I'm honestly surprised to see people here cutting Wings so much slack. Obviously he's better at dealing with trolls than some of the other lolcows, but to me Wings is just as worthy of criticism because he is an example of someone not knowing when to quit.
I remember seeing a video where he complains about his job as a streamer doesn't afford him the same 'benefits' that a normal job comes with. He said "Where I get to sleep in late, y'all get social interaction."
The man literally acts like he's on a different plane of existence where getting a real job is so far out of the question that you have no choice but to feel bad for someone who decided to roll the dice on making streaming a full time job. Social interaction and other benefits that come from a real job aren't privileges, they're things people worked for and earned.
Online content creation, especially on twitch, is a crapshoot. Acting like you are owed a viewership, or owed fame is only going to hurt your own content because you're just not having fun anymore.
I was a fan of Wings a long ass time ago (off and on from 2010-2014 or so), and fucked with PKA heavy in that time. Fans, trolls, and even PKA hosts have been telling him since probably 2011 that he needs to find a new career path.
It all started when he was at his YouTube peak. His money was pretty good, raking in between $5,000 - $7,000 a month in ad revenue, I think was making payments on 2 trailers, driving around 2 trucks, and was blowing a lot of money on himself and his girlfriend at the time. Then, his channel plateaued and started to decline. He topped out at like 460k subs, then started to fall. Viewership started going down. Everyone around him blew up. WhiteBoy7thst hit a couple million subs. Woody hit a million subs. Everyone was adapting and exploding, but he never got with the times and started falling.
He was telling people in like 2011 or so that he hated doing YouTube and Call of Duty content, which he was known for. It got to the point where he was paying people for MW3 footage, so he could do commentaries over it. There were a lot of people that tried to help him. I remember PKA kind of sucking ass after a while, because it was just 2 hours of them telling Wings how to lose weight and new things he could do for content. They would throw him video ideas, and directions he could take to capitalize on what people liked about him. Kyle took him to his fucking house at the end of 2013 and set up a boot camp for him to lose weight. Drew took him in and was training him and helping him lose weight. Hell, they were even telling him jobs he could do if he didn't want to do YouTube anymore. There were so many fucking people out there trying to pick him up.
The problem is two-fold:
- Wings can't take personal responsibility
- Wings is lazy
I've seen people fatter than Wings hold down steady jobs. I've seen people with more health problems hold down jobs. As far as that field goes, he really doesn't have an argument as in why he can't go do something else. The only reason he hasn't is because he's too fucking lazy to do it. He's even too lazy to do YouTube and Twitch at this point. I remember a PKA where they were feeding him ideas, and he was like "Oh, I can't do fat Lincoln because I'd have to go buy things." He couldn't even come up with his own video game footage for Christ's sake. There were so many occasions in the time that I watched him where he could have taken simple steps to better his life, and he would just not fucking do it.
Did he ever blame himself for his shortcomings? Nope. It's always the fucking trolls. It's the fucking people on PKA. It's the PKA fans. It's KiwiFarms. Every time he backed himself into a corner, he would cry some crocodile tears about how this group or that group was fucking with him, and it was the sole reason why he's in such a bad spot. If you're bringing in over $60k a year playing video games, while living in a trailer in a corner of the country with a low cost of living, and you can't save fucking
anything, then it's your fault you're fucked the minute the money stops coming in. Maybe don't buy a second truck and try to flex on people? It's not YouTube's or Machinima's or the trolls' fault that you are broke, it's the fact that you blew your money while putting the least amount of effort possible into your job until your 15 minutes of fame were up.
I'm not really upset with how things have went, nor do I really care at this point. However, it's fucking nuts checking up on someone from 6 years ago and seeing them struggle with the same simple issues that they were having then.
Just quit streaming, and get a fucking job if you hate it so much and are hurting for cash.