Dear YouTube:

It is ignorant at best for you to assume that all of tabletop roleplaying games are synonymous with Dungeons & Dragons. There are literally hundreds of game companies and content creators who would like to pick that bone with you. Instead you seem to have listened to the likes of Ginny Di and have erroneously assumed, at least as far as the algorithm is concerned, that D&D is all we, your audience, cares about.

Are all sports American League Baseball? No.
Are all garden hoses worldwide made by Rubbermaid? No.
Are all tractors made by John Deere? No.
Are all automobiles a 2007 Honda Civic? Heck no!

So why would you assume our entire TTRPG hobby is just D&D? Was it because someone at YouTube HQ did all of three minutes of research on your platform and discovered Ginny Di, Nerd Immersion, and Critical Role and looked no further? Either that or y’all are incredibly gullible if you believe that line that old Ginny is selling. Or maybe Hasbro, parent company of Wizards of the Coast, makers of the current edition of D&D paid you to ignore their competition. Nothing surprises me anymore.

I know I’m one lone voice barking in the dark out here. I don’t have the might of an entire corporation behind me. I don’t have the might of an entire game company behind me. I’m one guy who makes supplementary material for indie TTRPGs such as Dragonbane.

What’s this Dragonbane business all about?

Dragonbane is the English name for Drakar och Demoner aka Demons and Dragons in Sweden. It’s a fantasy TTRPG that has been around in one form or another since 1982. Here’s the Wikipedia link if you want to learn a little more.

Dragonbane is but one fantasy game amongst hundreds of fantasy TTRPGs out there in the world. It just happens that Dungeons & Dragons is the one with the loudest advertising. Look up Pathfinder, Shadowdark, Sword World, Tunnels & Trolls, Blades in the Dark… or just go to DriveThruRPG.com and go under Browse Category -> Genre-> Fantasy Titles. The list is huge, and that’s just one site.

In Sweden for about the last 40+ years, DoD (Dragonbane) has been more popular than Dungeons & Dragons, partly due to the language barrier. Similar experiences have been cited in Japan with a game called Call of Cthulhu, although there have been others.

D&D might not even be the most popular game in the United States.

Even in the United States there are those of us who swore off of D&D in about 2023 in light of the Great Wizards of the Coast (WotC) Dungeons & Dragons Open Gaming License Debacle of 2023. WotC made a foolhardy attempt to change a license that was established in 2000 that allowed Third Party Publishers to create content for D&D. The “community” of not just publishers, not just writers, not just Dungeon Masters, not just DungeonTubers, but all of us including the players, said, “No.”

WotC capitulated so fast it wasn’t even funny. The OGL was restored, but community trust was broken going forward. Since then several other game companies have released open licenses to encourage independent writers to create products for their games. WotC burned bridges and may never get the full trust of their once huge fan base back no matter how many new editions of D&D they release.

So why YouTube?

Well, YouTube is the premier long form video platform out there as of this writing. I have a Premium Membership since 2013. I realize I’m a mere speck of dust in relation to the billions of people who watch YouTube, but I am still a paying customer who chose that platform over say Tik Tok or Rumble.

YouTube has graciously allowed me to publish videos on their platform and I, like many content creators, had the dream of joining the YouTube Partner Program someday. I’m on a fixed, very modest income, and the meager ad revenue from a small channel would be about perfect to pay for my kids’ activity fees, take my wife out to dinner, buy a book or two, and maybe contribute to other content creators.

Like many I watched YouTube during the COVID lockdown. I watched a lot of what are now the popular Dungeons & Dragons influencers aka “DungeonTubers” on YouTube. I noticed a lot of what they discuss are the same things we used to talk about at conventions and in game stores back in the 1980s – 90s before social media became popular.

Some of us are really burned out on all the D&D rhetoric.

Again, the way the corporate sponsored DungeonTuber influencers talk about it, you’d think D&D was the only TTRPG on YouTube when that is simply not the case. Yes, D&D talk drives clicks. I understand YouTube finds that important. But I want to make it abundantly clear that the TTRPG culture contains more subcultures than just D&D.

Regardless of WotC and DungeonTuber shenanigans, or which edition the game is on, some of us like to talk about other games on YouTube. I prefer to parse things in terms of Dragonbane, Twilight Sword, and other tabletop roleplaying games on my channel. There are other channels devoted to Free League Publishing games such as Lord of the Rings, Alien, and Mutant Year Zero. I know others who talk about different genres such as space, superheroes, and horror games. D&D is just the loudest dog in the park, not the only one.

Why This Matters So Much Now.

August 10, 2026, YouTube announced major changes to their Partner Program. Starting on February 1, 2027, YouTube will require channels to have 1,000 Subscribers and 8,000 qualified public watch hours to be considered for AdSense revenue. We won’t talk about the Shorts qualifications because I don’t consider Shorts to be a viable part of my channel.

Every week now for the last three years, I have scoured YouTube for new content creators which I then link to my good friend The OG GM so he can shout them out. Many have asked why I do this. I joke around that he’s my boss because I think of him that way even though he doesn’t pay me. He is kind of my YouTube mentor and TTRPG writing guru. His channel is also bigger than mine and grows exponentially faster. I really do look up to him, and he’s a good friend.

I find a ton of new channels that have 1,000 subscribers or fewer on YouTube. I don’t check their watch hours because I’ve always found subscriber counts to be a bigger hurdle. This new announcement is going to put more emphasis on watch hours and a lot of YouTubers, not just in the TTRPG sphere are freaking out.

Recently I’ve been bumping into these outlier channels with 10,000 subscribers or more that only have a dozen or so D&D videos. (I don’t ask anyone to promote them.) I can’t tell how they’re getting so big, so rapidly, and I’m just now discovering them.

Are these new D&D channels doing something unethical such as buying views or maybe even buying a channel that already had subscribers as well as view hours under another niche? Could they be buying subscribers and/or botting heavily? I wish YouTube would take some interest in people violating the ToS regardless.

Something just seems off when a channel pops up out of nowhere and gets huge. Their D&D videos are just regurgitating what other creators in the space have said. It’s almost like they’re reading from a script written by somebody at WotC in some cases, but that’s just the Tinfoil Hat Society in me talking.

I get that YouTube isn’t a charity or just for funsies as a platform.

I know YouTube has employees to pay, and they have to keep the lights on, too. Yes, D&D drives clicks. No I don’t expect YouTube to have mercy on the rest of us small content creators.

I can’t afford a paid mentor, YouTube coach, or someone’s YouTube course to try to pull my own channel out of the weeds. That is just not going to happen. I’ve got real bills to pay. I sure as Hell would love to know why my own channel is where it is in the grand scheme of YouTube, though. Who did I piss off? What do I need to do to go viral within my own niche within a niche?

Look, we can’t all be Ginny Di, Bob Worldbuilder, Dungeon Dudes, or Nerd Immersion. Those DungeonTubers are already working for WotC officially or unofficially. We’re not all collecting three paychecks plus sponsors. AdSense revenue is probably a fraction of what they make from being D&D influencers anyway. By driving off smaller creators, you’re just lining the DungeonTubers’ pockets more.

It would sure be mighty damned cool if I could hear more about solo roleplaying, Dragonbane, TTJRPGs (Japanese RPG subgenre,) or any other number of TTRPG related topics on YouTube. A lot of these new or burgeoning channels are going to dry up and blow away in the coming months because there’s no way we can meet the new requirements. We know YouTube doesn’t care, and people are going to start migrating off the platform and taking our views, subscription money, and channels with us. It’s going to start adding up across niches.


I don’t care what Think Media, VidIQ, or your other dozens of YouTube influencers try to say. There’s no one in the TTRPG niche who’s going to pop off like Mr. Beast. We’re all just waiting around for Ginny Di to get her magical Gold Play Button so she can rub it in all of our faces which she inevitably will.

All this new monetization change will do is make mainstream D&D influencers more money and push the rest of us out. If you take anything away from this article, please for the love of the Universe change the way YouTube thinks about smaller content creators if you value us at all. Thank your for your attention to this matter.