A dattebow video essay.
This is the one where I got to watch the mistake happen and go back and diagnose it, which doesn’t come up often.
Original working title was “The Steam Deck Changes What Games You Actually Finish,” which said the whole conclusion up front and ran long enough to get cut off in search results. Retitled it “The games my handheld killed” a few weeks before publishing, shorter, and it doesn’t give the mechanism away the way the old one did. Tried around 40 reference thumbnails before landing on the final one, hands holding the Deck, a real room behind it instead of a plain background, the game on screen paired with a small Steam playtime stat that only means something if you already know how to read it.
Published it, then checked the numbers two days later. Average view duration was 44 seconds out of a 5:26 runtime, people were leaving almost immediately. Went back through the script to figure out why and found the actual problem, the opening anecdote was about finishing Persona 5 Royal, a finished story, but the whole video’s now built around a killed one. The real “killed” anecdote, dropping Skyrim back in March, doesn’t show up until the second chapter. By the time the video says what its own title promised, most people had already left. Next revision is re-cutting the opening to lead with that instead, not rewriting the whole script, just fixing where the thesis actually starts.