Rooster Teeth Shut Down By Warner Bros. Discovery

Fullscreen bought RT ten years ago.

They got schlorped into Warner's miasma through several "corporate restructurings" that somehow involved AT&T owning them. AT&T owns Warner, apparently? Owned Warner, past-tense. In any case AT&T tried to sell or spin off RT three years ago, and it just got dragged along instead.

Unfortunately this has been a long time coming. They were on top of the internet circa 2010, and tried expanding into a whole bunch of new things, few of which really worked. RWBY was always a better idea than it was a show, and when Monty died, it went from 'less than it ought to be' to 'even less than that.' The RWBY games somehow flopped in total obscurity. I'm not even sure what they did wrong, there. They looked fine and the scope was reasonable. Unlike that asymmetrical shooter they burned some pile of money on. Vicious Circle, right. A wacky frenetic audio-bark-spam collectathon deathmatch, the mechanics of which did not even matter, because a multiplayer-only game requires instant widespread adoption. Slow sales guarantee even slower sales. If only there was a phrase describing that sort of feedback loop!

RvB was shockingly good, basically the whole time, but it is niche as fuck. A soap opera for palette-swap Master Chiefs nodding their heads to talk? Yeah, congrats on the mindfuck time-travel arc, but you're not getting on real TV. Camp Camp should've, though - I have no goddamn idea why Adult Swim never snapped that up. Cartoon Network being tightfisted, I guess. They did a few other cartoons and almost-cartoons, none of them were cheap, and none of them were amazing.

Their live-action shows, proper, never interested me, because I don't care about ghost hunting, reality TV, or scripted mystery nonsense. Their sketch comedy was great! Until they stopped doing it. For some reason. I'm sure Immersion just ran out of ideas. Million Dollars But was a lot of setup for very short videos. For that much effort they were better-off doing RTAA and other animated versions of recorded conversations. A lot of great interactions were in the middle of Let's Play videos that wider audiences would probably never watch - and trimming those down to a few sketchy illustrations per week highlighted how their best quality was just people talking to each other.

Let's Play videos were the premiere source of some guys talking for an hour, when Achievement Hunter was fresh and new. (When people knew what the fucking name meant.) Those videos got longer and more complex, and every guy besides Ray got chattier and louder, and basically it was a cacophony by the time Etika and Fiona showed up. Still many great moments - but the balance was different, and the audience had changed. Alfredo's TTT "lightning round" remains fantastic.

Podcasts were kinda there from the beginning, and also showed up incredibly late. Drunk Tank, later the Rooster Teeth Podcast, was exactly what you'd expect from that era. They expanded into Off Topic and Always Open, god, must've been a decade ago. Each had an extra-special after-podcast for First members - genuinely a good idea, as a recurring revenue source. They spun off some subject-specific podcasts like Red Web and Black Box Down. These were all excellent decisions... possibly excepting Geoff & Griffon's relationship advice podcast, right before they divorced... but they did nnnot require the sort of expanded company Rooster Teeth had become. And even with all the people who left, since I fell off watching their stuff regularly, I can't see any way they could've cleanly split the company. A lot of it relied on crossover between groups. And that was before people started getting married.

Anything on Youtube was ultimately strangled by The Algorithm, especially once swearing on the internet became a no-no, and especially once Minecraft was declared "for children." The game itself is older than the audience for Youtube's ads on it. Meanwhile RT's own video site... kinda sucked, if we're honest. Not awful. Not great. They were pioneers of distributing video via the internet. I still have some .mov episodes of RvB. But just watching a series in-order was a hassle. It defaulted to reverse chronological. That is never the right option. And if you were watching shit on a second monitor, autoplay was downright aggressive. That sort of ass-ache is what paying customers got, year after year, for the sort of shouting-match Garry's Mod sludge that was abundant on Youtube and honestly better on Twitch.

There was a point, right before Lazer Team, where it really seemed like the company could take off and be more than some dorks with cameras talking over video games. And the feeling throughout the year after that was... yeah, maybe not.

They mentioned the last season of RVB now being the final season, so it sounds like the end unless they can get someone else to fund things, buy the rights, or otherwise decide to continue the series without being part of Rooster Teeth. I'd guess maybe that'll be easier for RWBY than the others as it's closer to just being a regular TV show with an established viewership.

You probably will wish it did. But I'm sure they're planning on doing something with AI for it.