James Rolfe / James D. Rolfe / Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN) / Rex Viper and Cinemassacre / Screenwave - Now with not much grieving about a 41-year old man still making videos on YouTube. We're the balls on the dick.

[northstar747]

He's made enough money to where he should be able to retire if he wanted. If he put any effort into basic monetization, he'd easily have $10 million in assets.

Can you explain because I thought all the sponsors and shit videos were him monetizing stuff

What basic stuff should he do that he isn't doing?

 

[Pickle Dick]

The episode reviews not just C64 games based on Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street, but on other horror movie properties as well (including, bizarrely enough, a C64 game based on Rocky Horror Picture Show).

A few dumb jokes and skits scattered through the episode, but its a nice supplement to the C64 episode nonetheless.

Also, we're at 199 episodes now. The video's description says episode 200 will be out next month, I wonder what it will be on.

 

[Coolio55]

Starts off pretty good (even if he clearly didn't read the manuals) but the shitty villain cutaways interrupt the pace. There's a few rubbish jokes here and there but the final sequence (which only lasts like 2 minutes but still) is where the episode goes full irate gamer with dodgy special effects and bad plotlines replacing anything interesting

 

[69ing Ur Mom]

Can you explain because I thought all the sponsors and shit videos were him monetizing stuff

What basic stuff should he do that he isn't doing?

He doesn't use affiliate links to games/movies in video descriptions, it took him forever to do sponsorships, the merch selection is pathetic, and the clips channel isn't managed correctly.

He's too lazy to hire someone (or tell Screenwave) to go back and add affiliate links to eBay/Amazon/wherever to video descriptions. Reviews that don't include a link on where to buy the item reviewed??? That's tens of thousands in lost potential revenue a month. It would be more money than he makes off YouTube ads.

Hiring an editor to make sure there is daily content on the Cinemassacre Clips clips channel would easily generate more than $10k a month. Toss in affiliate links and it'd be like $30k a month.

The merch consists of a few t-shirts and DVDs. People into vintage gaming love to consoom. He couldn't be bothered to have a wider selection of merch. Do limited runs of stuff for each season. Release higher end stuff for holidays. Hire someone to build nintoasters. That's tens of thousands of dollars a year.

He couldn't be bothered to earn hundreds of thousands dollars more a year because he's lazy. Instead of hiring help, he complained about not having enough time. Partnering with Screenwave was the laziest option possible and it's killing the AVGN/Cinemassacre brand.

He should be easily pulling in 1-2 million a year. Instead he's in Rex Viper. The level of incompetence is fucking hilarious.

 

[Rotollo 2]

Also, we're at 199 episodes now. The video's description says episode 200 will be out next month, I wonder what it will be on.

200 is gonna be AVGN Movie 2, staring rex viper

 

[Pringles Can]

Starts out good, then becomes way too skit heavy. The reviews were fine, but james please cut the channel awesome crap.

 

[Mongo0o]

He doesn't use affiliate links to games/movies in video descriptions, it took him forever to do sponsorships, the merch selection is pathetic, and the clips channel isn't managed correctly.

He's too lazy to hire someone (or tell Screenwave) to go back and add affiliate links to eBay/Amazon/wherever to video descriptions. Reviews that don't include a link on where to buy the item reviewed??? That's tens of thousands in lost potential revenue a month. It would be more money than he makes off YouTube ads.

Hiring an editor to make sure there is daily content on the Cinemassacre Clips clips channel would easily generate more than $10k a month. Toss in affiliate links and it'd be like $30k a month.

The merch consists of a few t-shirts and DVDs. People into vintage gaming love to consoom. He couldn't be bothered to have a wider selection of merch. Do limited runs of stuff for each season. Release higher end stuff for holidays. Hire someone to build nintoasters. That's tens of thousands of dollars a year.

He couldn't be bothered to earn hundreds of thousands dollars more a year because he's lazy. Instead of hiring help, he complained about not having enough time. Partnering with Screenwave was the laziest option possible and it's killing the AVGN/Cinemassacre brand.

He should be easily pulling in 1-2 million a year. Instead he's in Rex Viper. The level of incompetence is fucking hilarious.

He's made enough money to where he should be able to retire if he wanted. If he put any effort into basic monetization, he'd easily have $10 million in assets.

Instead he dicked all that money away. Screenwave showed up and told him they'd pay him be a lazy piece of shit.

Now he does a bunch of degrading shit like a used up whore.

No he is trapped to the character for the rest of his life. None of the channel's peripheral shows have caught traction in comparison to a channel like RLM where every show is a winner. As iconic as the character is James is probably not rich. He went to business for film school, not financial. Thinking that you can make a full fledged film in the LA area with only $325,000 is proof enough that he's monetarily stupid.

As for who's taken the money over the years, there was definitely a chunk of revenue taken for exposure (ScrewAttack, GameTrailers) and editing work (ScreenWave).

The real money for him would be in streaming. Metokur did a 2 hour stream a month back and walked away with thousands in one night. James is much bigger than him and could definitely pull hundreds of thousands, if not millions per year.

Spoiler

But no time

 

[seri0us]

The real money for him would be in streaming. Metokur did a 2 hour stream a month back and walked away with thousands in one night. James is much bigger than him and could definitely pull hundreds of thousands, if not millions per year.

inb4 they're reading the thread and this is what they try doing next, sounds smart tbh

 

[Pringles Can]

As iconic as the character is James is probably not rich. He went to business for film school, not financial. Thinking that you can make a full fledged film in the LA area with only $325,000 is proof enough that he's monetarily stupid.

That should have been everyone's first clue to how smart (financially) James is. Ive known like 4 people who went to an art/film school and only one of them actually came out with some intelligence. Not much, but enough to not make James level mistakes.

 

[69ing Ur Mom]

The real money for him would be in streaming. Metokur did a 2 hour stream a month back and walked away with thousands in one night. James is much bigger than him and could definitely pull hundreds of thousands, if not millions per year.

YouTubers make considerably more than streamers. Someone like Mr. Beast is probably getting $500,000+ for a single ad read on one of his videos and then additional money for conversions through an affiliate link, because he's getting more than 70 million views a video.

Think about how much money companies spend/spent on television advertising. YouTube provides better demographic information. For every video Mr. Beast is selling an ad slot on what's equivalent to an ad shown during the Super Bowl. For 2021 a 30-second ad slot cost $5.6 million. He's making more in a month than top streamers make in a year.

The problems with streaming is that it is time consuming and back catalogs don't make any money. A video made 10 years ago can still get views and generate revenue. Yesterday's VOD isn't making shit.

A couple years ago when Cinemassacre was getting 20 to 30 million views a month, James should have been making a couple hundred thousand a month. People click Amazon affiliate links and buy other stuff because they know the creator will get some money. That's why people put links to all the gear they use to make their videos in the description.

James couldn't be bothered to watch a basic "How to Make Money on YouTube" video. He lost out on millions of dollars that would have taken ~20 hours worth of work (affiliate links), he's stuck being known for a character he doesn't like, he ruined his relationship with Mike over money, and his channel is being killed off by slobs all because he's lazy. He's an incredible lolcow and it's hilarious.

 

[Doctor of Autism]

It's okay when James is reviewing the game but the skits were really annoying and felt really forced in especially when James has himself cut in with Irate-gamer tier skits.

 

[Raging Capybara]

If James posted 5 years ago on his Twitter that he was willing to hire producers to help with his company, he would receive hundreds of calls from all over the world. He has millions of followers, some of his fans probably work in the field and have years of experience, amazing resumes, and would be willing to even work for less to help their childhood hero.

But no, he decided to hire the worst losers from the Philly area. A bunch of fat nobodies who never accomplished shit in their lives. That's the biggest tragedy on this, he had the opportunity to work with truly talented people, but his boomer brain can't comprehend that you can work with people who live far away and that you didn't know since your childhood.

 

[69ing Ur Mom]

inb4 they're reading the thread and this is what they try doing next, sounds smart tbh

James would find a way to fuck it up.

If James posted 5 years ago on his Twitter that he was willing to hire producers to help with his company, he would receive hundreds of calls from all over the world. He has millions of followers, some of his fans probably work in the field and have years of experience, amazing resumes, and would be willing to even work for less to help their childhood hero.

But no, he decided to hire the worst losers from the Philly area. A bunch of fat nobodies who never accomplished shit in their lives. That's the biggest tragedy on this, he had the opportunity to work with truly talented people, but his boomer brain can't comprehend that you can work with people who live far away and that you didn't know since your childhood.

That's not a tragedy because it was self-inflicted. James has consistently shown the ability to make the worst possible decisions. It's hilarious.

JAMES IS A LAZY POOR FAGGOT AND IT'S HIS FAULT (IT'S HILARIOUS)​

I forgot to mention Patreon, because Patreon is for fags. My favorite LOLcow Jim Sterling (a fag), makes more than $10,000 from Patreon a month. His channel is easily 3-5x smaller than Cinemassacre.

Patreon was started in 2013 (by a massive faggot). I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that James should have heard about it by 2016. Sign up would take an hour. Pasting a link in every video description would take less than a minute. Mentioning the Patreon in a video would add less than 30 minutes of work per video. (I'm being extremely generous there. It should be less than 5 minutes.)

So if Jim Sterling can post pictures of himself with cum on his face, troon out, have a thumbnail of him with a ball gag, and still make more than $10,000 on Patreon, it isn't unreasonable to expect that James could make at least $20,000 per month starting in 2016.

$20,000 x 12 = $240,000
5 years x $240,000 = $1,200,000

Keep in mind that Patreon is a shitty way to monetize content. Instead of signing up and mentioning Patreon for 5 seconds a video, James fucked away $325,000 and shitloads of time on a movie no one will watch.

I feel like I'm failing convey how little effort James would have had to put in to make millions of dollars. An hour to sign up for Patreon. 3 hours worth of work a month to add mentions of the Patreon and link in the description per video. He would have easily made $20,000+ per month. (Extremely generous there in time spent as well as being extremely conservative in terms of earning.)

Could someone please explain to me how that's not hilarious? He was too lazy to put in single digit hours of effort for millions of dollars.

 

[Gunty King]

This video really demonstrates just how far the Nerd has fallen in terms of production quality. I'll be honest, I've never been totally opposed to skits the way many other people in this thread are. I think they can work well if they're integrated properly. The earlier AVGN Halloween episodes are a perfect example of this, they're usually some of the most skit heavy episodes, yet those skits are so well put together and flow so seamlessly into the review portion, they hardly even qualify as a skit anymore. Hell, I remember the Texas Chainsaw Massacre review scaring the shit out of me when I first watched it, to the point where I never watched it again until much more recently.

Yet in this new Freddy & Jason review, the skits feel wildly out of place. I think a big part of it is the music. When you go back to the Friday the 13th, Nighmare on Elm Street or Halloween videos, every time there's an extended skit, it starts playing the leitmotif from the respective movie, and during some of the shorter skits, the music doesn't cut off at all, it just keeps playing the game music. But whatever slob from Screenwave that is editing these videos together constantly keeps playing music from AVGN Adventures. I love the soundtrack to AVGN Adventures, but the overuse of these tracks in recent videos is making me hate it. Like, he doesn't even have to create original music like they did back around 2011, just stick to in game music and stop over relying on stock music or AVGN Adventures ost. This one might have been the worst yet in terms of music. Every single time it would cut to Freddy, it would start playing the AVGN Adventures final boss song, then abruptly stop after a couple seconds. This is the type of shit I expect from a first time editor you hired off Fiver, and it's laughably bad when compared to the editing in the Halloween episodes from 2006.

I'll be honest, when I saw Freddy and Jason at the start, stuck in hell, I got kind of excited. Like I said, I don't have a total aversion to skits, and Freddy and Jason were great back in the original 2006 episodes. Even if Jason is being played by one of the slobs now instead of Mike Matei, and even though James has completely lost the Freddy voice he used to have, I was kinda interested to see things play out, and see how Jason and Freddy would fuck with the Nerd or each other as he tried to play the games. Turns out, they didn't fuck with him, at all. They're a total nonpresence the entire time until a random shitty and totally pointless fight sequence at the end which amounts to a grown man playing pretend with action figures. It's so much worse than the Halloween episodes James was putting out a decade and half ago, a part of me is still hoping against hope that this was some intentionally bad joke skit, where he hypes up the return of Freddy and Jason, only to have them be lame toys that are defeated by literal paper. Maybe that is what it's meant to be, but I've lost so much faith in Cinemassacre at this point, I'm almost certain this was meant to be played straight. (I just keep thinking back to the ROB the Robot episode and James using a plush Mario to fight a robot is meant to be taken super epic and serious, and I realize that this was most likely the same way. But the ROB episode had so much better production that it feels dirty comparing it to the Freddy and Jason episode)

The worst part about it is that if you remove all the skits, this is a very solid episode and a perfect followup to the previous Commodore 64 episode. I know alot of people on here would prefer AVGN to be like this, no skits and just pure review, but to me, the proper balance of a high quality skit with a review has elevated certain episodes from "just another great AVGN episode" to one of my top 10 favorites. Still, given the choice between no skits and these shitty excuses for skits in the modern episodes, I'll gladly take the former. Maybe one of these days I'll download a couple of the more recent episodes, and try editing out all the skits. I feel like with this episode in particular, it would be pretty easy to cut out the skits and still make the episode flow. Anyway, sorry for the long post, I was just so disappointed with the conclusion to this episode and how much worse it is compared to the 2006 Halloween videos I had to get it off my chest.

 

[BrunoMattei]

The worst part about it is that if you remove all the skits, this is a very solid episode and a perfect followup to the previous Commodore 64 episode. I know alot of people on here would prefer AVGN to be like this, no skits and just pure review, but to me, the proper balance of a high quality skit with a review has elevated certain episodes from "just another great AVGN episode" to one of my top 10 favorites. Still, given the choice between no skits and these shitty excuses for skits in the modern episodes, I'll gladly take the former. Maybe one of these days I'll download a couple of the more recent episodes, and try editing out all the skits. I feel like with this episode in particular, it would be pretty easy to cut out the skits and still make the episode flow. Anyway, sorry for the long post, I was just so disappointed with the conclusion to this episode and how much worse it is compared to the 2006 Halloween videos I had to get it off my chest.

Agreed. If you cut out the sketches and the obnoxious ExpressVPN ad read then it's fine. The only thing sketch-wise that I thought worked was the stop motion work on the Freddy and Jason toys. I also hated the Old McDonald joke.

5/10.

 

[Tism the Return]

In the most recent podcast ep (linked/timestamped below) they were talking about how they have a backlog of fan Q+A questions, and randomly Kieran jokingly chimes in about how it's essentially his fault because he derails the podcast. Then James even chimed in talking about the whole "aliens" thing, and Justin jokingly blamed his behavior on the liquor.

It was a meaningless moment in a sea of meaningless moments that comprise the podcast, but I found it interesting...

EDIT: I'm not adding a new timestamp, but Kieran seems pretty drunk and it's resulting in some hilarity.
Highlights so far:
- Kieran stops the convo dead to explain how conversations get derailed. I feel like someone has been reading comments...
- Kieran stops the convo dead again later talking about how he takes the comments personally and advises people to not engage the trolls.
-James and Justin bring up people talking shit about Rex Viper and how no one booed.
- They all discuss how online hate doesn't manifest irl.
- etc.

Kieran replied to a 4chan thread and used to sperg the fuck out on the truth subreddit so I'd be more shocked if he didn't read any comments.

 

[José Mourinho]

Episode is mostly fine with me, I can see a lot of effort is being put into it a lot compared with the mid-2021 ones, I can even see James is having a lot of fun with the Friday the 13th C64 part, though the skits which involve James playing with plastic figurines is really cringe. If you're showing Freddy and Jason in human forms early on (not the old episodes, the scenes where there's fire background obviously), why reappear as plastic figurines based on the NES games?

200th episode coming up, which honestly I am looking forward to it.

 

[Mr.Downer]

James has consistently shown the ability to make the worst possible decisions. It's hilarious.

It's so sad to see James fall hard like this, the AVGN brand definitely could be making millions a year if he played his cards right, but he really is a big dummy because everything he has done has lead to him basically becoming a slave of a bunch of fat literal whos.

 

[PeriodicTrouble]

Maybe one of these days I'll download a couple of the more recent episodes, and try editing out all the skits.

So something like this then?

 

[ICameToBooli]

I took the liberty of reading through the entire thread to catch up. I had no idea about the plagiarism fiasco, and things seem to be even worse than I thought they were.

All I'm saying is that I'm gonna throttle the bastard who sent me that Rex Viper live video