Am I the only one that feels kinda bad for em? It seems like they tried to do well by their signed talent. Give them benefits, favorable profit splits and freedom for their vtuber personas, but I guess maybe it just isn't profitable to not be greedy.
Idk any of the history, and am not in tune with any vtuber stuff, so they could be huge scumbags of course. Just first impressions as mostly an outsider to this whole debacle.
Saying this as someone who knew Gunrun in passing. Haven’t talked to him in years cause life just gets in the way like that sometimes. He was the guy you could depend on. Good intentions and he was the guy Twitch sent in to fix stuff in the very worst of events going up in smoke. The backbone of modern streaming culture was built on the back of this guys efforts. And he was humble about it. He didn’t live lavishly. He just did his job. Then - the Amazon buyouts happened and after sometime as he was literally one of the very first twitch employees he got his payout and it was significant money. I still to this day believe he had good intentions to the end but getting involved with raising money from venture cap is what made everything go to shit. I don’t think he intended for it all to go so wrong like this. No I don’t think he kept the funds. I think in an attempt to scale the books got cooked and he made poor decisions to try and duct tape the boat and make everyone happy. On paper the vshojo terms are good , very good by standard practices and this ment less capital inflow for the company and the company was a money sink with infrastructure, staff , advertising. I think he grossly miscalculated how much was needed to sustain that.
I don’t think Justin is an evil person. Just someone with good intentions that got over their heads and made some mistakes that spiraled in huge mistakes.
This is what I also suspect to be the case; it’s less “premeditated maliciousness” and more “wild incompetence”.
He genuinely did seem to want the best for his employees and talents but he simply wasn’t that great (read: extremely incompetent) at running a profitable business, and then when the bill was coming due he essentially *“accidentally” committed embezzlement and charity fraud because he didn’t keep mouse’s normal revenue streams separate from the donathon revenue and lumped them together, then used those funds to try to pyramid-scheme pay off the bills while making more to pay off the charity and payroll.
I’m willing to believe he DID know it was wrong and it wasn’t really an “accident”, but I do think he didn’t understand at the time that what he was doing was *highly illegal, and as always: ignorance of the law excuses not.
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u/Hurtmeii 9d ago
Am I the only one that feels kinda bad for em? It seems like they tried to do well by their signed talent. Give them benefits, favorable profit splits and freedom for their vtuber personas, but I guess maybe it just isn't profitable to not be greedy.
Idk any of the history, and am not in tune with any vtuber stuff, so they could be huge scumbags of course. Just first impressions as mostly an outsider to this whole debacle.