The Rooster Teeth Story: The Middle Bits

grow as an online focused media company. We covered some really early ambitious efforts, like how they launched a crowd funding campaign for an independent feature film called Laser Team, and how rooster Teeth was the type of company that fans would want to work for. They would become fans of the company and then say that's who I want to end up doing work with, and in fact, some fans would be willing to move across borders to become

part of the team. We ended that episode last week by talking about how a different company called full Screen would acquire Rooster Teeth for an undisclosed amount of money at the end of twenty fourteen. So let's pick up there and let's talk about full Screen as well as its parent company out our Media and while I was working on this episode, it's when I realized that, uh, sure enough, I'm actually going to need a third one to really cover the important stuff plus the stuff I

wanted to throw in for various reasons. And part of that is because this is a tech podcast. It's not just an episode that's kind of exploring rooster teeth and what it did and why it was important. It's also looking at a lot of this stuff, a lot of factors that overlap with rooster teeth, to explain what those are and how they work. So I'm kind of using this not just as a way to talk about rooster teeth, but to talk about important things in general. So let's

talk about full Screen now. The story of full Screen starts with founder George Strombolis, who had worked for YouTube as a strategic partnerships manager. YouTube as a platform really only has value so long as there are people creating compelling content for the platform. That's actually the challenge of any platform that relies on user generated content. The stuff

being posted to the platform. You know, if it's not interesting, or if it's not of sufficient quality, well then the platform is likely not going to stick around that long. So the job of a strategic partnerships manager is in part to identify and secure and maintain and grow relationships

with various content partners. The content creators will find a way to monetize their work, and they'll learn strategies to maximize their efforts so that they're not wasting their time and money and energy on things that aren't going to work. They can also find other people to collaborate with all this kind of stuff. That's sort of the benefit they see. And meanwhile, YouTube gets content that users want to watch.

At least that's the idea. And of course YouTube gets a significant cut, like around thirty percent of the ad revenue that content creators bring in. So YouTube has an incentive to encourage successful channels, and channels have an incentive to work with strategic partners in order to maximize the return on the investment they have made in creating their content. Now let's talk about multichannel networks. These are third party organizations that fulfill a similar purpose to a strategic partner

over at YouTube. So a strategic partnership manager actually works for YouTube, whereas multichannel networks are independent third party organizations typically and they curate content, they recruit content creators to have their channels join this network. Those channels may not overtly explain that they're part of the network. They might not have a logo or anything that shows this. Maybe they have a little bit in the about section, but

otherwise it's not necessarily obvious. The networks end up making revenue by taking a percentage of those ad sales that member channels generate, similar to the way YouTube does. This means a multi channel network only makes money if the channels in that network are also making money. So it's sort of like a talent agent. It gets a percentage of a creator's pay when they land a gig. You know. Now. In return, the channels get support from the network. At

least that's what's supposed to happen. The network provides publicity, they might provide strategy and advice, They might provide collaboration opportunities with other members of the network, and perhaps most importantly, they provide a sense of stability in an industry that's unpredictable to say the least. So Strombolis decided to found full Screen in twenty eleven and as a company that would help content creators reach the next level on YouTube.

Full Screen was sort of a multi channel network that worked with tons of creators. The idea was that full Screen would benefit from working with a large number of channels, and the channels would benefit from better promotion on YouTube. We're already back in twenty eleven it was getting harder and harder to stand out in a really crowded field, and as you can imagine, that challenge has only grown

more over the time, like it's today. Being able to stand out in YouTube seems like it's an overwhelming challenge. Folks can end up getting promoted, it seems almost at random by the recommendation engine, but it's really hard to purposefully stand out all on your own. It can be done, but it's hard to do so. Full Screen ends up

racking up this huge list of content partners. In fact, according to AT and t's website, full Screen worked with quote more than fifty thousand content creators who in h four hundred and fifty million subscribers and generate four billion with a B monthly views end quote. The billion with a B was me Beyond that, Strompolis fell into a camp of streaming video execs who saw the potential of

media behind a paywall. Be it a subscription service or you know, pay to access this particular video or what have you. Meanwhile, we actually have to talk about another entity. This one is called Otter Media. And to talk about Otter Media, actually we have to talk about anime distribution. Specifically, we have to talk about crunchy roll. Because this all

gets really complicated and jumbled, but it is important. So back in two thousand and six, there were some college buddies who had recently graduated, and they were thinking about how hard it was to get access to anime in the United States. You really had to put the work in to find anime, and only a few times had

really broken through to find general distribution in America. And even then the anime you found might not be subtitled or dubbed into English, which meant even if you could access the anime, it wasn't really accessible unless you were fluent in Japanese. So they put together a website that celebrated anime, and by celebrate, I mean the celebration included

hosting pirated versions of anime with fan subbed subtitles. That means these were versions of anime that fans themselves had subtitled in order to make the successible to non Japanese speaking audiences. They called this service Crunchy Role. Now, the piracy thing meant that anime studios and their corporate overlords

weren't terribly keen about Crunchy Role. When the small business received a significant investment to the tune of four million dollars, there was a concerted effort for Crunchy Role to go legit. So instead of featuring pirated material, Crunchy Role would try to secure licensing to feature various anime films and series. This was much more amenable to those various studios and aforementioned corporate overlords. So then fast forward to twenty thirteen,

a company called the Chernin Group comes into play. Now, the Chernin Group is a media investment company, as in, this is a company that invests in quote media, entertainment, technology, sports, and consumer and digital media sectors end quote. It was founded by a former news Core executive named Peter Chernan, thus the Churnin Group, and in twenty thirteen it acquired a majority stake in Crunchy Role. Meanwhile, AT and T, the telecommunications company, was looking to branch out into media.

It wouldn't just provide the wires that brought you the content, it would provide some of the content running across those wires. Other telecommunications companies were doing similar things, notably Comcast, which eventually becomes part of NBC Universal, or rather it becomes the owner of NBC Universal. So in twenty fourteen, AT and T forms a partnership with the Churnin Group, and these two companies together create a joint venture and they

call it Outer Media. Each company, AT and T and Churnin Group would retain a fifty percent stake in Automedia, so Automedia would act as a kind of holding company in One of the things it held was Crunchy Role.

Shortly after launch, Automedia was taking a good hard look at the market to determine what other properties to scoop up besides Crunchy Role, and it set its sites on full Screen, so Automedia would secure controlling interest in full Screen, though George Strompolis would manage to continue to run the company as CEO, and other investors would maintain a stake in full Screen as well, so it wasn't a full takeover.

And that wasn't like they everybody. They were kind of trying to keep things as independent as possible so that Strompolis wouldn't be interfered with too much. Now, a lot was going on at this time. Traditional media companies and by that I mostly mean television studios and cable networks were all trying to figure out how to get into the digital scene. It turned out that the stuff that worked in conventional television didn't necessarily apply to the online world.

You couldn't just port a TV network mentality to YouTube. For example. The online world allowed for a tighter focus on niche interests, and in the cable world things might start off that way, but over time they would change. And for more evidence of that, you can just look at what happened to channels that started off with a really tight focus, like the sci Fi Network originally was really a science fiction network. Over time it became less so, or cartoon network even or A great example is MTV,

which when it first started was almost exclusively music videos. Gradually, content that doesn't quite fit the mission of the original channel concept starts to creep in in the cable world, and eventually all the cable channels kind of become general purpose rather than a channel that centered on a specific topic or interest. But online that doesn't necessarily happen. The hyper focused channels can maintain that focus and cater to

a specific audience while still experiencing wild success. This was also in an era that bleeds into the pivot to video scandal, which I talked about in a recent tech Stuff episode, So as a reminder, pivot to video was

a concept that spawned largely because of Facebook. Facebook famously stated that video content drove far more engagement on the platform than it really did, and as a result, Facebook would put a lot more focus in support behind posts that contained video content, particularly video content that was posted directly to Facebook as opposed to video content that was hosted on an external site and then linked on Facebook.

That movement would ultimately decimate writer's rooms across content sites all over the web, but it did mean that companies that focused on video production were in a pretty darn sweet spot as far as the market was concerned, at least for the short term. So anyway, Autermedia acquires a majority stake in full Screen, and Autteromedia in turn has the churnin group in at and T as Mommy and Daddy. That's a lot, but don't worry, it'll get a lot

more complicated as we go on. However, it was full Screen in twenty fourteen that makes the offer to acquire rooster Teeth, and the company accepted that offer. So why did full Screen go after rooster Teeth well as deadlines? David Bloom put it in a twenty fourteen article titled full Screen buys online video pioneer Rooster Teeth. Rooster Teeth had proven itself to be an early success story with regards to subscription models. You know, the company originally called

them sponsorships and later called them first memberships. They also were a success with merchandise and live events. All of these things are potentially revenue generating enterprises. It was clear that online delivery was going to be the future of content distribution. There was no denying there was a shift as there were more and more cable cutters and those who would never become cable subscribers to start with. Heck, full Screen itself was part of that online distribution world.

Rooster Teeth had found a way to foster a community and cater to that community in a way that was profitable. That's something that a lot of other content creators hadn't quite figured out yet. For example, Rooster Tee's subscription model had proven to be popular, so in the earliest days, the subscription or sponsorship was twenty dollars for a single

season of their flagship show Red Versus Blue. At the end of the first season, Rooster Teeth sent out DVDs of the episodes that contained things like commentary tracks and bonus material to all the sponsors. Some folks would actually contribute far more than the twenty dollars. In an interview on the Recode podcast, co founder Bernie Burns said that one supporter sent five hundred bucks and they contacted him to find out if this had been an error, but

the fan said no, no, it was intentional. So Burns's conclusion was that people liked to support the stuff they like, and that this support meant that the company could actually stay afloat despite hefty expenses like file hosting and bandwidth fees, because remember, they're hosting all these video files themselves, and people are downloading each episode over the internet and then watching them at home, So they had to find a way to be able to support this because the bill

for those bandwidth fees would be in the tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes so over time, this subscription would change to a monthly fee, and in return for which subscribers who are now called first members, would get early access to some content, exclusive access to other content, and depending upon the level of membership, they sometimes would receive physical merchandise as well, including exclusive items that were just

made for members. And the model totally worked, which showed rooster Teeth had a savvy handle on how to do business in online media, despite the fact that the co founders didn't come from a business background. Okay, we're going to take a quick pause in our history to thank our sponsors, but we'll be right back. Before the break, I was talking about how rooster Teeth had managed to find a model that allowed them to be very self sufficient.

A huge part of this was how the company had put in a ton of work to encourage their audience to become a community. You never hear them talking about audiences or very rarely, they almost always use the word community instead. So the rooster Teeth website hosted message boards where fans could congregate and discuss all sorts of topics.

Some of the folks who worked at rooster Teeth actually got the start as community members on those forums, the folks at the company would dip into those conversations, and that further strengthened this communal bond. I could probably go off on a tangent about parasocial relationships because a lot of that was happening too. We'll actually have to talk about that in the next episode, but we're gonna move on.

So the article I had mentioned earlier also quotes George Strompolis as saying, quote, rooster Teeth is one of the strongest and most authentic media brands in the world amongst eighteen to thirty four year old male skewing audiences. The combination of its massive reach, unique creative voice, and insanely powerful community makes it a perfect match for full Screen end quote. Okay, but what about rooster Teeth, why did

the company agree to this acquisition? Well, according to Bernie Burns, who was also quoted in that same article, quote, at Rooster Teeth, we have a long history of creating the best digital content in the industry. With full Screen, we look forward to continuing that tradition in even bigger and better ways. Matt and I are excited about the opportunities this alliance will present for our creators and all the amazing content it will empower them to produce for our audience.

End quote. Now, the Matt that Bernie mentions in that is Matt Hullum, another co founder and at that time the CEO of Rooster Teeth. Bernie served as the creative director for the company at that time. Both would continue to operate in those roles post acquisition, at least for the near future. Now, I suspect that one other reason that they agreed to this acquisition is the big ol'

honk and check that they presumably received for this transaction. Again, it was never made public how much this was for, and Bernie would actually say on that Recode podcast. I mentioned earlier that he had enough money to retire, but then he pointed out that if he did retire, it would just be so that he could do what he was already doing at Rooster Teeth. So I'm sure the

money definitely helped with the decision making process. Rooster Teeth was in an interesting position with regard to online media. For the first several years of the company existence, they hosted all their own content right I mentioned this earlier. They didn't jump onto YouTube right away, and in fact, YouTube didn't launch until two thousand and five. And remember rooster Teeth launched in two thousand and three. So again in the earliest days, he would actually have to go

to the rooster Teeth site. They would have a link to the media files that were for each episode. You would download the file, you'd watch it on your computer locally. Now, according to Burns, rooster Teeth held off on YouTube until two thousand and eight or two thousand and nine before dipping a toe in, So even when YouTube became a thing,

rooster Teeth was not immediately on board. Now, part of the concern was that early on with YouTube, there was no way to monetize videos on the platform and it would take some time for that to happen. Google would acquire YouTube and then eventually would put into place a partner program, And there was also a fear that if they did put stuff up on YouTube, it would cannibalize traffic from rooster Teeth itself. Burns said on that Recode podcast quote, people who were on YouTube and leave YouTube,

they didn't click away to go to anything else. In the quote. Now, seeing as how rooster t that really wanted to encourage people to become subscribers or members, as well as to encourage merchandise sales. You can understand that there was a reluctance to share videos on a different site because it's very hard to get folks to leave one site and go to another to do something like

make a purchase. YouTube has a very strong incentive to keep people on YouTube for as long as it possibly can, So if you did jump on YouTube and you hope to get people to come to your site, you actually have two organizations that have conflicting goals, and that's just not easy to overcome. It's a similar problem content creators would run into with social media sites like Facebook when

they changed the game. You would get a lot more engagement if you uploaded your content directly to the platform itself, as opposed to posting a link to your content, but that meant all the traffic was going in and out

of the social media site, not your site. So you have to weigh the benefits of getting more eyeballs on your content by posting where a lot of people are congregating, such as YouTube, versus hosting everything yourself, getting the most benefit of each individual user, but perhaps having far fewer

users overall. Ultimately, rooster Teeth would choose to host some of its content on YouTube as well as its own site, but Burns stress that it was always important to maintain your own base of operations because you have no control over a third party site like YouTube, and when YouTube makes a change, say to its recommendation algorithm or to its advertising policy, well that affects you, and there's not really much you can do other than try to adapt

to the changes. On your own site, you have far more control. So roster Teeth was living in both worlds, and there would be times when Rooster Teeth would actually pull or set to private some of the videos that previously were publicly viewable on YouTube. So not all the stuff that rooster Teeth has uploaded to YouTube is still there or still available today. The full Screen acquisition marked a big change for rooster Teeth. Now it was neither

completely positive or negative. Recently, at least at the time of the recording of this podcast, the Rooster Teeth staff appeared during a really emotional live stream. This happened a day after the announcement that Warner Brothers Discovery was shutting down rooster Teeth. They gathered to talk about their experiences working at this company as well as with each other, and also to share what information they had about what comes next. We'll talk about what comes next in our

next episode. There were a lot of tears in that live stream, y'all. You can check it out. It's up on YouTube. But one moment that really stood out to me was one in which Rooster Teeth employee Chelsea Atkinson lamented the full Screen acquisition and talked about how many folks were upset at the time. They were essentially saying, how could you sell this company? A lot of her

colleagues appeared to share her feelings about this. The effects of that sale would actually take some time to really shake out, apart from the fact that the state holders at Rooster Teeth got a hefty check for their acquisition. So we're going to continue on our journey as the company would launch more projects, and again I'm not going to list everything because that would be exhausting and also

wouldn't be very interesting. Now. Like twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen would be another really big year for Rooster Teeth for both good and bad reasons. The company would launch several new series, ranging from more comedy shows to a sports

related show to documentaries. Their first feature film, Laser Team, would premiere in twenty fifteen, so this was a big year and also as a mark of that strategy that they were forming with YouTube, Rooster Teeth's film, Laser Team would actually become a launch title for YouTube's subscription service called YouTube Bread. YouTube was looking for special content to acquire for this launch in order to attract people to

subscribe to YouTube Bread. Laser Team was one of those pieces of content, so the movie would become available on YouTube Bread for subscribers shortly after it had its cinematic debut. So this was one of those cases where you have a film that almost simultaneously comes out in theaters and on streaming. Is a fairly early example of that, not the first one, but an early one. The company also saw lots of new hires in twenty fifteen. It was on its way to growing into a much larger company.

It had taken years for Rooster Teeth to get to just twenty employees. It would take much less time for it to grow dramatically into several hundreds in staff under corporate ownership. One new division inside rooster Teeth at this time was a games development department, the company that grew up around creating content inspired by or featuring video games would actually start to make its own video games as well as board games. More on that in a little bit.

The live events department also went into overdrive. Not only was Rooster Teeth involved with RTX, which is their big annual fan convention, but the company also started putting together live shows like Let's Play Live, so the Achievement Hunter crew would travel to perform in live theatrical and concert venues, and that's a really big step. It's one thing to perform for a camera or a bunch of cameras, and

it's another thing to appear in front of a live crowd. Also, the technical requirements of Let's Plays meant there were a lot of things that could go wrong. Technically making sure that all the camera and video feeds from video game footage to the live shots that are capturing the reactions of the Achievement Hunter crew, that's considerable. And making this a show that could play in different venues meant that

you could never count on the same setup twice. So I can't even imagine how intense the build in process was for those shows. Rooster Teeth also overhauled its website that year, the company launched an app, because everyone had an app. If you were a content company online, you had an app. I remember when how Stuff Works launched its app because my former co host, Chris Pollette and I got together and we shot a whole bunch of really dorky crnch videos promoting that app. If you can

find those online, go ahead and watch them. They are incredibly awkward. I love every single one of them, as cringey as they are, so I believe they're still online. But holy cal that was That was a time, and whether anyone actually would adopt your app that was up in the air because they got to be so many apps that I feel like a lot of people were just like, I don't want to install more stuff on

my phone. I saw a lot of content apps wither and die because companies just moved away from supporting them like they would launch them, and then within a year or two it was like the company had forgotten that there was an app there. But at the time, the conventional wisdom was that you needed to have an app

for iOS and for Android for one thing. Designing an app that had mobile users in mind from the get go was sometimes a little easier than having to retool your website so that it would look good and be usable on a phone screen. Twenty fifteen was also the year that the media company screw Attack would merge with rooster Teeth. Full Screen acquired screw Attack in twenty fourteen, so that actually made screw Attack and Rooster Teeth two

media companies that belonged under the same corporate umbrella. But in twenty fifteen they decided to kind of join forces, and screw Attack moved its content over to the rooster Teeth site. The journey of ScrewAttack is another complicated one.

At one point it spun off a group called game Attack, which also was part of the Rooster Teeth network, But then in twenty nineteen, Game Attack would leave Rooster Teeth to become an independent project and screw Attack would essentially dissolve, and the only thing that would remain from ScrewAttack was a series called Death Battle, which is still a thing, at least as of the recording of this episode. One event in twenty fifteen that had a massive impact on

Rooster Teeth was the death of Monty Ohm. As I mentioned in the previous episode, Ohm came up with the concept for the series Ruby Rwby and had spent countless houtur is working on company projects. I mean he slept at Rooster Teeth on many occasions. He had a deep passion for his work. In early twenty fifteen, he had a catastrophic allergic reaction and he later passed away, and his death shook the company, which was a very tight

knit community itself. Ohm was very well liked and respected within Rooster Teeth, and his passing brought up questions as to the future of Ruby. His colleagues pledged to continue the series om had created and to see it through to the story's conclusion. Whether they will actually be able to do that or not still remains an open question. We'll probably talk about that a little bit in the next episode. In twenty sixteen, Rooster Teeth would debut a

series called Day five. Now I call this one out not because it's particularly special, but because I'm in it kind of but only barely. And I don't think I've ever actually spotted myself in the one shot that I'm in so way better. In twenty twelve, I attended my one and only RTX event. I was just there incognito. I wasn't there as a guest or anything. I was there as just an attendee. I was checking it out and I had the chance to be an extra in a scene for Day five. So the concept for the

series was that a mysterious effect hits the earth. It causes anyone who falls asleep to die. So a very small group of people figure this out and they try to stay awake in order to avoid death. But the longer they remain awake, the harder they find it to tell reality from hallucinations. And it's called Day five because it's the fifth day of being awake. Anyway, while we shot this scene in twenty twelve, the series itself would not premiere until twenty sixteen. It took a really long

time in development to get the story right. Still can't see me though, but I am there. I'm laying on the street in Austin, Texas. Also in twenty sixteen, a new channel formed in Rooster Teeth. This one was called cow Chow and it would largely focus on couch based co op let's play sessions with lots of comedy and more than a little bit of destruction, which would lead

to issues with the channel's various landlords. The Couchop Crew would ultimately locate their studio in Los Angeles, but after three years of making content, they shut down as several prominent members would leave to pursue other opportunities. Rooster Teeth would also partner with another media company called kind of Funny, founded by former IGN editors Greg Miller and Colin Moriarty.

Kind of Funny would not become a direct Rooster t subsidiary. Instead, they leaned on Rooster Teeth to handle duties like merchandise sales and ad sales for Kind of Funny properties. Okay, we're gonna take another quick break. When we come back, I'm going to talk about one of the early controversies that broke out from Rooster Teeth. But let's take a

quick break to thank our sponsors, and we're back. So, as I mentioned before the break, we would be entering into a time where controversies would start coming out of the company. Not that there were never controversies in Rooster Teeth earlier, but for a long time the company was such that one it was small enough that it wasn't really getting that much attention from mainstream media. Two it

was kind of insulated by its community. You have a lot of community members who are personally invested in Rooster Teeth and the health of that company, and as part of that investment, these members, these community members helped protect the company for good and for ill. Sometimes they act as almost insulation from outward criticism or outside criticism. But that didn't mean that bad things weren't occasionally happening. I mean that's just going to happen with any organization, especially

as it gets larger. You're eventually going to get people who either make bad decisions or are bad people, or they're just mixed with other folks that they don't work with very well and problems arise. So around this time, Rooster Teeth would hire on Mika Burton, the daughter of actor LeVar Burton. Mika would work with Achievement Hunter, among other departments. Now I mention her specifically not because of her father, because no matter who her dad is, she

actually did really great work with Rooster Teeth. I liked her work all by herself. Instead, I mentioned Mika Burton because she was someone who first shed light on an unpleasant side to Rooster Teeth, the company side. Because again, community members were mostly familiar with the content the company produced, which included things like podcasts that seemed to give a behind the scenes look at people's lives and what was

going on at the company. But it's kind of like social media, where you post the stuff you want people to know about, and you don't necessarily talk about the stuff you would rather folks not know about, which seems kind of counterintuitive because if you listen to any of those Rooster Teeth podcasts, the hosts talk about really personally embarrassing stuff, but it's not stuff on the level of

what I'm talking about here with Mika Burton. So Burton left Rooster Teeth just two years after she joined the company, and later, and somewhat reluctantly, she cited issues she had with the company itself, things that she faced like abuse and, according to a message she posts on Twitter, being abandoned, blacklisted, ignored, and most of all not believed. When is your dad going to hate us? Now was a bigger concern than my well being. I knew I had to go, That's

what she posted on Twitter now. She shared those thoughts in twenty twenty, that was two years after she had already left the company, and it was also during the Black Lives Matter movement. When she shared this, members of Rooster Teeth spoke out about their failure to listen to Burton and to take her concerns seriously, and to speak up against those who would dismiss her and abuse her,

and to be good allies. It was not lost on Rooster Teeth's audience that the company was largely built off the work of a bunch of white guys, and while these guys weren't necessarily bad people, they weren't always the best allies either. Burton was really reserved in her statements. She didn't want to make the whole matter about herself or her situation. Instead, she wanted to stress the importance of listening and learning. She said, that's what the company

really failed to do. But Burton's statements would not be the last from a former employee voicing grievances against the company, including implications and accusations that the company failed to protect black employees from abuse. We'll talk more about another of those in the next episode. Anyway, back to twenty sixteen. At this point, Mika Burton has just been hired on and we don't know anything about those problems yet. It would take four years for that to kind of start

to trickle out. At twenty sixteen, Rooster Teeth Games officially released the title Ruby Grim Eclipse. This was based off the animated series Ruby, originally developed by a fan of the company named Jordan Scott. Rooster Teeth actually hired Jordan Scott in twenty fourteen. I think they even announced it publicly at RTX that year, and then they continued to develop the game that Scott had created. It entered full release on Windows on July fifth, twenty sixteen, and it's

a co op hack and slash action game. Rooster Teeth Games would serve as both a video game developer and a video game publisher for independent titles, while Rooster Teeth would publish games from developers like Team Chaos and Invisible Collective. The next actual Rooster Teeth Games title, the one that they would produce themselves, was an asynchronous shooter game called

Vicious Circle. This game released in August twenty nineteen two let's say mixed reviews, not that that many people actually bought the game, which switched to a free to play model just a couple of months later, complete with refunds for those who had purchased the game at full price. Earlier gamers complained that the title had limited content and not much replay value, and the lack of a strong community around the title meant there just wasn't much to do.

I mean, it's a team based game, and if there's no one online, there's no one to team with. And not only was that team based, one player would take on the role of the monster that you were supposed to kill. So if there's no one on, there's no one to be the monster or the monster hunters. So it sort of fizzled out. In fact, not just sort of. According to streamdb dot info, the peak number of online players at any given time was just three hundred and

twenty three players total. Like that's not good. Vicious Circle, by the way, would become one of the favorite targets for finger pointers who were looking to explain why Rooster Teeth was headed in the wrong direction or why things just didn't seem to be as good as they used to be. Now, I'm not saying that the quality of content at Rooster Teeth was actually in decline, but for some folks, that was the conclusion they came to, and a lot of the blame fell on a perceived lack

of focus at the company. There was this perception among this particular circle of critics that Rooster Teeth was just trying too many things and throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if anything was sticking, when they should have been focused on keeping the quality of their flagship content at a high level. Now, again, that's not me saying this,

it's this group of critics. You also have to keep in mind that at this point, the company is more than a decade old, right, You've got the people who have been creating the content, some of whom have been working on it since the beginning, and burnout is a real thing. So a lot of people were kind of handing the reins over to a new generation of storytellers. And this transition meant that things would start to change.

Sometimes the style of narrative would change, the style of animation or presentation might change, the tone would change, and with that would come critics who don't want anything to ever change. Right, there are folks who just despise change. And I get it, Like when you find something you love, you don't want it to see it change because then it's no longer the thing. That you fell in love with.

I totally understand that this was a case with Ruby, for example, with Monty Ohms passing, there was this deep concern within the fan community that Ruby itself was going to go astray, that it was going to move away from Ohms's vision, and that without his guidance, it was going to become something else. As for my own opinion, at this point, my tastes in content were actually changing. I felt a lot of the stuff that Rooster Teeth was producing was really aimed at a younger audience, and

that's totally fine. It just meant that the content was starting to not resonate with me as much as it had when I was younger. I was sticking with the Rooster Teeth podcast because that largely still felt in line with what I had found entertaining with the original company, and I had become personally invested in hearing more about the misadventures of the various hosts, sort of that parasocial relationship thing going on there. But I didn't get the

feeling that the company was necessarily losing focus. I didn't agree with that criticism. I did get the feeling that there were some corporate forces that were starting to affect Rooster Teeth's direction, and that perhaps the decisions of the company were in the process of making were somewhat at odds with what the folks at Rooster Teeth had actually

wanted to do. In other words, sometimes the company comes in and tells you to do something, and while you might not agree with the decision, you don't necessarily have the power to say no anyway. Rooster Teeth Games would develop only one other video game title itself published others, but only one other video game title would be produced by Rooster Teeth Games. That was actually a remaster of Ruby Grim Eclipse, and that happened in twenty twenty one.

So not only did they only publish one more in house game, it was a remaster of a previous game they had published. The division also developed card and board games, including Million Dollars Butt the Game and Achievement Hunter Heist. I've got Million Dollars Butt, but I've never played Achievement Hunter Heist, even though it looked cute when I saw the promotional video for it. Now, this seems like we're getting to a pretty good place to stop for episode two.

As I said when I first started putting these together. I didn't even plan on it being two episodes, but as I was working on this one, it got to a length that was just unmanageable. It would have been like a two hour podcast. Now we're still technically in the early days of Rooster Teeth, at least as far as it being part of a much larger corporate entity. But I do have one more thing I want I want to say that happened in twenty sixteen that does

relate to that particular part of Rister Teeth's existence. In twenty sixteen, AT and T made a huge announcement it planned to acquire the media company Time Warner. Now, the history of both AT and T and Time Warner is super long and incredibly complicated, including issues with things like monopolies and antitrust lawsuits and all that kind of stuff.

So we're not going to go into all of that here, but we will say that Time Warner had already been through a pretty phenomenal flop of a merger with America Online back in the day, sometimes referred to as one of the worst mergers in corporate history, So could AT and T avoid the pitfalls that AOL had encountered previously? With its merger with Time Warner. In a word, no spoiler alert, the merger would actually take almost two years to complete. The deal closed into twenty eighteen, so we'll

talk more about this in the next episode. And also four years after that, AT and T would actually divest itself of Time Warner. Now at that time AT and T had renamed this division as Warner Media, and in twenty twenty two they sold WarnerMedia to Discovery Communications. So this is where all the Warner stuff comes from. Because you know, I've talked about Warner Brothers Discovery shutting down Rooster Teeth, but we hadn't actually talked about Warner yet.

That's because we're not even at the point where Warner as part of the media oversight for Rooster Teeth. But in twenty sixteen, the wheels are set in motion for that to happen. Anyway, that announcement was so far above the head of everyone at Rooster Teeth, and the deal would take so long to complete that it wouldn't immediately have an effect on the company, but eventually it would make a huge difference. Eventually. All right, this is where

we're going to say goodbye for now. On Wednesday, we will have part three of this, and that really will be the end of it, because I'm not going to go on and on and on. But again, it's a great opportunity to talk about lots of other things in the tech world, like the different monetization strategies multichannel networks, the fact that you had this one model for revenue generation that was working for this one company, and whether or not that would be applicable to other channels out there.

Some channels did find some success doing stuff that Rooster Teeth does, others would find that that just wasn't working for them. And also this conflict between traditional media that desperately wanted to tap into online distribution because clearly that's where things are headed at this point, and the fact that they're so firmly entrenched in an older strategy that works for terrestrial media that would be a huge issue.

One of the biggest problems that I think Rooster Teeth would encounter is working for a corporation that ultimately didn't have a full understanding of how the online digital world worked compared to the traditional television media world. I know that my own personal experience working for an online media company that at one point was part of a more conventional television cable based company was really frustrating because of that disconnect, So we'll talk more about that in the

next episode. We'll also talk about some other really unfortunate controversies that came out of Rooster Teeth and some times of real upheaval, including an unfortunate time where the company had to lay off a significant portion of its staff for the first time in its history. But that's for the next episode. In the meantime, I hope you are all well and I will talk to you again really soon.

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