He was once one of Fortnite’s biggest names, but Ceeday disappeared without a trace in February 2020. However, nearly two years since his hiatus started, he has returned with one goal in mind: Get his YouTube diamond play button, no matter what it takes.
Ceeday was one of the top Fortnite creators, basically from day 1. The American YouTuber went from a few thousand views on his Destiny 2 and Overwatch content to millions while playing the battle royale that took gaming by storm from 2017 to this day.
However, as 2020 was called in, Ceeday’s feed slowed down to a crawl. By the time February came around, he had disappeared. His last upload, “Mythical Ceeday,” racked up 14 million views as fans held out hope for a return.
Then, in a Christmas miracle on December 25, 2021, he finally broke his two-year hiatus.
After two years off YouTube, Ceeday has returned to reach his goal of 10 million subscribers.
“It’s not easy to explain a nearly two-year absence — and let’s be real, those last two years were no normal two years. That was one long continuous ass-whooping the whole time,” Ceeday opened his 17-minute return with.
“While the world is literally ending in front of us, the last thing on my mind is ‘when am I going to drop this new Fortnite video?’
“Don’t even get me started on Fortnite. Can we please, as a community, act like Chapter 2 didn’t happen? The state of the game, plus what was happening in the world at the time, it was the perfect sh*tstorm to keep me from coming back to YouTube.”
The star admitted Fortnite’s decline in Chapter 2 wasn’t the only reason that kept him away from content creation though. The star was starting to fall out of love with the idea of YouTube as a whole, although he came to terms with it quite quickly.
He never intended to come back either — despite fans getting excited over a teaser on Instagram in August 2020.
“It was apparent that I was falling out of love with YouTube and making videos. The time between every upload got longer, and you know what? It’s normal. After doing literally the same thing for that long, it gets repetitive, and it loses that thing that made it fun in the beginning.”
However, Ceeday believes this is his “last chance to be serious” and go for his one YouTube goal: Get a diamond play button.
The star currently sits at 6.78 million subscribers — the same as he did when he left back in February (although he did lose 60,000 in the interim) — a smidge over 3 million away from that 10 million subscriber reward.
If he can finally accomplish that achievement, he can feel proud of what he was able to accomplish over his five years on the platform.
“I’ve never shown any of my YouTube plaques before, and that’s because I still haven’t claimed them. I say that to let you guys know that until I can hit 10 million and get the Diamond play button, I don’t feel I deserve the other two [100k and 1 million],” he admitted.
“There might be rough patches where you won’t see me for a while, but until I can reach that goal of 10 million, there’s no way I’m going to quit forever.”
Ceeday is willing to do anything it takes to get there too. While he made his stardom off the back of Fortnite, the YouTuber isn’t ruling out a change of pace — especially if Fortnite Chapter 3 ends up falling flat.
“I will be back again, and again; maybe I’ll try something new, but YouTube will have to ban me to stop me from trying.”
