For a while now, I have resisted armchair "if I was in charge stuff" (although I am always happy to share my likes and dislikes as a viewer) but glad to weigh in on the past as a reflective discussion.
This all comes with caveats that I wasn't there. I'm ignorant of internal discussions. There have been many thoughts from looking from the outside since June 2016.
It always bothers me when I see comments that allude to the departures of key talent being entirely responsible for the downfall of the Patreon.
I have always agreed that Easy Allies's point was for the Game Trailers crew to continue doing what they loved. I will never forget that EZA Podcast episode 1, where Kyle ends the introduction with, "Let's just do it; let's start talking about video games".
Slowly but surely, I think the Easy Allies mission swerved too far from "let's keep doing the things we were doing" to "let's invest lots of time and money into things that are completely unproven and may not be a net positive for Easy Allies".
I loved Tabletop Escapades (I understand it was a spiritual successor of a GT show), and I'm sure Ben Moore's private Patreon DND sessions were exquisite. It's probably a net negative in the grand scheme of things.
Box Peek was probably the biggest perpetrator of this, taking the time of one of the most unique talents in the company. Again, I get it was a fundraising goal, but it went wildly over its planned time and budget, and no one had the will or authority to reign it in. All for a show that, while well made and novel, didn't end up being all that good and had an ending that actively made fun of the viewership the show had managed to garner.
Compound with several show concepts that went well with the audience but were never followed up on. Brandon Plays Pokémon is the obvious one, a show that I still see the shadow of in MinnMax's Deepest Dive series, which continues to be a big drive for their growth.
The others are Top Tens and Retrospectives. I will never understand what was so stressful about Top Tens. It seems like the easiest thing in the world to put together.
Retrospectives were put together and performed decently in the channel but were stopped because of the effort involved. I don't know the ins and outs, but videos performing well that require effort never seemed unusual.
All the while, pre-Studio, the Allies were coasting on extremely natural and infectious in-person chemistry and a game industry that was positively booming with the success of Nintendo's latest console and a string of incredible first and third-party titles on all platforms.
Having the allies in the room together reacting to the industry through podcasts, live streams, betting specials, or reviews themselves meant that overall, the channel and the Patreon performed well, and herein lies the problem.
Easy Allies never seemed to take the time to learn to play the content creation game. The money was coming in, and more was coming every day. There was no pressure to review shows that were going poorly and how they might be improved. There was no pressure to pursue evergreen content that could be produced without relying on a well-functioning game industry.
As great as it was at the time, the fact that Reaction content was consistently EZA's highest-performing content should have been a warning sign from day one.
And before anyone could bat an eye, the worst happened. A prolific member of EZA announced their departure, followed by a pandemic.
I have always thought they could have weathered Kyle leaving if not for COVID and that Kyle would have gone a long way to survive the blow that COVID dealt. But the 1-2 punch that both those events delivered was brutal. You had one of the most creative members of the team leave and are forced into a situation where you can no longer easily rely upon the in-person chemistry, which has been such a key to success all these years prior.
Because E3's death, followed by COVID, hurt EZA more than anything. Suddenly, EZA had to survive in an industry that might have been pumping out the same games they were used to but not the same marketing and content that EZA used to remain relevant on YouTube and Twitch.
Suddenly, EZA had to play catch up, and they started to try and do all that learning that they should have been doing in those first few years in some of the most tumultuous years the industry had ever faced.
In efforts to speed this process up, the team reached out to the Patrons for advice and guidance; the people who were already bought into their personalities and existing content and would not provide much insight on what would bring in a larger audience, though to their credit it would at least provide data on what sort of content was unlikely to bleed a majority of existing support.
Unfortunately, with plans already made and in motion, COVID hit shortly after, scuppering most of those plans, which largely revolved around evergreen in-person streams, that struggled to transition to remote with the increased demand on and reliance upon technology with little to no room for faults without harming the resulting production quality of the final product (for example, the Resident Evil 3 stream, which should have been a home run).
Since then, EZA has never seemed able to find its feet in finding the same growth it saw pre-COVID.
There are other factors also, such as some of the pre-COVID growth being artificial through fundraising linked to Patreon pledges, where existing Patrons naturally found themselves encouraged to up their pledge to unlock rewards while simultaneously having no intention to maintain that level of pledge over any period of time.
Another factor which seems to be ending at the end of the year is Easy Allies enshrining their editorial voice. Being able to do formal reviews has always seemed like the top of the totem pole, with Ben Moore practically saying it was the most important thing they did.
And while that's fine and is the whole point of the Patreon model, it clearly wasn't paying the bills, and so trying to do that while still doing the thing you're doing it for, the thing that takes a lot of time and energy and money to accomplish, will have been a bit insignificant roadblock to making any significant change that required more than a bit of extra effort to produce.
All that being said, I have to agree with others that the enthusiast gaming market is highly saturated regarding measured journalism and critique. I'm half convinced that MinnMax, KF, EZA, Second Wind, LSM, Aftermath and so on are all trying to get scraps of the same few million people. I would go so far as to say that most successful people in the space have skewed one way or the other to capitulate to a more opinionated and often larger audience, such as Yong Yea leaning towards content that is excessively critical of unpopular publishers and overly forgiving/praising of popular ones, and this is often due to the way that SEO favours strong, controversial content over measured and mild.
In summary, while my heart of hearts has begun to make peace with an ending, I think Bloodworth is right to be optimistic about the reset. To me, at least, as thankful as I am for all the content we have gotten over the past 7-8 years, this seems to be how the channel should have been from the start. A couple of steadfast regular pieces of content, leaving room to pursue experimental projects that won't break the bank but could still find an audience.
But that's just me.
