My Top Ten Watched Videos of 2018

It’s time for another performance review of my YouTube channel.

Thanks to YouTube’s change in monetization strategy at the beginning of the year, I basically stopped putting any effort into video production in 2018. The only videos I upload now are completely unedited-basically mini-streams without a chat room. (Occasionally I do some edits, but it’s minor and rare.)

In fact, toward the end of the year as I’m writing this, I would say that I only upload about 1 video for every 10 that I actually record. Most of them just sit on my hard drive now. I recorded my entire playthrough of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but only uploaded an edited summary of the first couple of hours of it. I’ve recorded probably close to a hundred hours of RimWorld videos, but I’ve only uploaded seven. I actually click the “record” button on OBS pretty much every time I play a PC game now. Hard drive space is a bit of a problem.

I don’t upload them because I don’t see much evidence that anyone watches these long series. Last night, as I write this, I recorded the 39th half-hour part of a series following the adventures of colonists I dubbed the Chocoholics, because in the random scenario I started with, they began with 373 chocolate bars on the map. It started with two colonists which has grown up to nine in its third year. They’ve beaten back raids, sieges, fires, mechanoids, heat waves and cold snaps, and last night, an attack of 13 man-eating ostriches. I even brought one of the colonists back from the dead! To me, it’s the perfect formula for a dramatic YouTube series, and *I*, as a viewer, would really enjoy watching the trials and tribulations of these guys over time, and it’s exactly the kind of game videos I like to watch, but I’m kind of meh about uploading these long series of videos anymore if nobody *else* is going to watch them.

Despite all of the inattention I’ve paid my channel, I actually gained new subscribers and now have a whopping 45. That’s double what it was last year. If I say I “doubled my subscribers” it sounds very impressive. (45 is 955 short of the threshold required to monetize videos now, by the way. And I’m also some 3,600 hours short of 12-month watch time requirement. So you can see why I don’t put much time and effort into making the videos anymore, or upload a whole lot of them.)

As far as video projects in 2018, my favorite by far was the million-part Dark Souls Remastered Casual Nostalgia Tour. Unfortunately I still haven’t been able to finish it. I had to give up fighting Manus in the Abyss back in July because of my hands and particularly my left thumb, and I haven’t had the nerve to try to go back yet. As I’m typing this at the end of December, my thumb still doesn’t feel 100% yet. Tentative experiments with The Last of Us on the PS4 have shown that I need about a day of rest for every hour I play on a game controller now. But maybe it’s just the PS4 controller.

But what about my adoring public? Which videos did *they* like? Well, apparently, in 2018, you guys liked my Morrowind series, for some weird reason. Yeah, I know, the one in the oddly-sized square aspect ratio, where I spend most of the time reading the text on the screen in dumb funny embarrassing voices. I don’t understand it either. (I mean, *I* have great fun reading things in dumb funny embarrassing voices, and *I* think it’s fantastic, high-caliber voice actor quality material, but if I set aside my ego for a second, it’s just plain dumb and embarrassing.) It’s another one I haven’t finished yet. Morrowind is a game that takes about a million hours to finish, and I think I’m only up to the fourth or fifth trial of the seven.

Anyway on to the list! Here’s the Top Ten from 2018, according to YouTube Watch Time statistics.

#10 Morrowind 41 - Rabina the Slave. Featuring Thieves Guild quests, pickpocketing a key, and rescuing Rabina the slave. Don’t know why people find that interesting.

#9 Morrowind 9 - Escort to the Fields of Kummu. Escorting Nevrasa Dralor to the Fields of Kummu. Don’t know why people find that interesting.

#8 Morrowind 46 - Old Mournhold Bazaar Sewers. Featuring the Old Mournhold Bazaar Sewers and the Dark Brotherhood. Don’t know why people find that interesting.

#7 GW1 Prophesies, Part 1 - New Ranger. A rare entry on the top ten list that I’m actually proud of, and a new video from 2018. I put a lot of video production effort into my Guild Wars 1 videos: I recorded a stinger (I suppose you could call it my one and only original music track in 2018), I cut out all the boring parts of running back and forth, and just included the good parts of the quests. It was *a lot* of work. My hours of effort were rewarded with a comment that called them useless hehe. Hey at least I figured out to put the episode number in the upper right corner of the thumbnail instead of the lower right corner so it isn’t covered up by YouTube’s display of the episode length!

#6 Morrowind 13 - Dwemer Ruins of Arkngthand, Part 2. Second part of some underground ruins.

#5 Morrowind 17 - Long Journey to Sulipund. Shows how freaking long it takes to walk anywhere in Morrowind.

#4 Morrowind 1 - Arriving in Seyda Neen. Holding steady at the #4 spot from last year, the very beginning of my long journey through Morrowind, over two years ago now.

#3 Dark Souls - Sorcerer vs. Sif the Great Grey Wolf.
Holding steady at the #3 position from last year, a perennial favorite, but I have no idea why people seem to like three and a half minutes of me killing a dog with soul spears, listening to a terrible, terrible microphone track that doesn’t even have a noise gate on it, the hiss of which sounds like fingernails on a blackboard to me.

#2 Morrowind 12 - Dwemer Ruins of Arkngthand, Part 1. Ah, here’s the first part of those ruins! Up from the #9 position last year.

#1 Morrowind 2 - Finding Caius Cosades in Balmora. And the #1 video of 2018, the second part of my long Morrowind series, for some incomprehensible reason. Rising from the #2 spot last year. It has six times more views than part one, and about *sixty* times more views than part three, which is #17 on the top ten list. I have no idea why.