Good things come to those who wait...?

[surgeworks]

RWBY, it seems, has not been totally canned.



Warner have given Rooster Teeth until May to close their studios. Rooster Teeth's RWBY team ("CRWBY") have expressed a desire to maintain control of the IP, but Warner is still looking to sell it.

Dillon Goo--who worked on early RWBY for Volumes 2 and 3, and works closely with Shane Newville--has expressed an interest in buying RWBY. This has the support of at least one ex-RWBY voice actor already.

Whether Dillon and Shane can actually do this, or what they would do if they did, is up in the air. Dillon's studio is relatively young and unlikely to have much money, especially given what Warner's asking prices will be. If they could secure investors, then maybe something could come of it. There wouldn't necessarily need to be a continuation of RWBY or a full reboot; they could simply buy it to make some funds off of merch and make different RWBY content.

Either way, it seems that I chose the exact right time to post my final thoughts on RWBY. I know that many fans of the current RWBY, driven by spite as they are, are insisting that "CRWBY" be brought along if RWBY is to be bought out (this is a terrible idea), seemingly not realize that Dillon and Shane are "CRWBY".

I imagine Jessie James Grelle is not the only person to feel like a Dillon Goo RWBY is worth believing in more than what RWBY looks like right now. The number of ex-RWBY fans most likely outnumbers the remaining diehard stans by a very, very wide margin.

Personally, I'm vying for a hard reboot from Shane more in line with what Monty envisioned. Some things are fate, and this seems like one of those things.

Comments

[surgeworks]

Everything they did seemed to make the problem worse, as none of those channels took off. The only thing they succeeded at was turning the bleed into a hemorrhage. As views dropped, so did the spirits of the community. And there was plenty to help them drop even further.

Interesting so far; Insight everyone's mostly aware of with how YouTube's kowtowing to advertisers has led to content creation difficulties, though nothing I could blame the company's entire downfall for.

The problem Roosterteeth ran into (along with there not being any real benefit in partnering) was that they were trying to make 7 more Achievement Hunters, without realizing AH is a fucking miracle.

Now this definitely rings a bell. Much the vibe of them trying to make a new RWBY with GenLock only to fall flat on their faces.

Onision

OH NO.

Besides Red vs. Blue, RWBY is Roosterteeth’s biggest IP. The Japanime following four teenage waifus huntresses, the stand-in for the head writer, and a very bad Neko-based metaphor for the civil rights movement has been going strong for over a decade now,

Well, I don't know about going strong, if at least not for a decade, but no other falsehoods were spoken.

Roosterteeth is a 2000s internet company. This means its fanbase contains some of the most violent, racist, and cruel fans imaginable.

Oh wow. That's...not..........untrue. Turret Run should be a comedian with brutally honest chops like that.

They tried apologizing but they’d just proved the promise of change meant nothing. They’d finally burned through years of goodwill just as they had a glimmer of hope they could turn things around.

This, too, is painfully accurate.

After reading the whole thing, I'm impressed by the comprehensive depth of the post. I don't have a Reddit account, but if you do, please give my compliments to Turret Run.

Focusing mostly on RWBY as I do, which is the part I was exposed to by far the most, I'd like to add these thoughts:

At the end of the day, Rooster Teeth can blame a number of factors, but the biggest one is still themselves. While it's true late-stage capitalism and the shift of YouTube into an advertiser-riddled den of rats has been catastrophic for content creators, what is also true is that that shift created a divided class. While it's now harder than ever to become a "big name youtuber", those at the top are, still, treated with more leniency; YouTube has openly admitted it bends the rules sometimes for big-name creators that draw in money. Rooster Teeth were definitely a big enough presence to stay afloat, if they carefully managed their future and their workforce. Naturally, neither happened.

As for the RWBY part, I will also add in some points I think were missed: While Achievement Hunter is far and away what Rooster Teeth is known for at the end of the day, the fame RWBY achieved was exemplary. Many content creators could only dream of making something half as good and a tenth as popular--it was very much a titan with a powerful and rapidly ballooning fanbase. This is why they made it the center of their large web of content in the mid-2010s and leaned so much on its success, and why they should have been much more careful with how they treated it. RWBY sinking simply can't be blamed purely on GenLock, because no matter how much Calxiyn wants this to be so, Genlock is not what RWBY fans got angry about and left over. Miles and Kerry sinking it with their shoddy writing and stunning displays of bigotry and manipulation had very long-reaching consequences.



A lot of people that I've seen who vibe more with Achievement Hunter or Red vs. Blue aren't wrong to demonstrate the full breadth of those series' hype and popularity, but I do find many of them underestimating that RWBY was, at one point, both genuinely popular and mainstream, hitting audiences well outside of the funny-gamer-youtuber bubble. RWBY might could have sustained the company even in the face of the daunting scandals, had they been able to nurture its popularity.

What surprises me the most in the late Rooster Teeth game was how so many of the moves were simply easy to predict failing. How many times have we seen an ailing creator or site try to move all of their shit to an exclusive walled-off pen, only to see that this shockingly does not improve revenue. I could've told you that wasn't going to work well in advance. The only route to success, the only guarantor of survival, was better material and a happier workforce. Neither were delivered.