Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The End of Rooster Teeth”.
Many businesses in the tech sector seem to be aiming to sell themselves off to a major player. Is there any subsection of the market, maybe such as high-end Leisure products? That could avoid that future? I mean, as far as I can tell the point of starting a business is um to make money. What and the best way to make money is to find some sucker with a lot of money and take it off their hands for them. That’S like how yeah that is. The goal in software is to sell. Generally, I mean that’s the goal in basically anything that’s not Mom and Pop, and I feel like I mean I wasn’t around when it was any different, but I feel like it wasn’t always like that. Like the point of running a business was to serve your customers and and and make money, but but not make more than you make necessarily by by just selling to someone else um, but part of it is like it seems to be driven both ways.
I’Ve talked about this before, but I have that friend who’s a vet who bought the practice that she worked at and ended up bidding against a large Veterinary acquisition company um. And so it seems to be a push pull right because, on the one hand, you’ve got people whose goal whose sole goal uh when they created their business, was to sell it for as much as possible. But then you’ve also got these acquisition.
Companies who exist only to acquire other businesses not to create not to create anything, and you know that can sometimes lead to really tragic results, because someone who wasn’t there and didn’t build it with their sweat, bled and tears is not necessarily going. I shouldn’t say not: NE is never going to treat something with the same respect as someone who did and uh you see this time and time again, uh Warner Brothers getting into our next topic here, shut down Rooster Teeth. Now I want to kind of preface this with saying: I didn’t really consume Rooster Teeth, content.
I didn’t follow any of the controversies that have taken place. I don’t know if they were resolved and everything was cool or if they were not resolved. So there could be a myriad of reasons why Rooster Teeth shut down, but what we know for sure is Warner. Brothers has shut him down at least 150 fulltime employees will lose their jobs, um, whoa and many of rooster. Teeth’S existing properties will either be sold or transferred elsewhere within its parent company. Um Warner Brothers hasn’t uh that hasn’t been the only controversial move that Warner Brothers has made recently uh Warner. Brothers is also delisting, an unknown number of game titles originally published by another subsidiary. Adult Swim, according to several of the gamees Developers, uh Michael M.
I think this might be a typo in my doc. But anyway, the creator of sound Dodger plus says he begged his Warner, Bros rep to transfer ownership of the game to him on Steam. Rather than remove it since see seeing as he still owned, the IP and the game rights – and this is a quote – I sent him a link to steam’s transfer page and explained clearly that it takes literally three clicks to transfer the ownership to me. He rejected my request, so the problem with this is not that it necessarily affects the ability of the game to still be available. He can relist it himself because he owns the rights which is really great, but he loses anyone who ever wishlisted the game. He loses all of the reviews of the game. The historical reviews of the game um, another Dev Owen, Deary uh – responded by offering a free download of his game.
Small radios, big televisions on his website, rather than have it completely disappear um. So our discussion question is: why would Warner Bros delist these games, rather than just leaving them alone? The only thing that I can possibly guess, tax thing yeah, that’s one possible option: uh speak speaking of uh seamless transitions into other topics. I definitely have some more to say about uh tax, writeoffs and tax deductions later on the show, because, anyway, the whole thing this week from the uh from the we read mean comments, video um, but that that’s one, that’s one potential option.
Another one. Is they just uh, don’t want to fund development of these and make sure that they don’t have any security potential liability? I yeah, I don’t know, I don’t know. I I it’s hard for me to imagine a mindset where you have something that is, as far as I can tell completely passive um requires no input from you whatsoever and generates any amount of Revenue.
However, small and just going, you know what I’ll just turn that off I just I I can’t I don’t get it. It doesn’t make any sense to me um. Does anyone have any additional context for this? Float plane chat anyone.
I don’t think so. I also don’t think, like I think it’s fairly accepted that games, especially single player games like they’re, not going to get security updates past a certain point and kind of who cares. One Dev, according to on ahead um, was told that he could relist the game if he removed everyone in Adult Swim games from the credits like what I uh weird. I don’t get it very weird yeah.
I don’t really get it um. I I saw you kind of, I saw you kind of Googling um Rooster Teeth did, were you were you checking if their controversies were resolved or what were you up? I looked that up um. They like fired somebody for something and there’s stuff, but there’s been they’ve. They’Ve existed for so long that there’s like been stuff over the years, it seems like they’ve, mostly resolved it, though uh. This is what I was more recently looking at was: oh Adult Swim games? Okay. What are we looking at here? We about Unicorn Attack, one of my favorites, oh okay, the the the Rick and Morty games, there’s a few of them in here, uh Rick and Morty, the virtual game, thingy yeah and pocket mores. What else are we looking at? I don’t recognize. I don’t recognize. Most of these most of these that doesn’t mean that it’s okay and we have no idea exactly. I had no idea there was a robot unicorn attack too being delisted. Is it any good? I don’t know, I don’t know if I’ll be able to know now H. I don’t see number two on Steam right now. In fact, I don’t see any Robot Unicorn Attack on Steam right now. Is it all already? Is it already pulled? I don’t think I don’t know. I don’t think the first one was ever on Steam. Oh okay! This isn’t a list of their games that are on Steam. This is just a list of got well where, where do you buy it uh the first one you didn’t buy. It was just a free web game. Oh okay, Robot Unicorn, Attack 2 is on mobile. Ah, so maybe maybe it’s just like a mobile Port – that’s not really a two, or I I’m not sure, not sure, but yeah that sucks any times anytime.
This kind of stuff happens, it sucks um. I like physical media. Physical media is good now, if it’s physical media, that just like links you to a thing that you have to download from then it is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter, but real physical media is good.
150 people working for Rooster Teeth. That’S a lot. It does seem like kind of a lot how many shows and stuff did they have. I know they have their own dedicated website, so that’ll be a chunk of it. I’M really not sure I I I don’t know what the uh. I don’t know what the revenue model was bought by full screen, which, in turn was bought by Otter Media before rooster, teth became part of Warner media under AT .