Why Dakotaz' Career Died

i was going through depression i was thinking that i just wasn't good enough that my stream sucked people don't like me watching me anymore you know this is over for me that's what was going through my mind i've been streaming on twitch since 2000. during his peak month of june 2018 dakotas was averaging 26 000 viewers for every time his twitch stream would go live over on youtube it was rare for his social blade to display a month totaling less than 15 million views while gaining a hundred thousand twitter followers in a month was simply a regular occurrence however despite being without a doubt one of the kindest most likable figures in the history of fortnite streaming dakotas has been unable to maintain his relevancy in an industry where entertainment and current interest reign eternally supreme his youtube viewership has fallen by 98 from an average of 15 million views per month to 300 000 views per month his average twitch concurrent viewership has fallen by 96 from 26 000 to 1000 while his twitter hasn't seen any positive growth in more than 180 days initially we suspected that his decline was simply due to a decreasing interest in fortnight however after digging a little deeper much of it seems to be the result of alcohol addiction messy breakups and strange geographic circumstances between france and the us on top of all that there was a host of mental health issues such as depression and anxiety this video will be a harsh reminder about how volatile we are as human beings as well as how risky and transitory a career in gaming truly is [Music] i've been streaming on twitch since 2012. i started this adventure when there wasn't like a lot of people streaming and there wasn't alerts popping while fortnite would become the game that dakotas was most known for he was no stranger to the battle royale genre leading up to fortnite's release dakotas had been streaming and uploading videos on a third-person battle royale style zombie game titled war z dating all the way back to 2012. in the beginning dakotas have been streaming part-time while working a job waiting tables however after receiving a 500 stream donation to buy some new computer gear decoders decided to go full time on twitch you dropped 500. for me to buy new headphones because my my microphone was a two dollar mic i quit my job like the next day one of the few surviving dakotas live stream clips from 2013 is titled dakotas live on stream passing out from vodka and while this could be easily dismissed as some hilarious stream shenanigans from a younger less mature dakotas it also gave us an insight into both his personality and his early streaming career we can see that by may 2013 approximately a year after beginning his streaming journey he was averaging around 500 viewers per stream on twitch was friends with summit 1g as shown in the chat but most interestingly was the kind of guy who could drink himself to blackout on stream well this is probably just a one-off friday or saturday night and was far from a regular occurrence it was an example showing that dakotas might not have been very good at controlling himself when it came to alcohol over on youtube a screenshot from as far back as october 2013 shows dakotas having gained 17 000 subscribers an impressive number considering he had only started the channel 10 months prior in january 2013. dakotas would switch to pub g gg guys another win man let's do this giving him even further experience in the battle royale genre and by september 2017 was sitting at around 90 000 subscribers on youtube and 100 000 followers on twitch however despite having a reasonable fan base in terms of followers dakota's explained that his average twitch viewership had declined dramatically since he started streaming and then my stream kind of died you know like i went through like depression and stuff like it died i went from 2 000 viewers to like 100. as mentioned much of the decline had been attributed to depression or alternatively perhaps the depression was actually a result of the declining audience but regardless it might have been an early indicator that dakotas was more prone to a depressive episode than the average person the decline of dakota's viewership during the pubg days also led to the removal of dakota's facecam for reasons outlined in the following clip i got a lot of like abuse from people saying my stream was dead so i turned my camera off just so i wouldn't give people reaction they were looking for because it was just it was kind of brutal to deal with it in addition to this dakotas had moved to france to be in a relationship with a girl he had met from there and explained that removing the face cam was helpful for his relationship a lot of women were very flirty and said i looked you know like very flirty comments and it kind of caused some tension in my relationship so you know sure my web came off was a helpful thing for my relationship but while a depressed dakotas who had been bullied out of using a face cam was far from a positive scenario each of these would represent a dark before the dawn and in september 2017 a game would be released that dakotas had a quote a special feeling about i played off-stream that night and i got like i got like a special feeling when playing i was like this game's special like i i can tell it's special but while dakotas had a special feeling about fortnight after it first released most didn't feel the same way literally no one's playing it no one likes it everyone's calling it disney game oh you know pubg is better switching to fortnite was going to be a massive risk for dakotas his stream was almost dead already then he starts playing something that the remaining audience doesn't like sounds like somewhat of a career-ending move however the advantage that dakota's had was that he genuinely loved and enjoyed the game and therefore had the motivation to begin making youtube videos on it regardless of whether or not his stream liked it i haven't even won a game yet on stream this is beautiful guys okay i'm gonna try and win a game and since dakota's had a genuine interest in the game he'd probably be less concerned about the performance of the content since he was simply enjoying the process of making it this would ironically work in his favor as his audience noticed something if he was willing to let his channel die for the game he was playing he must really enjoy the game and this genuine enjoyment for the game passed through to the content and made watching his fortnite videos far more enjoyable dude this game is number one right now there's no better game right now than fortnite in my opinion this in addition to the fact that no one was making any videos on fortnite in the beginning caused his view count to surge from the moment that fortnite was released i start making youtube videos where nobody's making videos for this game my youtube's going from like a thousand views a video to 30 000 instantly it had taken him five years to hit a hundred thousand subscribers however only two months after fortnite's released dakotas had passed 500 000 subscribers with every video on the channel averaging three to five hundred thousand views each this game is legit the best game i've ever played the best game i've ever played to think that we're in this game is just i can't believe it's real man this view count on youtube then translated into more people finding your streams over on twitch 60 viewers 200 viewers 400 viewers 2 000 and then the next day it's 20 000 viewers you know i was there before everyone and the higher twitch viewership gave him the ability to play with other larger streamers such as high distortion ninja and was even responsible for kickstarting daiquan's fortnight career after meeting him in a random squad game i queued up in a random squad and daequan was the only one that would talk and then we became friends the first fortnight skirmishes you know i got him into it only five months after the release of fortnight dakotas would hit 1 million subscribers and upload a video celebrating the achievement which included a face reveal this is what i look like thank you for the 1 million i appreciate it guys as he hadn't streamed or uploaded a single video with his face in it since removing facecam in the days of pubg however at the same point in time literally only seven months into his explosion dakotas would sadly return to the dark place that he'd been in prior to the release of fortnite about seven months in i was like i can't do this anymore my health started to climb like i had a permanent pain in my brain my health was just going down at some point between april and june 2018 when dakota's twitch and youtube statistics were at their highest in his career the depression that dakotas had struggled with in the past popped its head back up once again adding an extra burden to the content creation process dakota's maintained his daily stream and fortnite youtube upload presenting a facade that he was doing fine however later explained that once the stream had been turned off his happy hyped-up personality completely disappeared i'm going from this high to just nothing but as soon as my stream ends there's silence and then there's my reality which is despair for this reason dakota stated that he gained a lot of weight and didn't leave his house for eight months for eight months i literally didn't walk out the door i'm talking like eight months straight i didn't walk out the front door plus when he did finally go out his anxiety seemed to make him terrified of being recognized by fans i actually had a panic attack because two people noticed me who were at the register they knew i was dakotas unsurprisingly as his mental health declined his monthly view count on youtube and average viewers on twitch also began to decline in fact when looking at his twitch graph from the last three and a half years you can almost pinpoint the exact moment at which his mental health began to decline now as stated with the first decline while he was playing pub g perhaps dakotas had messed up his own interpretation and declining views was actually causing the depression but regardless the problem was that if his mental health was already bad then a decline in his career was going to begin a vicious downward spiral which was exactly what seemed to happen but it also is bad because if you start going down it feeds into the down like you're doing bad by studying his monthly hours streamed we can observe that dakotas has a very disciplined work ethic and seems to stream regardless of whether or not he feels like it however when observing the difference in his hour stream between may 2018 and may 2020 we can see that dakotas began to stream fewer and fewer hours per month as time progressed over on youtube as 2019 began his viewership decline was substantially more pronounced in the four months between february 2019 and june 2019 dakotas went from 8 to 10 million views per month to around 3 million views per month additionally his circumstances were about to get even more difficult as the amount of time required to keep his streaming career afloat would ultimately lead to the neglect and end of his relationship i'm chasing dreams and i had to chase that for me you know and i did but ultimately i'm single in a tweet made at a later date dakotas would explain that he'd been in the relationship for eight years so the end of it wasn't exactly going to be a positive for his already poor mental health dakota's french visa would then expire forcing him to return to the us however most of his belongings were left in france which in the short term seemingly led to a decline in the quality of his streams an article regarding dakota's read the popular twitch streamer often seen playing fortnite has been a bit flat and unenthusiastic in recent months often disappearing in the middle of streams and sometimes even vomiting off-camera with regards to the vicious cycle mentioned earlier the lower quality streams led to lower average viewership on twitch and lower video views over on youtube in addition to his growing list of twitch and youtube related problems by the end of 2019 around the beginning of chapter 2 dakotas began to express a dislike towards the direction in which fortnite had been going making tweets like fortnite is hot garbage right now also stating that the game had lost its soul and turned into a giant advertisement for singers and movies i feel like fortnite's lost its soul it's just kind of like this walking advertisement for star wars for marvel for musicians and it's like that's what it is dakota stuck with fortnite for about a year after the release of chapter two however as among us was rising in popularity he would change his main game on youtube with the goal of riding the new game wave this worked momentarily however unfortunately there were two problems with this firstly among us died faster than anyone ever expected and secondly everyone could sense that he was just chasing the short term amongst popularity and didn't have that genuine interest in playing the game like in the early days of fortnite and this second point is such a common theme for almost every single washed up fortnite streamer they all switched to a new game that you can tell that they don't really genuinely enjoy and it just comes off as super inauthentic i'm guilty of this too every youtuber thinks they can fool the audience by simply making content on a trending topic or whatever's popular but the people watching seem to be able to see through the facade before they even click on the video chasing the short-term popularity of among us seemed to work well for influencers outside of gaming like ksi corpse husband pewdiepie mr beast but was unfortunately met with far less success from former fortnite streamers like dakotas at around the same point in time as when dakotas were switching to among us he would open up to his twitter following in somewhat of a shocking tweet stating i'm officially 52 days sober i'm sorry to my stream for disappearing so much mid-streams and puking a ton i was silently fighting something and doing my best to hide it from everyone i'm back on cam and feel stronger than ever just wanted to share dakotas hadn't specified what he was 52 days sober from but the tweet seemed to imply that he'd been battling with an alcohol problem for an unspecified period of time thankfully his fanbase responded positively to the vulnerable tweet meeting dakotas with an overwhelming amount of support the tweet was covered in a few different articles giving dakotas a little bit of exposure however unfortunately not enough to slow the decline of his channel in recent times after approximately 10 months of uploading among us dakota's attempted to return to fortnite in a video titled the return to the fortnight days who gets nostalgia when i'm doing this however the video performed poorly comparative to his heyday in 2018. unfortunately his total subscriber count has fallen from three million and sixty thousand subscribers to two million eight hundred and sixty thousand subscribers while his twitch streams garner an average concurrent viewership of around a thousand however we shouldn't sit here and dance on his grave if we can avoid it dakotas is without a doubt one of the most kind-hearted well-intended streamers who got caught up in a personal battle with his own demons at the most unfortunate time possible thankfully recalling back to the beginning of our story dakotas went through a similar experience in the pub g days going from 2 000 average viewers to 50 average viewers thinking it was over for him before he would have a viewership explosion out of nowhere thanks to the release of fortnite another fortnight might be around the corner for decoders but there's no way to know it until it's actually released it's cliche but it's always darkest before the dawn you always find the best ideas at rock bottom so just keep on going dakotas keep up the hustle the suffering will sort itself out if you simply refuse to quit there's people going through the same problems i am anxiety problems depression we are all kind of alike like we're all just trying to make it in this crazy world you know [Music]

Channel: SunnyV2

Views: 1,421,026

Keywords: Dakotaz, dakotaz fortnite, fortnite, fortnite storyline, entire fortnite storyline, documentary, youtube documentary, rise and fall, Biography, narration, video essay, twitch, youtube, education, joon the king, family friendly, sunnyv2, fortnite downfall, downfall, sunnyv2 downfall, fortnite battle royale, epic games, internetajay, dakotaz downfall, fortnite evolution, the entire history of fortnite i gues, fortnite history, fortnite entire history, entire history of fortnite, history

Id: nndrO0NE2Pk

Length: 13min 16sec (796 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021