Darkness Zone

Making nuanced, insightful videos on YouTube is already hard enough. What happens when the game you love starts to die?

Conventional wisdom has it that, if you want to stand out in a crowded field, you need to specialise. That’s certainly proven true in the Wild Wests of YouTube and Twitch, where passionate players of games can turn their skills into a career. Yet with both platforms still in their relative infancy, any consensus on how to find success on them runs the risk of being proven wrong. What if, for instance, the game on which you’ve built a business and a living goes horribly awry?

That’s a problem that Stefan ‘Datto’ Jonke is currently coming to terms with. Across YouTube and Twitch, Jonke spent the first three years of Destiny’s life establishing himself as one of the game’s deepest community thinkers. While others cut flashy thumb skill montages or rounded up the latest news, Jonke’s USP was the way he broke the game down, identifying, analysing and explaining how Bungie’s often inscrutable game really worked. If you wanted to optimise your team’s DPS for a raid boss, to know which loadouts were most effective for a given week’s Nightfall strike, or to find out if the exotic chest piece that just dropped for you was any good, Datto’s channel was your first port of call.