This YouTuber Exploited Me For "Content"

YouTube’s economy right now has a very heavy focus on creating low effort, highly mass-producable “content.” Not to say that wanting to make money off of somethin you’re putting effort into is a bad thing, especially when creating videos is your full-time job, but right now the majority of the world’s focus is on cheap content made simply to make money with no soul or effort whatsoever. (If you want to see some real bad stuff take a look at JJJacksfilms’ reactor bingo series where he and his chat play bingo with common tropes in freebooted YouTube Shorts reaction videos).

A long while ago a former friend of mine decided to take interest in the whole “YouTube guru” space. Basically, people on YouTube who give financial advice to up-and-coming creators with the goal of maximizing profits while minimizing effort needed. I knew him since very early on in his original game development channel, back when it was below even 300 subscribers, so I felt I had a fairly close connection to him and so did many other game development video creators, which is one thing to keep in mind with how this happened at all.

For a bit of extra context needed up ahead, after starting a YouTube guru channel and getting a decent amount of success through it, he created a YouTube course charging nearly $1000 USD at first where he shared the advice he learned for free online and other info on how to get rich through YouTube.

The project

He contacted me with a proposal: I create a video game, he pays me for the game and creates a devlog documenting the process based on my videos and notes given. I wasn’t really a fan of doing it to begin with so I passed the idea around to some other uninterested people before he made his initial offer. $100 to make the game… to which I didn’t respond and he followed up with an “erm… I meant $200.” thinking back that is a very low offer to develop any sort of game, especially since, though we didn’t agree on it (or have any actual signed documents which is a HUGE red flag), he acted as though I had given him full ownership of the project. But I had never done any contract (or lack thereof) work and I thought it could be good just to give his idea a try, as a friend.

The video was to be titled “I Made a First Person Shooter in 2 Minutes.” So, how’d it go?

I developed a small arcade-y first person shooter in a little over a week. Then, he handed it off to another programmer who read the code, copied the files, and created an AutoHotKey script, hence the ‘under 2 minutes’ part. While making the game I also knew of this and took the time to only use integer values for placement and adapt my workflow to make it as simple to remake as possible with hotkeys rather than mouse movement.

He then handed off the development recordings, notes, and AHK script to a writer who wrote the video script, recorded it, and passed it to an editor. The video then released to critical…

Well definitely critical.

I really like that one in particular, it was really eye opening in realizing what was actually going on.

This one was also really nice to see because as I alluded before, he acted as though he made the game. There was no mention of me in the video or the description, nor any of the creators of assets I used that I specifically listed for him to credit. The only reason people caught on was the fact that the editor left a screenshot of my Godot window with one of my games very visible in the video.

Truly incredible. Weirdly the person who made the macro was credited which I felt was odd… and it was never mentioned in the lack-of-a-contract that I would not recieve any credit for my work on the project.

The video was unsurprisingly taken down and is now only available through the Internet Archive (my beloved 💖), and I gave the person who archived it the whole list of credits for it because I feel that’s really important to give. Especially when they ask for it when giving you the assets. But before then, he did try to continue the project. The second video would be “Fortnite, but you are the storm,” or something along those lines. Originally he tried to get me right on that right after the previous one, but instead settled to get another friend JujuProd on the project, and assigned me to making 7 games in a week. A simple task.

Juju I believe did finish his whole game and the video had a partial script before he pulled the plug, and I fully just gave up on the 7 games project because I was tired and wanted to make my own games. (I know all this because I had access to the Google Drive dropbox for the project, though he seems to have deleted it at some point in the past few years.) I hope he did get some compensation with the project cancellation, but the fact that he only targeted young, beginning game developers for these projects does feel pretty fishy.

The community

Beyond the first project, I also had a big role in his community. Again, I knew of him since he had under 300 subscribers and know how to make a Discord bot and manage a healthy, friendly Discord community. This was not that. The YouTube guru niche, unsurprisingly attracts a lot of people who aren’t interested in “true, heartfelt creation,” eugh. I’m just here to MAKE SOME MONEY!!!!!!!!!!! (Side note, if you just want to make money why would you choose any inherently creative niche? Just invest in crypto and NFTs like normal stupid people…)

I ended up as basically the “community manager” for his Discord server. Of course, he was planning to find some “chronically online person [he can] pay for cheap,” but that never happened so I filled in the role for free. Some things were fun, I coded a custom bot that allowed people to submit their YouTube channel URL to be allowed in (this kind of bot with some other moderation features probably would go for a few hundred dollars, but I did it for free for my friend) and I do think it was pretty neat.

But as I said, these types of communities attract a lot of the less savoury type of people, so I ended up seeing a lot of homophobia and transphobia to the point where me I couldn’t keep up, and I got a couple DMs like this:

I thought this was the end. There were a few loose ends, and I ended up directly DMing the creator of that third comment from earlier on (the really long one) and we had a really nice conversation where I learned just how much I really was screwed over, but eventually something happened and I found out so much more.

Uncovering the rest

_{This part is best read while listening to Reset The System by SCNTFC}

A while after these events I joined a Discord server with a decent chunk of other game development video creators. At one point my former friend was a member of this server, he was creating a fair bit of a name for himself as a YouTuber after all, so out of morbid curiousity I decided to search for his name.

He was banned for packing advice from that server into his nearly $1000 course, no more interest in game development whatsoever, and behaviour including xenophobia and intimidating other members to the point of requesting a ban.

A lot of that uhh… made a lot of sense. He often would comment on the fact that his audience living in third world countries were too poor to buy his stuff, and when he said he would find someone chronically online to take on the role of community manager, I neglected to include the fact that he specifically mentioned something about looking for a chronically online Indian to pay cheap.

Before that was mention of another project… of which I knew more about than everyone else there.

The collaboration

A long while before the main project of focus, he reached out for a simple competition. The idea was “whoever makes the better rhythm game gets music licensing rights,” and… sues the other person.. I guess? it was funny lol, why not. I started my project immediately, creating a simple but promising prototype in just a day or 2.

2 days after starting, he messaged me asking to postpone the project, and never came back. Looking through these old messages in the game development server, I found out that he had asked another friend of mine to work on the same project, only to say something along the lines of “nvm, my first choice said yes,” which feels incredibly rude and disrespectful.

Among these old messages I also found a screenshot of him basically saying in plain daylight why he worked with younger, inexperienced devs, basically to the effect of “they don’t know as much and I can pay them less.” This is what the drive to produce money over art, entertainment, education, and more did to this former friend of mine. There’s so many specific memories that jump out, like one time we were in a call with another friend who does graphic design. He was presented with a logo to which he then replied saying something like “niice, did you make that with chatgpt?” which is probably the biggest insult you could possibly give to a graphic designer EVER.

Conclusion

I haven’t talked to him since March of 2024. Far later than it should have been with anything like this. Nothing felt better than what I just did today.

_{…And then spent half an hour trying to figure out how to crop an mp4.}

I hope people take this as a warning. Keep a lookout for shady characters such as this. Never undersell yourself; if you’re just starting out you may not provide a service worth as much as a professional, but you still have worth and value in what you do. Don’t exclusively chase money, especially in a creative niche. It just turns you gross and goopy. Ewww…

But seriously. Everyone is capable of doing some crazy things, but we should try to be the cool and fun kind of crazy, not the insane capitalist who exploits their friends for income.

That’s all, I’ve been me, I hope to see you again in my next post which will be far more light hearted. Goobye :3 🩷