This actually raises an interesting question: why did Doug sign his rights over to Mike in the first place? Why would he ever think that's a smart thing to do?
So, when it comes to protecting or registering an IP you need a big chunk of change. In the UK this runs easily to £5k per item and I suspect its similar in the US as well. So Michaud likely offered up the money to handle that side of things and the Walkers either didn't have enough at the time, or didn't realise they were giving away a huge amount of leverage to Michaud who later turned out to be an asshole.
It's entirely likely "this guy can ruin me any time he wants" runs at the forefront of Doug and Rob's minds every time they have to make a difficult choice. Hence "complicit" in whatever shitty decisions that are made.
1: should have happened years ago and I doubt it will happen now. Michaud will go down with the ship and if he has majority ownership of the company then the Walkers can't do shit other than separate.
2: they should sell the fucking studio. It's a huge waste of space considering the kind of projects the Walkers do.
Unfortunately they won't do that either. Red Letter Media has a studio but they actually use it to shoot more complex productions. The Walkers don't do anything that couldn't be shot in their living rooms.
I can guarantee you Michaud will not let the NC IP go for anything less than a million bucks or more, he'll either be doing Lowtax style "based on its heyday" figures in his head, or what he suspects could be made out of it if someone competent and funny was doing it.
The critic has a
lot of brand recognition that is really not exploited at cons or other events that would provide an excellent additional revenue stream. Linkara knows how to do this with his own stuff despite the crap he's done in the past and while his live shows aren't the best, they're
consistent.
Second on the studio, I agree. But a lot of other "big" youtubers have also gotten themselves studio spaces or other shared houses on the basis they'd want to collaberate more frequently and have a separation between workspace and home space. This logic has worked out nicely for a lot of larger groups of YTers (Red Letter Media, Mega64, Yogscast, Rooster Teeth etc etc) but each of these guys have also been willing to diversify said space as much as possible in order to max out the use of said space.
RLM used to use their space for wedding shoots and equipment storage, Mega64 had a tiny unit mostly used for storage.
Rooster Teeth wound up massively diversifying their content to the point new spaces became necessary.
Yogscast's new Yogscast Studios operates effectively as a Youtube Space for gamers and you can rent out their units if you so wish.
Basically time and time again people look at ways of best using the space. Renting the studio space out would make
a lot of sense but either nobody would use theirs (Doug films in that tiny ass broom closet of an office for a reason) or their own productions would get in the way all the damn time and piss off whoever used it.
