And then there were two

Timberwolf

• 5 min read

TimberwolfK Plays is very shortly about to be an actual thing.

A pixelated wolf sits at a laptop, with a cup of tea. The laptop has a pink case and a heart logo, with pink light reflected off the wolf's fur, that notoriously reflective material.
I still suck at pixel art. And good choices for channel logos. And deflecting that whole "not a furry, but I do have many good friends in the scene and definitely did the 'wait... you didn't' double-take on seeing the Raya and the Last Dragon character design for the first time" situation.

I'm glad I announced that I would be doing this in 2025 a couple of blog posts ago because if I hadn't, I would have gone, "I'm too busy this month, maybe next" twelve times and then we would be in 2026 with no Let's Play channel.

Meanwhile in this universe, I did that for about seven months and then sat myself down on a free evening to play some games with a microphone plugged into the PC and record it all. About an hour in and it's been one of the most freeing things I've done in relation to YouTube since I tried playing a truck simulator using only my toes.

The wonderful thing is that I don't care. I'm speaking with my natural voice, happily chastising myself when the gameplay is rubbish or boring, failing at games I've been playing for the best part of 30 years, interjecting with hopelessly flat singing and half-arsed silly accents, and the result is magical. It's a channel just for me. And people exactly like me. (So... er, yeah, just for me.)

Which is good, because the main TimberwolfK channel is...

A screenshot of YouTube Studio showing a video with exceptionally good click through rate and view duration but merely middling views performance. The caption on the video reads "Utterly Broken".
"Utterly Broken" might be a good summation.

YouTube has made some changes to the notorious "algorithm" in 2025. As ever, trying to reverse-engineer what's going on or finding anything remotely close to a trustworthy source is an exercise in futility, but the gist seems to be:

  • YouTube is placing a much greater focus on what topics viewers are interested in.
  • There is a high likelihood video transcripts are being run through an LLM to work out what the video is about.
  • YouTube is predominately showing videos to users where it already has a high degree of certainty they are interested in the video topic.
  • There's an extra weight given to bingeable series - channels which produce a sequence of obviously related videos.
  • Getting a high click-through-rate (CTR) and retention is no longer a guarantee of having your video shown to a wider audience, if YouTube assumes they're not interested in the topic.

This is absolutely fantastic news for small creators, because we're finally on a level playing field with all the channels doing CTR and retention hacks - the topic and the ability to deliver on that topic are being given much higher weight. It's terrible news for TimberwolfK, because the whole point is, "I cover something you never expected to be interested in, but after 20 minutes of watching this you might be."

So yeah, getting those videos to the people who might be interested in seeing them is going to be like pushing water uphill for a while. Other people might rage at this, but I did disproportionately well out of the "just get the CTR and retention right and it'll be shown to all sorts of random people" era of YouTube and like an idiot failed to effectively capitalise on it by just getting the damn videos out, so now the pendulum has swung out of my favour I'm just gonna have to live with it.

(These days, it's all about the invites to retro events and the evenings in the pub talking about Sun Microsystems chassis and ancient record turntables with other creators anyway.)

But also, there's a potential trend developing that I am keeping an eye on. This is the growing awareness of just how much time we spend in a state of overstimulation thanks to platforms trying to optimise for grabbing our attention by jamming every neuroreceptor they can get to at 100%, and the resultant desire to look for unprofessional, relatable people, a sense of human connection over passive stimulation.

If you noticed that the Frontier: First Encounters vid in all its shaky-cam glory is a lot less deliberately edited and has a lot more genuine, in-the-moment reaction then... yes, and I only started finding out about this "relatable video creators" thing after I filmed that, honest. What's actually going on there is my own realisation the channel will die if I keep putting months of research and days of editing into videos that struggle to get 400 views. They need to be easier to produce, easier to edit, and feel like the effort which goes into them is commensurate with only 10x the view count rather than 100.

But also I have a feeling that the retro scene is too full of pompous, overly-serious middle-aged men and I am desperately trying not to come across as one of them. I guess the Let's Play channel is an outlet for that - for a start it's not overtly "retro" (one of the launch games was released this year) but I've also taken Factorio, a game which attracts people so serious they don't get out of bed unless they're certain they've optimised the perfect trajectory to put feet on floor, and played it like an incompetent sociopath. Er, had fun. That's the sentiment I was going for.

So future videos are more likely to fall into the First Encounters template where I take a game, a basic premise around my initial assumptions of that game, then just play it and see what happens. I expect to start throwing in a few more modern games, because the remit of the channel was never retro-only, and some more general PC and programming topics, but that "I take a day and see where I get to" is likely to become the standard format for TimberwolfK in future. I've realised with the latest YouTube changes how much at risk I am from having a very small core following, and I'm not going to increase that following without consistently making videos, and to do that I need a format which is quick, fun, but also not so blindly repetitious I'm attempting to claw my own brain out through my eyeballs after three videos.

But, y'know, I also now have the Let's Play as an outlet for when I don't feel up to doing anything more than rolling a game and talking nonsense into a microphone.

I find it strange coming to this mid-year (ish) state of the union at the opposite angle to my January one. Almost all the "life admin" things getting in the way of making videos are now fine, but now the YouTube environment is much tougher for a channel which does niche and weird stuff with not much connection between individual videos. And my reaction to that is.. just keep making more, I guess? Between the Let's Play channel and the more casual approach to the regular channel my aim is to be bringing you 3 videos per month, even of 2 of those are just me wittering on over the top of games being played badly.

But hey, maybe that "authentic and relatable" thing will pay off one day, right?