People have been doing exactly that for decades, ever since video games (or learning in general) have been a thing. Nintendo's tipline in the 80s was free. Here is an in-depth guide to every version of tetris, complete with ascii diagrams and user-submitted cheats, released less than a year and a half after the gameboy version came out, when the internet was still a mess of rabbit holes. It's far from new.

Both of those attracted helpers primarily or entirely for the love of the thing itself. 99.9% of communities for any topic are the same way, and one would be horrified to find out the kinds of things that people get up to in knitting circles. Insinuating it's wrong to expect help to be both useful and accessible runs counter to human nature.

Frankly, when we're talking about YouTube, it's also weird. The watcher doesn't pay either platform. An uploader running two ads on a video with a million views makes $180, and that's if none of them is running an ad blocker (they are). Scrolling through the top Hades videos, the only ones with views that really broke more than the low thousands were the official trailers. No one is so much as buying chicken nuggets off that game unless they are the company that made the game.

From someone who jumped from Hades all the way back to trying to beat Suikoden Tactics, god fucking bless passionate text forums in general and gamefaqs specifically. I would not have have bothered with an obvious clickbait ""boss exploit"" video, but the information that there was one spread like wildfire among fans in paragraphs of nuanced Q&As. For free. Because people needed to talk about the game with each other, which they are still doing on Lemmy for free too.

Nor do I have the will to sit through what would be actual irl hours of letsplays to figure out the ancient coin is on the third floor of Obel, buried in the right-hand rubble next to the exit. Sometimes, often even, you just want the damn answer.