Over the last six years, Adam ‘SkyDoesMinecraft’ Dahlberg made a name for himself through Minecraft videos, amassing 11 million subscribers on YouTube. He’s now done with it and is retiring from making Minecraft videos. In two notably different videos, one kid-friendly and one not, he said he no longer enjoys the game, has become disaffected by the community, and feels that making kid-friendly content feels “fake”.
Dahlberg announced his retirement in a video titled “I’ll See You Later Recruits (My Quitting Video),” which you can watch below:
“I’ve been in this block world for so long, that I feel like it’s time to go explore the real world,” Dahlberg said, before thanking his fans for sticking with him.
Dahlberg was famous enough that children could buy toys based on his Minecraft persona from big-box stores like Toys-R’-Us. Dahlberg started his channel as a teen, however, and it seems clear that his creative aspirations changed as an older adult.
“I can’t force myself to sit here and play this game anymore,” Dahlberg said. “It’s just not fun for me, I don’t enjoy it.”
In the footage, Dahlberg notes that he has felt unhappy with the game and its community for “the past couple of years at this point.”
“I want to go back to making f**ked-up content,” Dahlberg said.
You’ll note that in the video, “f**ked-up” is bleeped out. In a recent interview with gossip YouTuber DramaAlert, Dahlberg described his situation in a much more raw way:
“I originally started Minecraft…before the community became f**king s**t,” Dahlberg said, without bleeping anything out. “The entire community just became about people kinda undercutting each other, f**king each other for money, stupid crap like that…I didn’t want a part of it.
Part of the issue, Dahlberg said, was that when he started making videos, he didn’t need to censor himself. He was free to make “f**ked-up” jokes, he said. But as Minecraft blew up on YouTube, things changed.
“The Minecraft community kinda took that turn, where it’s like, this unspoken rule, like, ‘everybody, we need to be all kid friendly, and basically be fake pieces of s**t,’ I eventually just kinda got bored of it. I eventually felt, creatively, you know, I guess, bordered.
“I don’t even want to sit here and make content that makes me feel like myself, like I’m a fake piece of s**t,” Dahlberg said. “And it shows on my content, on my channel, you can just see that I don’t give a f**k. I just don’t care. And I feel like for the last couple of years, I’ve just kinda been lost at what I want to do and what I need to do.”
Dahlberg noted that he felt 100 per cent trapped making Minecraft videos for a living, because his brand of comedy is more crass and risque than other Minecraft channels.
“I don’t care how many subscribers and f**kin’, how much money the channel gets,” Dahlberg said. “It’s just not f**kin’ worth it for me anymore.”
According to YouTube tracking website Social Blade, Dahlberg makes up to an estimated couple thousand dollars per video, without taking into account any other outside sources of revenue he might have, like merchandise. In June 2017 alone, he uploaded 20 videos.
Dahlberg may have gripes with the Minecraft community, but he’s not wholly abandoning it. The Sky Does Minecraft channel will continue sans Dahlberg, instead acting as a portal for community creations. Fans who participate in the program will be able to earn a percentage of the money that the video makes.
Dahlberg, for his part, will be working on a music-focused YouTube channel titled “NetNobody,” which has already garnered 1.1 million subscribers. Dahlberg says his new channel is worth following for anyone who wants to get to know Adam, rather than “Sky.”
For those who follow Dahlberg, his announcement may not come as a surprise given that his social media posts have described discontent for a while now. More overtly, within the YouTube community, it’s become a running joke that some Minecraft-centric creators don’t actually like the game or the younger audience it begets on YouTube. Dahlberg is a rare instance where such rumours take a concrete, visible form.
Comments
10 responses to “Top Minecraft YouTuber Quits Channel Because He Doesn’t Want To Be A ‘Fake Piece Of S**t’”
To be quite honest. Guy sounds like complete narcissist.
Could have bowed out with dignity, instead he shits all over his younger fan base for simply enjoying his kid friendly content.
Narcissist wasn’t the first word I though of, but it’s pretty accurate.
Pretty much this. I get he wants to do something different, but that wasn’t the way to go about it.
Actually, I understand where he’s coming from. Having to go from being able to just relax and have fun to having to self-censor your online persona because you’re worried about how it may impact your brand can get pretty tiresome. Especially with Minecraft, the community has changed somewhat over the years, leaning further and further towards the younger crowd, and people just expect the big personalities in the community to roll with it and adapt. But not everyone likes the changes involved in adapting your personality for a younger audience. You can only change so much before you are essentially someone else completely, and if you don’t like who that person is, it’s only reasonable that you step away from it. From the sounds of it, he blames the community for forcing him to change from doing something he loved to being someone he hated, and he resents them for it. That resentment is only natural, and has nothing at all to do with a narcissistic personality. Now, he’s finally reached the point where he can’t bring himself to keep up the charade, and that resentment comes to the surface. It’s a similar situation to a worker in a busy workplace turning around on his last day and telling the boss who’s been peering over his shoulder non-stop for 11 years and watching his every move, slowly getting more and more anal about behaviour, that he can go f**k himself. Sure, it probably won’t be good for his future career, but at that point, it just feels so good to finally be able to release all that pent-up resentment and anger, and psychologically it’s actually quite healthy to let it out like that in a relatively controlled release.
Oh please, this is your textbook artist outgrowing his audience before lashing out at them.
This isn’t a guy who has gradually had to modify his behaviour for a younger audience, this is Sky Does (Bloody) Minecraft, one of the foremost names in the younger Minecraft audience since the game first took off!
Every kid Iv’e know who has found Minecraft has eventually found this guy.
He isn’t your average Joe slogging away for some boss at a dead end 9-5, lacking the skill or opportunity to follow his dreams, he is a market force who has licensed merchandise and steered the very community he is lashing out at.
I think the intent is less to shit on the fans but to shit on the idea that all mine craft content should be kid friendly.
It’s kind of like the stupidity of the watershed in TV where certain things can’t be shown until after 9PM in case kids might be watching.
When realistically it should be up to the parents and programming warnings to guide that decision making.
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And while he may be super successful in the field it doesn’t mean that he isn’t a product of others desires, merchandise and the like was probably taken because it was offered.
The only issue here is that the kids will take the message one way, while the community will say who cares you just increased all our revenue since we don’t have to compete with you.
So it’s harmful to one portion and will be ignored by the one it’s meant to target.
This just in, youtubers want to be paid like it’s a job but have none of the ethic. Gotta sell your soul, mate.
Good riddance. My kids all moved on to this youtubers ThaDaddie&ThaTweetie long ago. I think those guys are funny and aren’t being fake about being Kid Friendly. They’re just fun and creative without trying to be cool.
My kids are really into them too. I actually pause and listen every once in awhile and get a good chuckle.
Well, it’s a job. We all have parts of our jobs we don’t like, but it’s better than starving and being homeless.
It’s entirely his choice to bail on making them, but doing it in such a petulant and shitty-to-his-audience way is juvenile. Then again, he’s been doing this since he was a teenager and perhaps has never had a ‘real’ job where you just have to do the thing that’s in front of you – wether you like it or not.
It’s so interesting to see these microcosms of drama blow up so much, but I guess it’s the function of Youtube and the way the people on it show their lives.
It speaks volumes that he believes that it is impossible to be creative and remain “all-ages”. But now look at him swearing every two words, how creative, how free, how edgy! Clearly anybody who doesn’t act that way is a self-censoring lame faker.