I recently stumbled upon a 17 minutes and 10 seconds long YouTube video in my suggested feed. As you can probably guess from the title of this post, it was entitled “The Mistake That Cost Myth His Career”.
The video was upload 20th September 2018 and has over 7 million views.
That makes it one of the most popular videos in the whole domain of Fortnite. If you saw my post exploring Google Trends and Fortnite then you’d know that Fortnite is the most popular video game in the world right now.
Therefore the numbers that this video is pulling is seriously impressive. And I’m genuinely surprised by the amount of people that have seen it.
However it has more than a 30% dislike percentage (with more than 70,000 dislikes).
That’s not good. It may be popular, but a lot of people obviously don’t like it.
If you’ve watched the video—and I don’t recommend that you do because it’s really not that good—then I think it’s easy to understand why it’s getting so many dislikes from viewers.
What’s Wrong With The Video?
Firstly, we (i.e. the viewer) are forced to watch through an extremely long and drawn out introduction to Myth. Which I really think could have been summarised in a few minutes or less.
YouTube’s algorithm favours watch time, so it makes sense why he and many other video creators are trying to make their content as long as possible instead of just getting to the point.
It details Myth’s meteoric rise to the top of the Fortnite streamer hierarchy and contains such sentences as:
“Everybody was convinced that Myth was the best player in the game, if not the best”
Which doesn’t make much sense, though I get what he’s trying to say.
Eventually, 10 minutes and one pathetic attempt to gain a like/subscription later, it’s finally time to be told what the “mistake” was that “cost Myth his career.” In a surprising turn of events, it turns out it was actually two mistakes!
Mistake 1: Myth made a sponsored video showcasing Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
I do not think that there is anything wrong with content creators doing a sponsored video. These people put their content on the Internet for us to watch and enjoy for free.
Sponsored content is simply a viable way for them to earn extra income. Also if a gaming company were to offer me money to make a video playing their game, I would almost certainly do the same. As I’m sure most of you reading would, too.
Unfortunately I, like most people, am not a famous content creator with a huge fanbase. Therefore I doubt that I’ll ever get this opportunity, though it is nice to dream.
Furthermore it’s not like Myth kept it a secret that this was sponsored content either. Instead he was transparent and explicitly stated in the opening seconds of the video that it is a sponsored video.
Myth’s Rainbow Six Siege video has over a million views and around a 98% like percentage.
There is nothing wrong with the video and it did not hurt Myth’s in the slightest—at least from what I can tell.
However the next “mistake” actually has a bit of truth to it.
Mistake 2: Myth Performed Poorly At LAN
The LAN being talked about was Ninja’s Las Vegas tournament that took place in April 2018. It was one of Fortnite’s first big LAN tournaments.
There were a lot of great players in attendance with Myth being arguably the most popular (behind Ninja of course) and hyped up players going into it.
According to “The Mistake That Cost Myth His Career” it was specifically the pre-game interview with Ninja’s wife, Jess Blevins AKA JGhosty, where Myth made his big “mistake” that “killed his career”.
In the interview he was asked: “out of these next 3 games, how many do you think you’re gonna win?”
Myth’s reply: “Minimum 2. But I think I can definitely get 1.”
He was confident, and so he should have been! You just can’t go into a tournament unconfident. If you don’t believe in yourself then how can you expect to win?
Sadly for Myth, he did not win a single game.
In one game he embarrassingly died by falling and in the post-game interview said it was as a result of “one of the rarest bugs in the game”. What really happened was that he just jumped into the ramp that was being built above him. That in turn booped him off and sent him plummeting to his death.
Unfortunate? Yes. Bug? No.
So What If Myth Didn’t Do Well At His First LAN?
Myth was eighteen years old at the time of the tournament, practically a kid. A kid who had literally millions of eyes watching him.
Some hoping he would do well and others hoping he would fall. No pun intended.
That is a lot of pressure for anyone—particularly an eighteen year old—and it’s really not that big of a deal that Myth didn’t do well. He only had 3 games to play, which is a really small sample size.
I sincerely doubt that the creator of “The Mistake That Cost Myth His Career” has ever played anything at a competitive level and definitely not to this scale. In fact, most people haven’t.
Everything is different at LAN and a lot of people seem to forget that.
It isn’t anything like playing from the comfort of your home. You might have to use gear and peripherals that you’re not used to as well.
On top of that, nervousness can become a severe problem and be difficult to remain calm—especially if you’re someone with a profile as big as Myth’s.
I don’t know exactly what happened to Myth this tournament. Maybe it was nerves or maybe he underestimated the level of competition at the tournament. Whatever the reason; does it really matter?
Is Myth’s Career Dead?
Well let’s take a quick look at the numbers. At the time of writing this post (December 2018) Myth has:
- Over 5,500,000 Instagram followers
- Over 4,000,000 YouTube subscribers
- More than 4,000,000 Twitch followers (and ranked #3 for the most followed channel, according to TwitchMetrics)
- More than a million Twitter followers
Oh and he’s also team captain for one of the biggest eSports organisations in North America, TSM.
Myth has achieved all of this at just 19 years of age.
Does this really seem like the profile of someone who’s career is “dead”?
No, of course not. Most of us can only dream of getting as big a social presence as Myth has, especially at such a young age.
However when we take a look at his SocialBlade it’s evident that there’s definitely been a dip in his numbers—although he’s still gaining more than 100,000 followers a month, again numbers most of us can only dream of—but what’s really going on?
The Real Reason For Myth’s Decline
There’s a lot of pressure on the top streamers to perform as well as they can, every single day and for every single game. If they are ever not performing then there’s always going to be someone, somewhere ready to make a mean post or comment about you on the Internet.
Often video game streamers have to answer this question:
Do you want to be a top streamer or a pro player?
You can seldom have both. Because being a streamer means that you aren’t able to properly focus on actually playing the game. You’re distracted by Twitch chat and trying to be more entertaining instead of really practicing and trying to be as good as you possibly can be.
I think Myth knew that. So he mostly stopped streaming and instead spent his time trying to get good at Fortnite.
And what happened?
Well, Myth got good. In fact, he got real good and proved everyone, including me, wrong.
Epic Games’ most recent competitive event was the Winter Royale. This was the first tournament that featured an open qualifier i.e. anyone was eligible and there were no invites.
Only the best 200 players from the North American and European regions could qualify. The competition was incredibly tough and a lot of very popular streamers were not able to qualify.
However Myth did. He placed 127th with 29 points.
Conclusion
Myth’s career is not dying. He’s now nineteen years old and this is only the beginning of what could be an immensely successful career for him.
Sure he might have sacrificed his Twitch and YouTube numbers a little. But I think it was worth it to prove to everyone that he could truly hang with the best.
It’s evident that he has his priorities in order and a clear goal in mind: to be the best that he can possibly be at Fortnite.
I think we all need to give pro players a break. It may look like they are living the dream by making a living playing video games. Not many of us understand or appreciate the level of work, discipline and stress that comes with it.
It’s easy to think “man I could easily be better than these guys, if only I had the time!”
But could you really?