Brianna Wu / John Walker Flynt - "Biggest Victim of Gamergate," Failed Game Developer, Failed Congressional Candidate

  • 🏰 The Fediverse is up. If you know, you know.
  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Frank is so fascinating to me. Before he met Brianna, he probably had like half a million in the bank. Since then he's lost hundreds of thousands on that Rev60 along with all her surgeries. He has to do all the work on that failure of a game and failure of a political campaign that Brianna is too lazy to do.

Like I could sort of see a middle-aged man getting suckered into this stuff by a younger, attractive woman. But Brianna is grotesque and Frank has to be the laughingstock at whatever event he drags her out to.
 
Richard Stabone said:
Frank is so fascinating to me. Before he met Brianna, he probably had like half a million in the bank. Since then he's lost hundreds of thousands on that Rev60 along with all her surgeries. He has to do all the work on that failure of a game and failure of a political campaign that Brianna is too lazy to do.

Like I could sort of see a middle-aged man getting suckered into this stuff by a younger, attractive woman. But Brianna is grotesque and Frank has to be the laughingstock at whatever event he drags her out to.
Click to expand...
He must really enjoy the idea of owning a ghoul, like a lifetime goal or something.
 
Kosher Dill said:
Well, let's do a little more back-of-the-envelope math here. Here are the best guesses I could find online for podcast ad pricing for someone good enough to be on a network but not any kind of star:
Short ad at the beginning ("pre-roll"): $18 per 1000 listeners (CPM)
Long ad in the middle ("mid-roll"): $25 CPM
Revenue split between the podcast company and the creator(s): 50/50

I checked the latest Rocket episode and they have one pre-roll and one mid-roll ad, so let's say the network is grossing $43 per 1000 listeners on that show. Disruption has just one sponsor which I'm going to assume is mid-roll, so let's say that's another $25 per 1000. Let's average that out to $34 per 1000 over all episodes of all shows in the year, for Relay.

Assuming John is on an equal footing with his 3 co-hosts, him getting ~12K means the total revenue going to the creators is about $48K, meaning the total ad revenue coming into Relay would be $96K. Divide out the $34 per 1000 listens, and you get about 2.8 million total listens in the year, for all episodes of all shows.

Rocket had 49 episodes in 2016, and Disruption had 37. So these 86 episodes had to have averaged about 32800 listeners, every time, for the numbers to work out. Now, someone should check my math on this, but that sounds like bullshit. Either the Wu Crew is getting an insanely good CPM via cronyism, or there's something else going on.
Click to expand...
I would guess they just clustered all the 'other income' under the podcast. For instance: Wu definitely also Twitter-chilled for Nerf-guns as well, but that is nowhere to be found either.

However, it is also possible that Wu got suckered by Blue Apron. Instead of getting cash, she probably just got one year of a free subscription to the service.
 
WeaponsGradeAutism said:
So, a movie poster was requested. I deliver.

View attachment 221649
Click to expand...

There's going to be some tough competition at the box office this week.
(I'm sorry for tainting your memory, Robin Williams)

IMG_9048.JPG
 
Richard Stabone said:
Frank is so fascinating to me. Before he met Brianna, he probably had like half a million in the bank. Since then he's lost hundreds of thousands on that Rev60 along with all her surgeries. He has to do all the work on that failure of a game and failure of a political campaign that Brianna is too lazy to do.

Like I could sort of see a middle-aged man getting suckered into this stuff by a younger, attractive woman. But Brianna is grotesque and Frank has to be the laughingstock at whatever event he drags her out to.
Click to expand...
Frank is a lolcow himself but we never really get into an in-depth discussion of him because he's got just enough sense to hide most of it. That, and the distraction of being married to one of the biggest lolcows on the site.
 
Francis York Morgan said:
Frank is a lolcow himself but we never really get into an in-depth discussion of him because he's got just enough sense to hide most of it. That, and the distraction of being married to one of the biggest lolcows on the site.
Click to expand...

Basically his lolcow status stems about 90% just from the fact he's willingly married to Brianna Wu.
 
nets_awesome said:
Brianna and Franks financial disclosure:

Highlights
  • Brianna made roughly $50k from patreon, her radio show and other speeches/R60 purchases from January last year until today
  • She has a car loan and a loan against her $401k
  • Frank makes $175k/year

http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-pdfs/2017/10016803.pdf
Click to expand...

Head of Development
Giant Spacekat
Vice President (SP)
Giant Spacekat

I'm assuming Frank is the President of this "company" that currently employs 2 people.

Sr. Director, Head of Intellectual Property
(SP)
WAVE Life Sciences

Sr. Patent Agent (Jan. 2015 - Nov. 2015)
Novartis

Are these more of Frank's "companies"?

Kosher Dill said:
I dropped a more detailed breakdown of these financials in the War Room, but there's just one more thing I want to point out, or rather, the absence of one more thing.
There's no income from Steam!
Either Frank forgot to include this, or more likely, Rev60 PC made less than the reporting threshold of $200 last year :story: Assuming a 70/30 revenue split on Steam, that would mean fewer than 29 people bought the game - and a good fraction of those were people who just bought it to livestream and mock :lol:
Click to expand...

Rev60 has got to be one of the worst financial losses of any video game in history. If you adjust for percentage of value the "company" lost I think its the worst.

Richard Stabone said:
The financial disclosure is interesting. Shows that Brianna has no assets and zero income from her award-winning video game.

Couple of notes:

1) The Fidelity account is likely Frank's 401k since it's marked as tax-deferred. At his age with the kind of jobs he has worked, it's kind of low. Makes me think they had to pull from it a bunch over the years.

2) They are living paycheck to paycheck. They list no savings accounts or property in their assets. They are also renting as no mortgage appears under liabilities.

3) The loan against the 401k came last year in February. Wonder if it was needed to pay for someone to finish up Rev60.

4) Frank's income takes a rather big jump this year so far (on pace to make over $200k). I wonder if a chunk of that is coming from him selling off shares in the company he has accrued. He may not be making $175k a year in income. It could be him making $125k and him selling the shares that have fully vested each year to cover expenses.

Biggest takeaway is that Frank has been making big money and has almost nothing to show for it. The 401k is tiny for a couple that will be retiring in 15-20 years. Especially a couple that has no equity in a home. Also Brianna is living off e-welfare and a few side bucks from a podcast. The game on PC sold almost no copies.
Click to expand...

Maybe it's not one person. Most of the original employees were recruited off Craigslist and were underpaid. Maybe Frank did the same scheme again.

Luigi said:
He must really enjoy the idea of owning a ghoul, like a lifetime goal or something.
Click to expand...

Hey there, smooth skin.
 
Kosher Dill said:
Rocket had 49 episodes in 2016, and Disruption had 37. So these 86 episodes had to have averaged about 32800 listeners, every time, for the numbers to work out. Now, someone should check my math on this, but that sounds like bullshit. Either the Wu Crew is getting an insanely good CPM via cronyism, or there's something else going on.
Click to expand...

Let's look at it this way: $12k averages to $1k monthly, spread over 2 podcast shows. So that's $500 per month per podcast show.
With Rocket having 49 episodes last year, a single episode would net $125 per person. Doesn't seem impossible to me. I also wouldn't put it past Wu to fuck over her co-hosts, so that they are getting paid less. Take into account that Relay also has a feature to support podcast shows.
 
pandawan said:
With Rocket having 49 episodes last year, a single episode would net $125 per person. Doesn't seem impossible to me.
Click to expand...
$125 per person, split 4 ways and then split 50/50 with Relay, means one episode would need to take in $1000 of raw ad revenue. Divide out the CPM and you still end up with tens of thousands of weekly listeners, which seems insane for such a terrible show. Wouldn't that make them more popular than DarkSydePhil, who actually does make a living at this (sort of)?
 
Maradontia said:
Rev60 has got to be one of the worst financial losses of any video game in history. If you adjust for percentage of value the "company" lost I think its the worst.
Click to expand...
I was going to say I could think of one that sold worse, and I'm just going to bring it up for the sake of comparison.

I had to look it up again, but it's called Sukeban Shachou Rena, and it's a really fucking weird Japanese Wii game about a blogging cat or some shit. It was reportedly the worst-selling Wii game ever made, and I remember when I first heard about it I'd been told it sold something like 100 copies in its opening week. That's already better than Rev60 SE, which apparently sold 29 or fewer copies since its release months ago.

Even then, the cat game apparently gained a small cult following that at one point tried to get it localized for an English release. It also got some exposure on Youtube, which I imagine would've helped sales in the long run, but I can't find any updated sales info on the game so I can't be sure. Also, I have no idea how much it cost to produce the cat game, but looking at gameplay footage, I'm willing to say "not much".

I guess what I'm saying is, even awful games can sell, simply on the merit of being awful. So it's stunning to me that even with people like Lowtax and Oney ripping on Rev60, it still managed to sell worse than the worst-selling game I can think of. The only games that I can fathom selling worse are RPG/Game Maker abominations that nobody's ever heard of and that cost next to nothing to produce in the first place - the kind of shit @Jaimas would play, in other words. So, in my highly uneducated opinion, I think there's a good chance you might be right. Leave it to Wu to break new ground in the realm of failure.
 
sgetti said:
I guess what I'm saying is, even awful games can sell, simply on the merit of being awful. So it's stunning to me that even with people like Lowtax and Oney ripping on Rev60, it still managed to sell worse than the worst-selling game I can think of.
Click to expand...

There's so bad it's good, and so bad it just sucks, and Rev60 is clearly the latter. Also, most of the people who might be inclined to drop a couple bucks on a shitty game for cheap yuks actively hate the piece of shit John Walker Flynt and would never give him a penny of income on purpose.

Also for anyone who has never seen that deranged cat game, here's one of the mini-games from it.


Unlike Rev60, it's so fucked up it's actually interesting.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom