D&D General Weird "DnD Is Dead" Youtube Trend??

[cranberry]

Yea, just clickbait. I guess some Youtubers are getting desperate for views.

 

[Charlaquin]

Well, also...at a certain point, there may be diminishing returns for "DM advise" content.

Especially now that the new DMG is actually readable!

 

[Parmandur]

Luke Gygax to Dan Ayoub: There's what 50 million players now?
Dan: Many more than that.

If your DM Advice content can't be relevant to a game that is growing by the millions still that's a creator problem, not a D&D problem

Sure, the game is growing...but good DM advise videos from 2022 will work fine still, how much demand is there for a churn of new content...? I can see that being more challenging now than it was 7 years ago.

 

[Nightfly]

"Most leading gamers claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys. But this didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme for his best selling book, Well That About Wraps It Up For 5e."

 

[Umbran]

If your DM Advice content can't be relevant to a game that is growing by the millions still that's a creator problem, not a D&D problem

I don't know that it is either problem.

As D&D rode a skyrocket through the pandemic, it was picking up new players, and they were forming new groups of newbies, many of them playing online, none of them knowing quite what they were doing. Online content is a perfect approach to getting them ideas of what to do with their game.

But then, the world opened up. I suspect, even as the game continued to grow, you had more mixing of new and experienced players. That may have shifted us back into the apprenticeship model that has been common in the game for most of its history, and away from needing new online content to do the job.

Plus, just like with D&D game books, the market can be saturated with videos about D&D. If the video market has enough material to work with, they don't go for new videos with the same gusto.

 

[billd91]

D&D YouTube has been struggling lately. A lot of creators blame it on changes to the algorithms, but personally I suspect that between the OGLpocalypse and the fracturing of the 5e fanbase in it’s aftermath, there’s just less demand for D&D YouTube content than there was between 2020 and 2024.

It's not just D&D YouTubers complaining about the platform's algorithm changes. I'm inclined to think that there's something to the algorithm complaint and that's why the clickbaitiness has increased even for channels with generally decent, level-headed information.

 

[Kurotowa]

D&D YouTube has been struggling lately. A lot of creators blame it on changes to the algorithms, but personally I suspect that between the OGLpocalypse and the fracturing of the 5e fanbase in it’s aftermath, there’s just less demand for D&D YouTube content than there was between 2020 and 2024.

I wouldn't even put it down to the fanbase fracturing due to this or that event. I haven't seen much evidence of that outside of very specific online communities. My theory is that 2020 boom was another side effect of the pandemic lockdown. You know, that massive society upending event that no one likes to remember or talk about.

During the lockdown era, having your D&D group meet over Zoom or Discord with a VTT saw a big uptick in popularity. It was an activity and a social outlet that could be done remotely, and those were in high demand. And that, of course, drove the D&D content creators to new heights. But after the lockdown ended, things died down again. Not with a sudden stop, but a slow trail off over a period of years.

For content creators tracking D&D's popularity by the metrics of their own content, of course that looks like the game is dying. But the game is doing just fine. It's the artificial high of online virtual play and content catering to that playstyle that's going away.

 

[Autumnal]

People have been proclaiming the actual or imminent death of D&D since 1974. Waves of enthusiasm for the idea come and go, and since there’s more than one community involved, the tide can be coming in here and going out there, simultaneously.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

It seems to me like it's a pretty bleak existence long-term in the D&D YouTuber sphere. You basically have to make D&D your whole life to keep up, and it still doesn't work because even someone playing TTRPGs around the clock doesn't generate enough thoughts and experiences about them worth turning into videos on a regular enough basis to support a channel forever. Eventually you use up your stockpile of good stories, ideas, whatever and are running on empty, and probably ramping up how many games and campaigns you're involved in to try to make up for it, and these games are massive time commitments. If you try to actually participate in the hobby enough to have relevant things to say and also make videos you are probably on the way towards burnout before too long, even under perfect circumstances.

And the circumstances aren't perfect. YouTube is always rejiggering things algorithmically, such that what works great to rack up views for a time doesn't work forever. So soon the D&D YouTuber is in a situation that would probably make them a little miserable even if it was lucrative, but lo, it ceases to be so or never quite becomes so. This is true of all sorts of other YouTubers, but I think because the underlying game and culture they are covering is already occupying so much of their available mental bandwidth (espeically by time they have matured as a channel and used up all their best video ideas) D&D youtubers are probably one of the niches less nimble in adapting. They see the channel they've cultivated dying, and the response is rarely "well, it was probably a fluke to begin with that my particular views on Dungeons and Dragons, of all things, found an audience of many thousands", nor is it usually "ah well, to everything its season", it seems to typically be "YouTube/WotC/Politics/AI/Bugaboo-of-the-Day has ruined D&D YouTubing because of X, and but for X those halcyon days of my success would have surely gone on until the end of time". And contained in this line of thought is also often the subidea that maybe D&D itself is "dying" in some way (and hey, it's probably always dying in some way).

Thus I think D&D youtubers are a lot likely to see (highly exagerated) signs of death and ruin by nature. And that is even before some of them find thumbnails full of ragebait and alarmist nonsense is a good way to get those views they're hooked on.

 

[Autumnal]

That’s a really good analysis of factors pushing bad moods.