Goodnight sweet prince. At least you managed to humiliate a couple of troonbots before you died.
Oh he'll come back eventually. But next time the Hypershock bikini's going to be on 24/7.
Was gonna happen eventually. Can't blame Draco for leaving if he's not getting the engagement he once did, plus going through some of the comments here when the Minotaur vs Witch Doctor fight happened showed the community has changed somewhat.
Pretty much as soon as the Robot Wars revival ended the entire robot combat community just seemed to go to hell. There was a web series made in the UK called Bugglebots that ran for two seasons and pretty much from the start it was garbage. The team captain of Nelly from BattleBots hosted the show. Here's one of the competitors:
She's a super heavyweight.
Not even Chaos 2 or Apollo could flip her out of the arena.
Do you think Draco/BBU knew? Like, way ahead of time? Because it's only been a couple of weeks since he ended the blog and it just so happens almost immediately afterward news comes out that Destruct-A-Thon is ending and BattleBots was never able to work out another contract with Discovery. I get the impression he knew this was coming because otherwise it seemed like a very random time to just say "thanks for everything" and end a project like that.
Yes, with the benefit of hindsight its obvious. He's also deep in the community and talks to both teams and Greg and Trey. Whether it was that BB was dead on tv or that they were shutting down the live show and dismantling the Battlenox, who knows.
Seriously I don't know why these people are trying to have this syndicated on large cable networks are dead anyways just streaming on YouTube and you'll probably make more money
He does know builders personally, he's talked to Greg and Trey multiple times. I'd say that he did. I think behind the scenes Greg talked with the builders that Discovery is dragging their feet on getting a season 8 and as a result they can't put on a show this year and have to cancel Destruct-A-Thon. Draco heard this and thought it was the perfect time to bow out rather than having to do another write up of a season that may not come.
Malice's team is saying the Faceoffs will be streamed to Youtube.
Battlebots costs millions to produce and makes millions more. They might, if they're lucky, make 50k a year on youtube.
They just constantly shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to monetizing their recorded media. For example, if you don't personally go to Vegas to see Destruct-A-Thon then sometimes BattleBots will share videos of some of the better fights (such as the Proving Grounds ones that featured hopeful newcomers)... except they only posted these videos to Facebook, where they were not monetized in any way. Also to see them you had to pledge $5 to BattleBots on Facebook like a Patreon subscription. They rarely if ever promoted this information. The only reason most people saw Proving Grounds fights is because the teams who competed in them received copies of the fight videos and they would just post them to their own social media pages.
The Facebook Premium stuff is the dumbest thing. Until the last season they would hide the fight cards behind it until a day or two before each episode aired. You know, wouldn't want fans to get excited about the upcoming show and talking about it at school or anything now, would you? A friendly wager between people who haven't checked spoilers to see who is "guaranteed" to win? Of course I always knew who was fighting anyway, without paying them a dime.*
I completely forgot about that. For a few seasons they announced competitors exclusively to Facebook supporters too by way of these little promotional pictures of the robot, the team, and the country they were from. The only people who got to see this info were supporters though so it effectively built up zero hype because the 99.9% of people who don't do the Facebook shit couldn't build up hype around all the robots and politely argue over who would win it all that year. Absolutely stupid.
If people are willing to give terrible left wing podcasters $500,000 a month on Patreon to make mediocre content I guarantee you these guys could get their fans to give them around the same.
Discovery owns the streaming rights to "their" seasons of Battlebots, seemingly in perpetuity, just like Viacom and ABC seem to with theirs.
