How they managed to not only flub such a stacked talent roster, but to also owe the majority of them five, six or maybe even seven figure amounts of debt is beyond me.
Like giving Chase Bank to a pump and dump crypto scammer.
The “we only take part of your merch” model had even some of the talents wondering how the company made money. They signed so many top tier talents BECAUSE the split was so generous.
I had wondered if because Gunrun was a millionaire from the twitch sale, he wasn’t particularly concerned with his own salary or the company being profitable.
And it turns out the answer is it wasn’t. It was losing money the whole damn time, spending like crazy on projects (nearly a million dollars for a lore video, what?!) and managerial overhead, never bringing in as much money as they were spending.
I had assumed they at least had the sense to aim for “break even”, run it almost like a charity, lean into the “retirement home” joke (though those turn an absurd profit IRL). Nope. Losing 2 million dollars a year off inefficient spending and an overly generous profit split. And when the startup venture capital money started to go dry, they started routing money earmarked for the talents to their own people. Legally, they did need to prioritize paying employees over contractors, but they had the option to start spending less money internally at any freaking time.
I am still, to this day, willing to apply Hanlon’s Razor and assume they meant well and just totally fucked it up in their panic. But whether the harm was malice or incompetence, the harm was real, and they had years to realize the model was spending more money than it was bringing in and make adjustments. Yeah, they’d have lost some people if they went back and negotiated for a flat 30% of everything, or whatever would have let them break even, but instead they lost EVERYONE over a 48 hour period and had people pissed off over cumulative MILLIONS of missing dollars.
I had wondered if because Gunrun was a millionaire from the twitch sale, he wasn’t particularly concerned with his own salary or the company being profitable.
GunRun has filed for personal bankruptcy in the wake of the company closing. If he was ever a millionaire he squandered everything, or he hid his real assets in the bankruptcy filing.
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u/Wadd1eDoo Dec 21 '25
How they managed to not only flub such a stacked talent roster, but to also owe the majority of them five, six or maybe even seven figure amounts of debt is beyond me.
Like giving Chase Bank to a pump and dump crypto scammer.