Just put out a desperate e-begging video for "transparency"

Just put out a desperate e-begging video for "transparency"

33% drop in Patreon funds since their initial peak

Expenses for Q1 2025 were nearly $250,000

Claim they need $45,000 A MONTH to break even... for a fucking youtube channel

Still trying to stick it to The Escapist, a literal dead website

Calandra hasn't learned anything from Frost leaving

No one buying merch, no one donating during streams

Only real solution is to paywall Yahtzee videos, shill more slop and make more series with charismaless employees

Calling it now, they're going to crash hard very soon. I've been watching since the beginning (refuse to give them money though) and the content has gotten aggressively bad. It's well-produced and reliable, but that's it. Calandra's weekly news show is just a glorified editorial, that British sperg has the worst takes I have ever heard about game design and they don't even put out traditional reviews anymore.

The best part is these egomaniacs saying they're taking "pay cuts" for next quarter. SO MUCH FOR BEING INDEPENDENT LMAO.

I don't know who this is

Claim they need $45,000 A MONTH to break even... for a fucking youtube channel

Large group channels based on personalities must be a nightmare for those involved when it comes to finances. It's almost bound to fail. Personality based channels should really only collaborate with others, that way any failure is fully on the channel owner and won't affect anyone else.

33% drop in Patreon funds since their initial peak

that's not so ba-

>Expenses for Q1 2025 were nearly $250,000

what the FUCK they're a bunch of dorks making video essays for a living how do you blow through a quarter of a million in 3 months??????????

trump

Their patreon is at 40.5k and they tend to get 3.5k in donations every month at the very least, so I don't know where you got your, "no one donates" from.

I don't know how many employees they have but if it's at least 10 that's only 54k a year for everyone is paid evenly. But that doesn't account for any company expenses. I wouldn't give them money but 45k a month is a pretty reasonable goal.

but they ALL hate the fucking US, their job can be done from literally anywhere in the world with internet and electricity, why wouldn't they just move?

Moving isn't free, immigration isn't seamless, abandoning your friends and family isn't something many people are ready to just do on a whim. Taxes will still chase you.

people move for work all the time specially within the game's industry, y'know, the one that they revolved their entire bussiness around?
not saying it's easy or good but if you don't like the country you're on, it's actively hurting your bottom line and bussiness, AND you'd lose virtually nothing from just moving, why the fuck not?

Anyone really hate JM8? He's the only one among them I REALLY hate. I think the others are fine, but him I despise. He has nothing of worth to say, ever, he keeps talking about the "game" he's supposedly making by himself, he has arrogance on par with Yahtzee, but Yahtzee earned his arrogance, he has no reason to be so full of himself. His videos are about the most superficial part of game dev yet he thinks he's saying anything of worth

Yahtzee should go independent. It’s always Yahtzee…and the rest. And Jack from RLM.

all this over a shitty editor no one likes or cares about

Reap what you sew stupid bitch.

what does jack even do, he's kinda funny on rlm but I don't really see him having much draw on his own

you know how the escapist had all this side content no one cared about?

well maybe if we do it people will actually watch since they're actual wholesome chungus fans who will always support us :)

Yeah sorry nah, they just want to see a smug british guy talk shit about video games. Let's be real, if Yahtzee just stayed on the escapist after that guy Nick got fired literally nobody would've fucking cared. I knew this stunt was going to end like this, did he learn nothing from manabar?

Behind the scenes shit.

kinda blows my mind how they were all part of a dying media company, left it, and then created the exact same dying media company

Cause drama and wind up not holding on to the few non-Yahtzee people with pull

It's literally Escapist 2.0 being kept afloat by Yahtz single handedly

It keeps happening, lmao

surely it'll work the next time!

it was always a dumb idea to try and form an entire entertainment brand hanging off of yahtzee's teets. that guy is falling off himself and he'd have trouble keeping up in relevance even if he went solo like he should've done more than 10 years ago when he didn't have shitty dad-gamer takes on everything.

This is basically free money for him. Play some video games, do maybe an hours worth of video content a month, collect a massive paycheck in return.
If he wanted to quit then he's a talented and well known enough writer that he could get by with just book sales and freelance writing gigs, but there's no reason to take out the golden goose with both barrels so long as it still shits out golden eggs at a reliable rate.
I'd say as soon as Second Wind folds whether it's due to politics or fucked up finances that you'll never hear from Yahtzee on the internet again, but he will be popping up in a lot more credits sequences than you'd expect for video games and TV shows as a co-writer or dialogue writer.

Frost made it abundantly clear that Yahtzee isn't looking to put in any more effort than is necessary and wants all the managerial aspects off his shoulders so he can spend more time with his family and hobbies.
He is already plenty rich so isn't especially concerned with maximizing gain and is just trying to do people he considers buddies a favor while collecting a piss easy paycheck.

Based on Frost's recollection of events, Jack doesn't do much of anything important and barely understands the business. He was suppose to run HR but didn't know how to and barely bothered, and he schedules meetings nobody attends.

sounds on brand for him

Claim they need $45,000 A MONTH TO break even

Don't they have like 10 employees? If they all make at least $45k a year then that makes sense.

I wish Yahtzee was my dad

it's just unlikely most of them do close to 45k a year worth of work

Yahztee has turned into a complete faggot
Disregarding the fact that he seems to bitch about Trump a lot lately, and how he was seething at J.K, I think his Marine 2 video was the straw that broke the camel's back for me
In a nutshell, he basically said 40k universe is childish, and the fans are a bunch of idiots because they enjoy the product wrong. He used the orcs as an example, and claimed that the creators made 40k to be liked ironically, and that it wasn't meant to be an edgy, space dark fantasy
What an absolute faggot and a coward

he basically said 40k universe is childish, and the fans are a bunch of idiots because they enjoy the product wrong

isn't that his whole shtick? shitting on things?

Honestly this. Nobody cared about any of the side content, and it proves. The main reason why I unsubscribed from Escapist 5-6 ago because my feed kept getting flooded on a daily basis

A review still needs to be constructed, even if your entire online persona is "i r smort, u is dum". Shitting on stuff is fine, as long as you can explain it earnestly, otherwise, you just become Anon Babble

Fuckers are just bad at it.
Yahtzee does his thing. I used to watch Frost's stuff too but he left. The Jack D&D stuff has actually a lot of production value, compared to similar play podcasts, but it's still just watching five people play pretend. Niche.
Then there's Design Delve, with that fag that is super pretentious and doesn't really seem to know what the fuck he's talking about, and the random ass streams they do that fucking suck because so many people in SW are just dull mother fuckers, otherwise incredibly annoying. They also pick the worst games to stream too.
They're basically doing the livestream shit like 15 years after it became old.
The fag that does movie reviews sucks, and whoever does "unpacked" also fucking sucks.
Kinda rambling here now, but yeah. They have nothing of interest besides Yahtzee. At first they seemed like they had potential, but boy did that ship sail. I honestly do not understand how anyone would quit their job over Marty of all people.

40k was probably a fun setting at one point, but from what I've absorbed from others it seems to be considerably less tongue-in-cheek than it once was. The fandom that surrounds it is fucking insufferable though.

what domingo you mean

wew, thank god nobody here is Anon Babble

Imagine watching this channel for anything other than Yahtzee

His shtick used to be talking fast, nitpicking, and doing loose summaries of the game plot. He shits on games more often than not, but he’ll still praise something if he thinks there’s merit in it. Fast forward to today, and his criticisms have gotten much tamer because now he’s a “game developer” himself and knows he has to dial down the cunt in his analysis or else he’ll be painting a target on his own back.

The only times he goes full early-Escapist rant mode is when he gets political, which isn’t what people fucking want to hear from a guy who doesn’t even get halfway through most games he reviews these days.

He's kinda always had shit taste, it just wasn't as apparent as a limey cocksucker virtue signalling about another country's leadership. For example his opinions on Bioshock.

yeah, I get annoyed by his politics too. Maybe I gotta go watch some older escapist stuff to see the difference

Frost still does the same show on his own channel, feels nice to be able to follow it without being subjected to all the other garbage

Kind of true. Are we seriously forgetting how he lost his mind over Black Myth? Claiming that Journey to the West was overdone to death, and he was sick of it. When in reality, it was the second game he'd ever reviewed, the first being Odyssey to the West

I really miss Let's Drown Out. Yahtz and Gabe had such a great chemistry.

Doesn't he live in Aussie? Why the fuck does he care about the US politics?

Nah, he also outed himself as a little bitch with the way he quit so I lost interest.

fuck these commies and fuck nick collandra, stupid alssa loving cuck.

He moved to the US years ago.

every other country in the world is more concerned with US politics than their own country's politics. Mostly because America has a stranglehold on the politics, economy, and media of the rest of the world

He moved to get whipped by some hag

You mean by trying to internally deal with the issue first and then blowing the whistle when it didn't work?

Let me guess, that's when his content turned to shit

I think it was mid-2016 so you be the judge.

Yep. Should've bowed out gracefully.

Define gracefully, letting the retard in charge keep leeching patreon money to fund his month long holidays?

yeah man i definitely know what you're talking about

that's some real american wagecuck mentality, there is no grace watching people get scammed in silence

Yes Frost. You say "blowing the whistle" but unless they're doing something actively illegal, you're just being petty about them handling shit in a different way as you'd like. If you talked with your coworkers and nobody cared, just fucking quit and let them sink their ship in whatever way they want.
All you do by throwing a tantrum is make yourself look bad. You claim to have experience working in different environments so tell me, would you hire the retard that stormed out of his previous job making a big, public mess out of it?
Enjoy running your own personal channel but I won't watch any of it, fag.

what is this

is this a video game? anybody have some screenshots or footage?

If you talked with your coworkers and nobody cared, just fucking quit

It's a company funded by patreons, and the patreons cared given second wind has to stoop to begging

whistle blowers bad because the people whose livelyhoods are tied to the scam are ok with it

kek

They clearly cared judging by the chat logs, but most of them are talentless hacks who wouldn't dare rock the boat because unlike Yahtzee and Frost they are unlikely to find a new one.
In what world do you imagine Aids Moby supporting Frost while being paid a full time salary to run a HR department that does nothing?

Somehow missed that Frost had left the group.
The only one of any worth is Yahtzee. The guy with the dog Ludo is by far the most midwit gaming youtuber and some of his takes are mind numbing.

Been getting kinda bored of Yahtzee. Not to mention he got a bit off his high horse where he thought no one ever got his political stance and proceeded to say "If you voted Trump I hope you die". Like yeah Yahtz has made of fun of current political events but he felt the need to straight up have a soapbox moment.

holy based

I’m glad I’m not the only one who remembers it.

This is what I don't get. Where they really THAT out of touch? Or were they expecting Yahtzee to be such a BIG DRAW still that people would just flock to their other shit like Escapist wanted to happen (before they got picked clean by corpo buyouts)

Cold Take is a complete dogshit series.
Literally only got popular because of his voice but if you dig into it, he literally says nothing of value in any of those videos. Just complete shallow surface level observations and soapboxing about the industry.

An autsitic retard on Anon Babble ranting would give better insights in half the time.

Literally who

Qrd on what the fuck this is even about

it started nicely under Escapist. When they moved to Second Wind, his cold takes become long and shitty.
But before he had few other video series that were good like, stuff of legend. He was shaping to be the second biggest start there.

he basically said 40k universe is childish, and the fans are a bunch of idiots because they enjoy the product wrong. He used the orcs as an example, and claimed that the creators made 40k to be liked ironically, and that it wasn't meant to be an edgy, space dark fantasy

How is this in any way wrong?

yahtzee, a game reviewer that never went solo for some reason was holding up the escapist singlehandedly for years. then had a midlife crisis and was convinced by 20something year old nobodies at the company watercooler to abandon his position at the escapist to form another entertainment group that also relies on him for the entirety of their relevance and revenue. the plan had a short, reddit-fueled high point of "fighting the man!" and is now in the process of crashing and burning because it's just like the original set up but worse in basically every way.
i just dishonored my famiru by posting this in the wrong thread so i'm going to go an hero in disgrace now bye

I agree that Frost was a little bitch and raising a scene is only going to fuck himself over, but I also believe customers of Second Wind have a right to know how fucked things really are.

They hired too many people, and watered down their channel too much. If you want to see what a successful version of what they were trying to do is, look at Red Letter Media. They have maybe 5 people "employed". And at least half their fans watch pretty much every new video.

last video with more than 200k views was a MONTH ago

most are somewhere between 13k-50k views

grim.

I stopped watching after Frost called out all their shit. It baffled me how many defending Calandra too.
Hope they rot

Calandra is known to waste funds on pet projects. So probably funneling funds out. Frost did a big video on it when he left

Sounds like a fag ngl I love a good karmic backlash story though

He's lazy and getting paid the most out of all of them so he doesn't care

Hi Calandra

Anyone else wish Yahtzee continued to play games with Gale and riff on them? God, it's so hard to find stuff like that nowadays.

idk who this calandra guy is but this anon is UPSET, rustled, and downright perturbed about him. 3 for 3 posts

I miss Let's Drown Out too. Gabe could be kind of a fag but he was funny.

I just wish there was porn of Ludo.

Let me guess, you never touched the books/games let alone play or read them

Only reason to be this made over Frost showing the behind the scenes bullshit is because you're on the SW payroll and he fucked you. Don't deny it. Calandra didn't do illegal shit, but he definitely did firable shit. Hence why he got the boot at escapist and then gaslight everyone into joining him.
Enjoy your sinking ship

Cold takes are

Cold

Holy fuck!

Retards followed a swindler after he was fired from his company to make a new one. Retards thought he was unfairly fired because the swindler lied about what he was doing. Swindler is now running new company into the ground with the exact same actions.

There is also a high chance the swindler or at least one of his lackey's, is in this very thread

W-Who is this guy? haha m-mad

Yea yea, same old playbook. I'm not the one begging for money. Lie in the grave you dug

i hope she reads this bro

Bot post

i thought i was calantra? now im a bot? am i in the room with you right now schizokun?

This is fucking horseshit. There's no reason NOT to fuck over a company if you KNOW corruption is afoot and prevalent. If it was some inter-personal drama that'd be one thing,but professional standards being blatantly disregarded to that extent is quite another.

There's no reason NOT to

there's the very practical reason of that guy probably having a more difficult career going forward because of being a whistleblower. if nobody is getting killed or grievously wronged because of those policies, i personally wouldn't torpedo myself to bring it to light.

Leave media company because "Fuck you! You're wrong, it's not all just Yahtzee, we will be able to support our creators!"

Turns out that no, you can't support all of these creators

There's no reason NOT to fuck over a company if you KNOW corruption is afoot and prevalent.

There is a reason, and that's retaliation. Frost himself has taken some blowback for revealing the behind the scenes shit.

You can't rationalize with bootlickers anon, especially when they're on the payroll

That's definitely more of a personal preference. Some people are ready and willing to commit such sacrifices for what they think is right (true altruism) but it's absolutely understandable how you'd also want to "keep your head down" so to speak. It's not an NPC tactic to do that, simply a fact of life. Some people consider their integrity more important than their future, and vice versa.
Don't get me wrong, those consequences are clearly easily seen. It's still important to recognize when the consequences are worth it, and Frost considered it worth the trouble.

I'd personally consider it more from this perspective: Nick might be a huge fag and a sleazeball, but when Frost pulled that stunt, he didn't just hard Nick, but everyone else whose' livelihoods depend on SW's success. Sure, they might be passive accomplices of whatever Nick was doing, but these are all people that quit their job alongside Frost and were starting this new venture. Frost wasn't just harming Nick but them as well. You could argue they deserved it by association, and maybe you're right, but I was taught never to hurt another person's livelihood.
If your issue is due to concern or their patreons, then I'd also argue anyone that gives any money to any patreon is a retard and deserves to be scammed. If porn game "makers" can scam thousands out of their money, anyone can. I don't rally against any patreon scam because patreon as a whole is a scam. All the idiots that donate to it would get their money stolen from some different way, probably twitch donations, anyway.

Frost considered it worth the trouble.

And I am grateful for it. It's scummy as fuck that Second Wind's whole origin myth of "sticking it to the man" that they were using to beg for money was basically a lie.

these are all people that quit their job alongside Frost and were starting this new venture.

A lot of them didn't. Calandra got almost all of them fired with him, so they didn't have much of a choice but to join Second Wind, which is also why a lot of them were complicit with Second Wind's less savory practices.

I was taught never to hurt another person's livelihood

Counter argument. People are spending money, their lively hood, on sleaze bags like Nick. They deserve to know the truth and risk of where their money is going

lot of names in this thread i've never heard before and don't care about

gonna keep watching yahtzee's reviews and nothing else

nick calender is a psychotic antifa weirdo who constantly engages in bizarre harassment campaigns in some crusade to expose da nazis or whatever. He's not someone you want managing a business

Yeah, I guess, but as I said, I have no sympathy for people that donate to patreons, kickstarters and/or streamers.
Either way, they were all in a similar circumstance as Frost. If he truly wanted to be the bigger man, you'd think he'd consider their position as well. He threw a tantrum, consequences be damned. He can claim it was for a good purpose, and again he might be right, but there were better ways to go about it. You can't chimp out then claim to be taking the high road.