I've explained this before but I'll explain it again: if you pull up the Jimquisition playlist and start from the first episodes, they're a pleasant listen while coding or playing video games. I played through Subnautica and No Man's Sky listening to them basically on loop.
However, at a certain point, he starts doing wrestling bits. In the beginning, this is easy to avoid because it's just the outro. Then it's at the start and the end. At a certain point, this starts becoming more effort than it's worth. The wrestling shit spreads like a cancer, and they are sprinkled into the actual heart of the video.
I basically received Pavlov Conditioning where I'd hear specific phrases that
precede the wrestling content, and my brain would fire a panic response to alt+tab out and skip ahead of the wrestling shit because I knew it was coming up and I didn't want to hear a single second of it. Now, there's more bad episodes than good episodes and I don't bother trying to scan the playlist because there's better content to binge listen while working.
I really cannot stress this enough. It was this video that started the actual observable decline in engagement.
View attachment 4602497View attachment 4602521
Item number 122 is the Wrestling promo video (which will change as this post gets older, but as of writing).
Look into it for yourself. It's worth noting that only a few months before this video came out, he was routinely hitting over 500k viewers and his Anthem video got over 1m. In the weeks leading up to this and after it, they never break 500k again, with three exceptions:
- Cyberpunk in December 2020, which was a topical game review (real content).
- Shittiest Games of 2020 new year special (his most successful video series historically).
- "I Can't Believe a Developer Tried to Kill my Channel" on Mar 2021 (dabbing on flaggers and the litigious is an old tradition of his and his most successful video ever is about the DigiHom lawsuit).
That's it. His videos now rarely break 200k. It all goes back to the wrestling shit. It sucks. Everyone knows it sucks. Except Jim. Even when he lists reasons in his Under 800k video why people unsubscribe, he acknowledges his videos are lazier and shittier now and gives that as a fair reason to unsubscribe. He talks about 'politics' but dismisses it as a legitimate cause. He does not even mention the wrestling - he still refuses to acknowledge it.