My Biggest Gripe With YouTube - JSLegendDev’s Substack

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My Biggest Gripe With YouTube

JSLegendDev<br>May 30, 2026

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3 years ago, I started a YouTube channel called JSLegendDev where I uploaded tutorials teaching the JavaScript programming language through the development of 2D games.<br>The state of the space around the time I started was as follows :<br>Tutorials inferior to an hour in length were not in demand. They made very little views.

Tutorials divided into multiple parts where dead on arrival. You were guaranteed dwindling views on every new upload.

To adapt, other content creators started uploading longer, multi-hour, often project based tutorials which translated to more views. Seeing the shift, I also decided to follow suit and uploaded tutorials reaching the 4-10 hour mark. I saw some success doing this. Therefore, I kept at it for a while. However, as time passed, I got tired of recording extremely long tutorials and they, in general, started to make less views.<br>There are many hypotheses as to why YouTube’s algorithm started serving tutorial content less. The advent of AI could’ve been the likely cause but also a general shift in YouTube becoming more of an entertainment focused platform to the detriment of educational content. Something you now put on TV to relax. In the programming space, channel producing content that can be watched passively like tech news, tech drama, tech history, high level discussions, etc… continued to thrive.<br>Seeing this new shift and because I was genuinely tired of making YouTube tutorials, I published my first scripted video titled “How do Devs Make Levels Without Game Engines” which was first published as an article.

How do Devs Make Levels Without Game Engines?<br>JSLegendDev<br>September 8, 2025

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In that piece, I told the story of how I discovered a convenient way to design levels for my games using an external editor called Tiled in conjunction with my editor-less game framework. At the end of that video, I promoted a paid tutorial I made teaching the exact steps needed to achieve what was presented.

The video ended up accumulating over 30k views, which was pretty great! It took far less effort to make compared to my multi-hour tutorials and I was able to make a few sales on my paid tutorial I mentioned within. Previously, I was very unsuccessful in selling any paid courses and I didn’t quite understand why. However, the answer now hit me like a truck. Why would anyone still have the appetite for a paid course after having invested the time following a free multi-hour course? Even if the subject of the paid offering was different, they would probably be too tired to commit to another one.<br>Anyway, following in the footsteps of this first breakthrough, I uploaded another scripted video titled “You Can Now Make PS2 Games in JavaScript” which was again first published as an article.

You Can Now Make PS2 Games in JavaScript<br>JSLegendDev<br>September 30, 2025

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In that video, I told the story of how I discovered that you could make PS2 games in JavaScript and provided an overview of how the viewer could get started. Despite including very practical knowledge, the viewer was never expected to follow along and therefore could watch it passively.

It was a resounding success, over 100k views! Unfortunately, I didn’t sell any courses in that video because I simply didn’t have the energy to both make the video and a course. The best business decision would have been to wait before uploading. I’ll go into more details later, but my biggest gripe with YouTube is that it’s no longer a great platform to build an audience but rather it’s only good for reach and here, I had wasted a lot of reach.<br>After having made so many game development tutorials, I wanted to try my hand in creating an original game that I would sell on Steam. Once the project was starting to take shape, I had the idea of making a video about it to gauge interest as I wasn’t sure it would find an audience. Therefore, I had the idea of using the same format used in my two previous successful videos. However, rather than focusing on technical details, I instead would tell the story of how I came up with my game’s design covering the various iterations and challenges I faced while working on it. Therefore, I ended up uploading a video titled “Making a Small RPG” which again, was originally an article.

Making a Small RPG<br>JSLegendDev<br>November 19, 2025

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It was also a resounding success reaching barely below 100k views! However, it came with a hidden cost. That cost was the tipping point that made me realize that YouTube is no longer a good platform to build an audience on. I naively thought that if the video performed well, this would translate to subscribers and an audience eager to hear more about the project, but this wasn’t the case. I had made a big mistake by not setting up a Steam page to direct viewers to before...