Culture Machinima Is Officially Dead - The Original Bane of YouTube Content Creators IS FUCKING DEAD (2000-2019)

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https://www.gameinformer.com/2019/02/02/machinima-officially-shuttered-81-employees-laid-off/

Machinima Officially Shuttered, 81 Employees Laid Off
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A couple of weeks ago we saw the unceremonious gutting of Youtube creator network Machinima, as its entire video library vanished on Youtube as contracts were terminated or transferred to another network called Fullscreen as part of Machinima's merger with the Time Warner-owned Otter Media. Yesterday the company announced what we all knew was coming: It's shutting down.

Deadline reports the company has made an official statement on the matter, including the announcement it is purging 81 people from its staff as part of its own end. "Machinima has ceased its remaining operations, which includes layoffs," a spokesperson told Deadline. "[CEO] Russell Arons remains with Machinima, and is assisting with transitional activities as she explores new opportunities."

Over the years, Machinima had been host to various gaming-related videos and parodies, including its namesake creative content made entirely with in-game assets of games. Some of its popular videos included a remake of Terminator 2 in Grand Theft Auto V and the Street Fighter series Resurrection.
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TowinKarz said:
It couldn't circle the bowl forever, the latest round of journo layoffs should signal that anyone not making a definitive profit is on the chopping block at ALL media outlets.

Games, social commentary, sports, nothings' off-limits as the VC for keeping these useless SJW-flavored sites alive in the hopes they'll SOMEDAY turn a profit is fading fast.

Honestly, I thought they were already dead.
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I guess it's a little too optimistic to hope that as the VC and ad money dry up, some of the opportunistic cancer """fans""" exploiting hobbies will wither away. The idea that all niche interests could earn you clickbait money has fucked up the whole internet. For every one real website remaining, there must be 10 wannabe Kotakus filled with people who clearly have no knowledge or interest in anything they write about.
 
Maggots on a Train v2 said:
I guess it's a little too optimistic to hope that as the VC and ad money dry up, some of the opportunistic cancer """fans""" exploiting hobbies will wither away. The idea that all niche interests could earn you clickbait money has fucked up the whole internet. For every one real website remaining, there must be 10 wannabe Kotakus filled with people who clearly have no knowledge or interest in anything they write about.
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I just bought a new laptop and did some research beforehand. There are so many garbage tech sites shitting up the search results. If you read the articles they tell you close to nothing. It's sometimes just a press release and worthless comments like "this laptop is fast you guys, buy it by pressing our Amazon link!".
 
RIP in piss and I don't think I've seen a single thing on this since before they threw off Dip Shit Phil.
 
Maggots on a Train v2 said:
I guess it's a little too optimistic to hope that as the VC and ad money dry up, some of the opportunistic cancer """fans""" exploiting hobbies will wither away. The idea that all niche interests could earn you clickbait money has fucked up the whole internet. For every one real website remaining, there must be 10 wannabe Kotakus filled with people who clearly have no knowledge or interest in anything they write about.
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In roundabout way, it may lead to a lessening of the noose at places like YT, (:optimistic:) but hear me out.

Their censorship-fest of the last few years was driven mostly for PR and "notice me, woke sempai investors!" reasons. Sure, the left-leaning overlords like the Zucks and Jacks had no qualms about kicking out conservatives from "THEIR" platform, but, that wasn't the plan from the start, otherwise we would've seen something like this far before Drump triggered them all to hell and back. They pay lip service to socjus, but I don't think that's what motivates the recent banhammer tactics. They were aggressively sterilizing themselves (and further aggressively weeding out the right-wingers in the already designated-to-be-weeded patch) in the hopes that would lead to profitability (it didn't) and failing that, venture capital (it didn't) because they just can't bring themselves to not follow the progressive paragon that diversity is profit, no matter how many times that's been shown to Just. Not. Work.

If that doesn't work, there's no reason to keep a hate-speech strike conflict resolution team on staff..... but that's why they love thier bots, or the idea they represent, doing for free the work they'd have to have hired 1,000 full time human moderators for, even if the bot gets confused and flags harmless cat videos as having "nazi content" because one of the kitties had a black spot on his chin the AI bot thought was Hitler.....

Anyway, none of this censorship apparatus is popular or profitable, and if it can't draw in new investors, or new customers, well, it's get woke go broke, are they stubborn enough to ride that flaming airplane all the way into the ground?
 
thismanlies said:
Speaking of DSP, didn't Machinima strike people for uploading clips of him spanking his monkey on a live stream? I wonder if they still own the rights to that piece of intellectual property.
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Probably not. EmptyHero's video of Phil's "accident" that got shoah'd by Machinima (likely at Phil's request since he was still with them then) got reupped a few days back -- partly because Machinima is fucking dead, and partly because his channel got demonetized so he went "lol fuck it" and reupped it.
 
I have to wonder how much of this nosedive into oblivion was due to the botched Transformers Prime Wars Trilogy that a ton of people didn't like.
 
Keystone said:
What's the story with that?
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Hasbro got Machinima to make a series of Transformers cartoons for them, broken into 3 seasons:
Combiner Wars, Titans Return, and Power of the Primes.

The finished product looked flashy but was lacking in frame rate so the animation looked stilted in places (CGI). In the first series they largely "cheaped out" on the voice cast (although the voice actors for Starscream and Megatron were great) - they got MattPatt as Computron for instance; in the second one they actually got Optimus' original voice actor (Peter Cullen), Wil Wheaton (as Perceptor), and Michael Dorn (as Fortress Maximus), and in the third one they splurged on Mark Hamill, Judd Nelson (the original Hot Rod from Transformers The Movie in 1986), Gregg Berger (the OG Grimlock) and Ron Perlman.

The fans were on the whole not pleased, particularly with how Windblade got jammed in there and mary sued the f out. (Check out this Abridged episode that points this and all the other problems out
)

There was a serious problem with pacing in both the episodes and the series as a whole. Since it was chopped into episodes of not even 10 minutes each (at first), it didn't really leave time for a proper unfolding of the plot or character development. Even if their writers were good (and arguably they probably weren't), if you limit time like that you're not going to end up with something decent that makes sense.

Unfortunately the Prime Wars Trilogy is mostly scrubbed from youtube but I think there are other places where episodes may be found.

I'm not surprised Machinima went under; the fan reaction to the entire thing was overwhelmingly bad and I think they lost a lot of $ over it. Especially if the fallout from the Prime Wars Trilogy contributed the black eye they ended up with.
 
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