Hey guys. Gatsby here.

My friends and I graduated high school in 2006--the same year Arin Hanson published Metal Gear Awesome on Newgrounds. This is what many of my friends would consider the "Golden Age" of web-based content. A big chunk of the content that we loved was being produced by kids our age with pirated copies of Macromedia Flash. We even took a stab at it ourselves.

This was also around the time that Red VS Blue, a "machinima" produced in Halo, was entering its fifth season. I think, like a lot of kids, we looked at our favorite art forms and went, "We could totally do that!" So over the next few years, we experimented with cheap video capture hardware and stolen video editing software, to mixed results.

Six years later in 2012, Arin Hanson and Jon Jafari created Game Grumps, a YouTube channel that went on to earn more than five million subscribers (as of 2022). Their formula was the typical "Let's Play" format--capture gameplay alongside funny commentary. What we didn't realize then was that these two had a leg up on the competition. They'd both earned some prior fame making original content during the Internet's infancy.

Not realizing that, my friend Super64 (Chase) and I once again said, "We could TOTALLY do that!" and began recording gameplay with Bandicam while using Skype for voicechat. Originally, we were just making videos for our friends--just like we used to do in Flash. Only now we were sharing them on the internet (Facebook, specifically), and people were encouraging us to share them on YouTube as well.

We had originally thought that by creating a series that wasn't a Let's Play, but was instead a condensed highlight reel of funny moments (without the dull, forced humor inbetween), we would have a product that was just as good--if not better--than the most popular gaming content of the time.

What we hadn't realized was that the era of organic discovery was already over. When we were young, fresh content was rare, so when a new video emerged, it became an instant classic--no matter how nonsensical and cringy. Now, it was all about SEO (search engine optimization) and using trending keywords to your advantage. Game Grumps didn't rely on that kind of thing, so we figured we shouldn't have to either--but they were already standing on pedestals they'd built from those instant classics. We started the race several laps behind.

Because we did not know to try and "game" the system while it could still be played, we spent the first few years of Bro-Op simply uploading videos and hoping someone would find them. As you can imagine, that didn't work. There were several years when our videos would have 10 or 12 views, if that. Comments were all from our closest friends, who ALSO didn't know why we weren't more popular. It wasn't until 2015, when I posted an old Starbound video to Reddit on a whim, that we experienced our first big surge in viewership.

Where's Starbound?

Starbound was our first "Story Mode" series. We didn't know it yet, but as we later discovered, the episodes in which we'd halfway commit to roleplay--even in the context of poorly acted, two-dimensional joke characters--performed way better than our usual gameplay highlights videos.

The roleplay element wasn't something we'd done on purpose, and in fact, it took us years to replicate the tone needed for it to work (some of our early content tries a little too hard). More than anything, we were trying to fill the holes in the story that Chucklefish had yet to fill. The game was in early access, so the story wasn't something that they had nailed down. 

So over the next year, we returned to Starbound (a game that we had actually already given up on) to produce a new "season" of content--the continued adventures of our characters, Captain Simeon and Prince Wasabi. We also continued to produce other content, enlisting the aid of the brothers Rhett (OneUpFox) and Ian (Justice) for a more well-rounded cast of performers. But there was one big problem we had yet to address...

No one gave a flying fuck about our non-Starbound content.

This was a pretty big issue, considering we had never set out to become a Starbound centric channel. Starbound is a neat game that combines elements of several other games we'd loved, but each time we play it, we get burned out awfully fast. But our existing subscriber base was built almost entirely from Starbound fans, and our attempts to share videos on other gaming subreddits had almost the exact opposite reaction. Where /r/Starbound users had been starved for quality content from their game, most of the other games we played were oversaturated with content. When we tried to promote our videos on those subreddits, we were agressively insulted and downvoted.

We knew at this point how we could become a successful channel: swallow our pride and churn out regular Starbound content. We considered it and quickly abandoned the idea. Instead, we focused on trying to play more games with somewhat cult followings on Reddit. At the time, this was a pretty accurate way to describe the Souls franchise.

The Platinum Rule

Dark Souls III was the first Souls Game I really enjoyed--and there was a co-op element. It wasn't a GREAT co-op element, but it was good enough. Plus, Super insisted that watching a Souls game from the perspective of a newbie (me) was hilarious. He was right, but at the time I was beginning to come to terms with some severe mental health issues that had plagued me since high school. I was incredibly insecure, and so the playful insults we'd offer each other were often far more hurtful than I would let on.

This was also around the time that it became a meme to offer non-responses to anyone learning how to play a Souls game. If there was a mechanic I didn't understand, the only advice I recieved was "Get good," more or less. It might have been funny if I wasn't genuinely trying to prove myself to the people I loved the most--people who had no idea I was suffering from mental illness.

So, when we moved on from Dark Souls III to the Lovecraft-inspired Bloodborne, I had a particularly bad time.

See, I knew the videos that performed the best (and the ones I enjoyed the most) were the ones where we used our imagination to fill holes in the story. After playing Dark Souls II, I figured that the confusing plot of Bloodborne was a perfect candidate for the "Story Mode" treatment. Super played along for a while, and we created the "Blood Fugitives" joke, where each of us had been forever transformed by our blood replaced with the blood of others (Brett Favre, John Cena, random citizens of California, etc.).

I think the joke was working, but we were met with some pretty tough roadblocks. First, Bloodborne was much harder for me than Dark Souls III had been. Second, the game's healing items don't replenish themselves like an estus flask, requiring me to farm blood vials off-camera. Third, while my understanding of Bloodborne's story was nearly nonexistent, Super and AkiraStryker (William) had already beaten the game together without me, developing a bond over the game, and a near encyclopedic understanding of its lore. 

I know I haven't mentioned it yet, but all the way up until this point, I had been working as an eighth-grade English teacher--a fact that I kept secret from our YouTube community so that my offensive video game channel wouldn't get me fired from my job. I was also now living with my previously long-distance girlfriend (who would become my wife). So what little free time I had, much of which should have gone to LadyLazarus (Candi), was being divided between playing Bloodborne on stream, playing Bloodborne for homework, lesson planning and grading papers, and getting what little sleep I could manage under the stress. On top of everything, my friends were beginning to resent me for not spending more time with them OUTSIDE of Bro-Op. All while I was still undiagnosed, unmedicated, and hopelessly depressed.

We finished Bloodborne together, but those episodes wound up taking something like two years to edit down. 

Godwoken as Fuck

Sometime before this, I had discovered Divinity: Original Sin II, a top-down tactical RPG with four player co-op. I suggested it to our friends, knowing it would be perfect for another attempt at "Story Mode" content (with a subreddit that reminded me a lot of the devoted fans of /r/Starbound). When we finally got a chance to play together, I took my shot--creating a character that better suited my complete and total lack of skill as a gamer.

Gizzard the Lizard Wizard is a bumbling comic-relief character, meant as a foil to everyone else's comittment to gameplay. As a result, the character worked perfectly fine when my friends were "playing along," and (arguably) even better when they weren't. I used his naivety to make observations about the game we might not have ordinarily found funny, and used obnoxious journal entries to both frame the story and pester my friends, whose frustrations perfectly suited the characters that they were (unwittingly) playing.

I completed the episode, rendered some video clips (with subtitles) to capture the attention of jaded, cynical redditors, and shared my work on /r/DivinityOriginalSin. For the first time in years... we had a hit.

This was excellent news for a number of reasons. Our subscriber count had stopped growing, and even the subscribers we had were not seeing our videos in their subscription feeds (Thanks, YouTube). We needed new views, new subscribers, and new chances to get picked up by this mysterious "suggested videos algorithm" that I knew nothing about. All I knew was that our fans loved our new Divinity content, and hated any time we tried to play a more popular game like Fortnite (which we unironically loved). 

So we doubled down on "Story Mode" content. Super didn't like it, but he also didn't want to sanitize our channel into the no-swearing, pogface-in-thumbnail content farm that YouTube clearly wanted us to be. He admitted these videos were funny, and performed well, so we stuck with it as long as we could.

Still, we ran into problems. First, we weren't playing Divinity like an RPG is designed to be played. We were... actually having fun. Because of this, we stayed pretty underleveled and underprepared for fights. Likewise, we very frequently had to cancel streams for Akira, or play without him, due to his work schedule. And most egregiously, the game's most recent content update fixed a good deal of the game's ending, but was not compatible with our existing save files. Halquent (Nick) and I worked hard to re-play a file up to the point we had reached, but we were still thwarted by oversights in the game's multiplayer design, schedule conflicts, and the tremendous mountain of backlogged footage piling up on my hard drives.

I did not actually intend to write our life's story, so here's my point:

YouTube began as a platform for people to discover unique and passionately crafted content. But, as the years have gone by, YouTube has become the thing parents install on their toddler's iPad so that they can eat at Red Lobster in peace.

The content restrictions that have been rolled out over the past several years have made it abundantly clear who the platform is for: children... and corporations hoping to advertise their products.

If your video contains profanity, it is struck down. If your video contains violence, it is struck down. If your video contains a mere snippet of a licensed song that (under fair use) we have legally sampled for a parody, it is struck down. If your video contains gameplay from another gaming YouTuber... THAT YOUTUBER can issue a strike.

For years, it has been our philosophy to ignore this. We don't use advertisements on our videos anyway, because the numbers have never equaled an advertisement payout worth the hassle. But when your videos are flagged in this way, they are also removed from YouTube's suggested videos algorithm, and with the other changes they've made up until this point, that's basically the ONLY way that a substantial number of people would ever discover our content.

So, when content coaches explain to us that our channel will never succeed unless we "play the game," use clickbait tactics, and pander to trends, we know from experience that "playing the game" has never worked for us, because we refuse to compromise the content that our fans have loved for years.

Bro-Op is a good show. Our members are funny. Our videos are well-produced. Our streams are rediculously entertaining. We work hard to create a product that is still pure and uncompromised by the Dark Ages of content creation.

We should not have to become a soulless imitation of what we hate in order to experience the bare minimum of success.

So, What is Dickbait?

After explaining the situation to our most loyal fans, and polling that community for potential next steps, we've decided on a few changes.

If only to experiment with YouTube's broken system, gather data on it, and mock the fuck out of it, we will be parodying YouTube's most popular creators and videos with our video thumbnails, episode titles,  SEO tags, and content descriptions. We will be uploading the same episode multiple times with minor tweaks to the formula, and we'll report our findings back to you, the amazing community who have patiently supported us for nearly a decade.

We are speed-running the YouTube algorithm, any%. We'll know we've succeeded whether we can break our own personal records, or simply get banned from the platform.

We have never wanted to go viral. We just want to enjoy the mediocre success worthy of a silly little dumb gaming channel.

If you'd like to help support our content (and keep it the way it is), please consider pledging to us on Nexus, and from the bottom of my heart, thank you for reading.