut out a lot of the crap that was making me miserable over the last six or seven months, and things are looking good.
This is the point in a movie where I step outside and immediately get hit by a bus.
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