Well, guess that's a great advertisement for downloading anything from YouTube you might want to watch again some day. A Creator might get divorced and purge any content involving their SO regardless of any relevance to the content in question.
I understood why they did it, but it sucks that all that content is going to perhaps be lost for any potential future viewers. Undeadwood was the first thing I ever watch under the critical role name, so I wouldn’t be a fan today if not for that. I have very mixed feelings about this.
Yeah, I completely understand and support the company's decision but personally still sad that I'm missing out on hundreds of hours of good content. I never got around to watching Undeadwood which is supposedly a lot of people's favorite, and Talks Machine was great.
I genuinely think this is the wrong decision (total content removal & inaccessibility). The best compromise would be to follow in the footsteps of WB and Disney, and offer the content is some sort of alternate repository with a disclosure. Something like "BWF is no longer associated with CR due to acts of domestic violence, but we're still offering the content for archival purposes".
No ads, perhaps not even any streaming. Maybe just download links, or official torrents, or something.
I'm not sure it makes sense to make a call on whether this is the right/wrong decision when we know next to nothing about the specific reasons leading to the removal.
Could be legal reasons, could be something in BWF's contract, or maybe it's purely for the personal comfort for Ashley (which if so, overrides anything else imo). We do not know.
I'm sad to lose the content too. Especially all the insight from the cast, and the BTS interviews. But I also cannot blame them for removing it, it's totally within their rights to do so.
Maybe they're trying to cover their bases? I don't know what contracts they had with BWF for appearing on the channel during their whole streaming journey, but I imagine they didn't have ironclad contracts when they were under Geek & Sundry, and only got the particulars down more concretely when they established their own company/channel. Those terms may have also changed once BWF was let go.
From how I understood it, BWF was also trying to blackmail Ashley for money, and the fact that he still appeared on the channel while no longer being paid may have contributed to that sentiment. So by having BWF-centric content wiped out officially, it cripples any murky legalities he can claim.
yogscast is another example. Some creeps in the network got exposed, they put out a public statement but they did not remove any previous content with those people in it.
Brian W Foster. Ex-fiance of Ashley's who used to work for CR, then got fired (Reddit hobbydrama thread explains this in great detail). Recently, Ashley filed a restraining order against him and there are abuse allegations.