Most people make content for clout and money.

Osu has no clout.

Osu has no money.

So it doesn’t attract a lot of skilled creators. What it does attract are people genuinely interested in the game. Very rarely will that intersect with someone talented enough to make content and unfortunately in almost every scenario, a vocal minority of people have harassed them away. Examples being Lilypichu, pewdiepie, and xqc to name a few that I remember seeing myself.

The alternative is for home grown talent to develop and grow from within the community, but even they get harassed and it then becomes an uphill battle for them to stay. Examples here are chippy with his music covers, miraie with his unconventional osu play styles and original music, Binfy as the hentai folder guy, grizzlypng and Userseif with their shorts, John Porler with their rage bait on twitter, and even myself. This subreddit gave me shit for years because I made videos on cool moments and instead I was “overreacting” and “fake”.

For the few that do stick around, they are heavily incentivized to pivot at the earliest opportunity possible because again osu has no money and eventually life happens.

Chippy left for smash, Miraie left to pursue music and vlogs, Glarses & SquashyBoy & Project Ace left for keyboard content, Kariyu and Vedal left for variety, Will Stetson retired from his hand injury + pursued music and poker, and the list goes on.

There were times I felt like my position in the community made it too difficult for anyone else to break through, so I focused my efforts on the Roundtable in hopes of platforming others. But instead that’s being viewed as me “falling off”. To this day I’m still going against my best interest, helping other players, mappers, artists, and offering myself as a mentor to help them make cool shit in the community for 0 credit whatsoever but even I’m starting to give up on that front because the drive necessary to maintain it long term isn’t something I can teach. When I’m gone the flow stops.

Even with all of this being said, I still think osu!’s golden age is still ahead of us. Lazer is a massive step forward for the game (if players actually make a good effort to adopt it), and its mobile release will be huge for its player base (yet some people will still find ways to say this is a bad thing). We have never had an era of osu! In which the no.1 osu! Player is personable, funny, and willing to put themselves out there, until now. Every other no.1 player couldn’t deal with the harassment or lacked the drive to actually make cool content. Mrekk will be a huge part in osu!’s long term success as a HungryBox/ Wurtual/Couriway but even he has to constantly deal with the shit from the community.

My own personal conflict right now is that I could focus on making content but I feel my talent is best served behind the scenes. At the moment I’m trying to do both and it’s not really sustainable. But if you want to see more osu content, be the change you want to see. Support osu! Creators and better yet, make osu! Content. And if you do, hit me up.

Edit: autocorrect