They started out making cheap but charming Video Game engine videos in Red vs. Blue. Then they decided to animate their own Waifu's using the Cheap but Charming 3D Custom Girl engine to make RWBY.
Then they made money. Then they sniffed their own farts, and then they decided they weren't a group of Geeky Nerds. No. They were crusaders! Visionaries! The avant gard of Social Justice! They weren't a bunch of shuttered nerds! NO! They were far better then those stinky people who made them money. They were better then that now! They had INVESTORS. The Right kind of money! They got invited to cocktail parties, where they could talk about how important it was to have representation in media while cashing venture capital checks and ESG bonuses.
And so, the original fans left and no new fans came in. While their content became much higher in production quality, it was stripped of all the charm of what came before and just dripped political propaganda with every frame. Nobody wanted it anymore, but the venture capital kept them going. The cocktail party invitations still kept coming. So it was fiiiiiiiiiiiine.
Until the ESG money ran out anyway. It was then that they realized nobody liked their trash, whatever good will they once had was gone, their new "friends" in the cocktail circuit stopped sending invitations, and all that was left was sweet oblivion. Verax tibimet ipsi esto.
I didn't see it posted in the thread anywhere (didn't read all 600 pages) but what killed RT was that literally none of them knew how to run a business.
They just made money and spent money and never looked critically at the business as long as numbers were in the green. They never saved money or did any kind of risk analysis on future moves and it buried them when the money dried up.
- People's wives were given Director titles (and some of them have OnlyFans lmao)
- They gave Monty's girlfriend (alleged wife with no documentation)
$250,000 just because when he died
- They sponsored podcasts with no real business plan
- RWBY Season 9 was a filler season
and the most egregious
- RWBY (allegedly, but as per Barbara) cost $35,000
per minute to animate. For context, that means for 2.5 minutes of RWBY - you could have a
full episode of One Punch Man or Demon Slayer. The most expensive anime of 2023 was Dragon Ball Super - which cost
$7,000 / minute. RWBY was spending
five times that to get out a garbage looking filler season that didn't matter. The amount of money they just burned is insane. The amount of money they spent on garbage was less than WB pays to make full on animated movies. The way they were doing things was hilariously uncompetitive and it's shocking they got away with it for as long as they did (they probably got and burned
tens of millions of dollars of WB/Crunchyroll money).
There's no way the business could have ever succeeded - but holy fuck they weren't even trying at the end.
