I must admit I could never quite "get" PI. He seemed to be an intelligent bloke, hiding under the facade of being a bit of a chav geezer. It's difficult to translate that if you don't understand UK English, I guess the closest would be to say trailer park trash which, after even a few minutes watching, he obviously isn't. Just like the TV series Scrapheap Challenge (Junkyard Wars in the US) each video has to be better than the previous one, you are always going to come to a point where it is just getting too extreme, costing too much, taking too long or becoming too risky. I think going back to reality is a good choice for him. YouTube will still be here if he ever wants to produce new content.
I know a couple of people here who make a living from making YouTube content, both in areas related to games software. I know that for one of them the pressure has become almost intolerable over this last year and he has had to step back from things because it was causing him very real problems. With conventional media you are somewhat isolated from the consumer, but with YouTube the feedback is very direct indeed. What compounds this is that a huge percentage of the audience is immature, both physically and mentally. This is not a judgement, just a statement of fact. The biggest YT audience is teenagers, who have hormones, and those who are particularly vociferous are the ones fighting to be pack leader. This entails all the traits we have come to hate; trolling, spam posting, gratuitous thumbing-down and so on.
Unfortunately, the effect of this is that the childish bangs, smells and rude words that draw in the big numbers. I know of a whole series of Minecraft videos that were bringing in well over a million views each within a few days. They must have taken an hour at most to film, maybe a couple more to edit. Compare that to Dave's videos which take a lot of preparation and only get a fraction of the views.
The thing is though, the teenage Minecraft audience is now thumbing down videos, getting irate and demanding more. When you get that happen to you, it must be hard not to let it get to you.