Poll of the Day > Rooster Teeth is officially dead (Makers of Red vs Blue, and RWBY)

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://roosterteeth.com/g/post/af39b172-be74-4398-94f8-908c3f4c5d6e

Officially, unfortunately. They've been in a state of unlife for at least four years, and my interest in their content died about nine years ago. It's still a sad thing to see.

Who will take over the development of the RWBY series?

Yeah they used to do some really cool stuff, but haven't for a long long time

Humble_Novice posted...

Who will take over the development of the RWBY series?

Considering they were owned by Warner Bros./Discovery you'll be lucky if they don't wipe it out for a tax writeoff.

Humble_Novice posted...

Who will take over the development of the RWBY series?

Watch Netflix try a live action RWBY.

Entity13 posted...

Officially, unfortunately. They've been in a state of unlife for at least four years, and my interest in their content died about nine years ago. It's still a sad thing to see.

Yeah, I believe it was Gen:Lock what did them in 5 years ago. And they have been bleeding money since. They werent a money sink, but probably were profitable or very profitable before that, but after Gen:Lock with A list celebrity voice talent, and the show not really attracting any new viewers, they just started to rapidly sink.

they did it to themselves.

hell of a time to stop
they were doing rwby and justice league stuff

Entity13 posted...

Officially, unfortunately. They've been in a state of unlife for at least four years, and my interest in their content died about nine years ago. It's still a sad thing to see.

This. Though while lost interest in RvB about 9 years ago, I was still into RWBY until about 6 years ago (around the time they moved it exclusively to the Rooster Teeth site).

I was still more or less into Achievement Hunter until about 4-5 years ago... but they started foundering a bit just before Covid, took a major shit during Covid, and then losing Ryan and Jeremy was pretty much the breaking point. It also didn't help that every time one of the older members (Geoff, Gavin, Ryan, Jeremy) left they were almost always replaced by someone worse (sometimes much worse). So there was just a slow yet inevitable downslide.

But yeah, the company as a whole has been dead or dying for years now. About the only part of it that most people still cared about at this point was the podcast division, which is mentioned as being the only part they're not closing. So this is pretty much the most unsurprising announcement ever (especially since they already killed off Achievement Hunter about 5 months ago).



Humble_Novice posted...

Who will take over the development of the RWBY series?

Probably no one. They were already at the point where they were talking about having to beg for money from Kickstarter to continue it. A lot of people were already assuming there might not be a season 10 even before this.

There's also the fact that even some of the most hardcore fans were willing to admit that it feels like they've completely lost the thread of the plot, so even if they got multiple more seasons the likelihood of the show ever coming to a satisfying end was pretty slim.

At this point it's almost better to just put a bullet in the corpse than keep dragging it around for a few more years. The outcome will be the same and at least this way it'll waste less money and less of our time.



rjsilverthorn posted...

Considering they were owned by Warner Bros./Discovery you'll be lucky if they don't wipe it out for a tax writeoff.

This might be the most likely scenario.

Which means if anyone out there really likes RWBY they should probably consider trying to track down some DVD copies of the various seasons, because if it does get the tax write-off treatment it will never be allowed to appear on any streaming service ever again, and will never be released on DVD again.

And RT has already pulled it off YouTube, and there's a good chance their site isn't going to last very long if the company as a whole is being dissolved. So it might become fully lost media.



ChronoXGP posted...

hell of a time to stop
they were doing rwby and justice league stuff

Not exactly. They did a RWBY/DC crossover, but there's no guarantee they were going to do more, especially since WB already has their own established animation studio, and RT's animation department has been having trouble for nearly a decade at this point.

RT's basically been bleeding money for WB for years now, and the WB/Discovery merger has the company looking over their books a lot more closely than ever before to cut dead weight. So this cut was probably pretty much inevitable.



PMarth2002 posted...

Watch Netflix try a live action RWBY.

It wouldn't be Netflix.

But I could see WBD trying to do something like that for Max. They'd originally planned to start producing a fair amount of original content for Max before Covid hit. RWBY might be worth doing because it's just about the only RT-related property WBD can actually utilize (RvB would probably cause rights conflict with Halo, and almost nothing else they've done has ever really been enough of a hit to really attempt to exploit).

But I could also see WBD looking at RT as pretty much nothing but a total dumpster fire and just jettisoning literally everything because they see no value in it.

RWBY has been pretty heavily monetized via merch and spin-off media, though - so it feels like they might see enough value in it to want to salvage it in some way. Even if that's just passing it off to DC and telling them to keep it running as a comic book or something.



Ogurisama posted...

Yeah, I believe it was Gen:Lock what did them in 5 years ago.

Getting bought by Fullscreen is probably what doomed them. It was the point where they essentially ceased to be self-employed YouTube content creators and started becoming too bloated and too corporately integrated to survive.

The money they lost over Gen:Lock certainly didn't help, but even without it they were probably fucked in the long-term. They "sold out" because they wanted to produce larger and more polished projects (see also Lazer Team and Blood Fest), but nearly every project they attempted effectively failed. Their only real successful ventures were their YouTube content producers like Achievement Hunter and Funhaus (on the small scale) and RWBY (on the "professional" scale).

Ultimately what hurt RT the most is that it was half the founders originally wanted to make movies (and failed), and then they accidentally tripped into success with throwaway comedy machinima. So they were never entirely content with what they had, and kept trying to be more than they were. They tried to grow the company to the point where they could make movies, but they never really became profitable doing so. They pushed multiple live-action shows to try and sell them to actual networks or streaming services, but none of them took off. They developed multiple animated series, and none of them really caught fire the way RWBY did. They basically spent far more money on failed concepts and projects than they were ever going to make back via YouTube ad revenue (which kept getting screwed over because YouTube sucks) or First memberships.

(Especially once their company started growing from like a dozen employees to hundreds, while never really shifting its infrastructure or corporate ideology to accommodate the influx of people.)

Then they mostly just burned out. Most of the founders clearly didn't want to do the things that had gotten them to where they were anymore, to the point where they either left (Burnie) or tried to do other things (Geoff). The new people replacing them either weren't as good or simply didn't care as much, so content suffered. The company and the community went from being a tight-knit collective to being a soulless machine. And fans stopped caring.

There's probably no way Rooster Teeth would have survived the next decade no matter what. Their only real hope would have been staying humble, staying small, and evolving to adapt to changes in the medium (like the Adpocalypse). The Yogscast is a pretty good example of what RT probably would have had to do to survive - and RT became utterly incapable of surviving that way the moment they chose to partner with Fullscreen.

https://i.imgur.com/B5SQh7c.png

I haven't heard anything good about this company in nearly 10 years, it's always allegations/proof of underpaid and harassed employees, key members getting outed as sex predators, and generally poor things about the shows they made. A shame, I used to love watching AH back in the day, I love the creativity they had with what they played and were pretty damn funny to me.

Cruddy_horse posted...

I haven't heard anything good about this company in nearly 10 years

Yeah this

I miss immersion, great series

SinisterSlay posted...

I miss immersion, great series

That was one of the ones they kept trying to sell to a network, and then got bitter about when no network wanted to buy it.

Completely forgot about Gen lock

ParanoidObsessive posted...

That was one of the ones they kept trying to sell to a network, and then got bitter about when no network wanted to buy it.

I expect it was expensive.

https://youtu.be/yyFPu5lqE-I?si=TLPFKHg4fGSpFHn4

SinisterSlay posted...

I expect it was expensive.

Well they were also effectively trying to sell Mythbusters, except with a more limited scope, at a time where Mythbusters popularity was already declining.