I hate any non-amerimutt going on about US politics but anglos are especially grating when it comes to this.
Holy shit, i completly missed that. Now that's fucking bad, should've checked the fine print before signing on. Escapist closing down in 3, 2, 1...
Not even his own youtube channel and discord watch him lmao.
ZP -was- the Escapist. No one gave a shit about their other stuff. Yahtzee kept it afloat for 15 years and no he is gone is RIP. They have been shilling super hard in recent videos too, so might be hard up for cash. (Also be sure to have sponsorblock installed along with your adblock these days)
He's boasted about being well-paid by The Escapist. When he first got hired there he was poor and only had a few popular videos, some let's play threads on Something Awful and some niche videogames that he made (the videogames were primarily distributed for free with him later releasing paid versions with some director commentary).
IIRC the "Zero Punctuation" name was something The Escapist came up with, as is the music and titles. Anything Croshaw created while employed by The Escapist, they own, which is standard.
I think it's understandable to just want to make your dumb videos and have money, taxes, benefits, promotion, etc. handled by someone else. That shit is a pain in the ass to wrangle on your own.
I think he sold the "art style" to them a few years ago. I say this only because the whole site uses the ZP style art now, which wouldn't make sense from a liability standpoint otherwise.
You can't copyright an art style. That goes for both Croshaw and The Escapist.
You probably can, actually. At least you could trademark it, probably.
No, but you can copywrite art assets and the fact that they gave everyone a ZP-style pill-person avatar to use in their videos even without Yatzhee present doesn't bode well for him still retaining ownership of it.
wouldnt be hard to make similar looking assets
No, you can't, as it infringes upon Fair Use. It's why you can make all sorts of fun "George Floyd fucks Anne Frank in the style of Pixar" images on Stable Diffusion.
New Yahtzee will wear a baseball cap instead of a fedora, viewers don't care, what matters is his voice.
The thing is that it works in reverse, too. Yahtzee's in for a nasty surprise if he thinks that he's anything without ZP. None of Yahtzee's stuff has made any impact outside of ZP and most of it involves/involved the ZP avatar and setup.
Why is his Patreon fucked? He can still make videos, anyone who cares enough to donate to his Patreon cares more about Yahtzee himself than the Zero Punctuation name. He'll just call them Fully Ramblomatic which is IIRC what they were called originally. The Escapist still owns the old videos and will cruise on their YouTube revenue until they finally go under and Yahtzee can buy the rights back for pennies on the dollar.
I was right, I was fucking right. I'm pretty sure now since yahtzees gone the escapist is probably gonna try to use ai voices to fill in for zp cause everybody knows nobody watches the escapist for anything else. Yahtzee himself I think will create a new venture with Nick calandra since they seem to be very close friends. I hate to say it but I liked zp and this shit was written on the wall ever since they apologized to Zoe Quinn and rehired moviebob. It's like whatculture all over again. But the funny thing is that Jimbo sterling was able to get away with the jimquisition while yahtzee had to give up zp, he's still very talented and will land on his feet but it's a shame the inferior crap gets to keep on going.
