With no public announcement or advanced warning to many creators, the entire Machinima YouTube channel was effectively wiped from the internet recently. All videos on the channel are now private, making them unable to view. The news quickly spread across social media, with fans and creators sharing their stories and information about the shutdown using the hashtag #RIPMachinima.
Wow… they finally went ahead and deleted everything we’d ever done.
7+ Years of work… lost to the sands of time. #RIPMachinimaMake sure you’re subbed to our new channel that we started after leaving Machinima last june – https://t.co/CdswejOfLJ – thanks pic.twitter.com/H8MEVGHaCq
— Ricky (@rickyftw) January 19, 2019
News of the videos began to spread yesterday, but it’s unclear when the switch to private happened.
Many creators seemed not to have been aware that their videos would be set to private. “Otter Media really just went and deleted Machinima, Happy Hour, Respawn, Realm, Prime, Inside Gaming, ETC, everything,” Jeremy Azevedo, a former creator and employee of Machinima tweeted after learning about the news. Other former creators were shocked to find years of videos now gone.
KhailAnonymous, a former creator at Machinima tweeted, “Wow y’all making me emotional with #RIPMachinima.”
“Sad to see the catalogue go. As many have already said Machinima was a special place filled with amazing people,” said former creator Matt Dannevik.
Back in December 2018, AT&T moved Machinima under their Otter Media brand in a restructuring that also saw layoffs across Otter Media. Otter Media is made up of other companies, including streaming services such as VRV and Crunchyroll.
In early January, shortly after the restructuring, long time Machinima creators such as Maximilian Dood were let go. Other creators were let go or sent letters informing them they were being moved to Fullscreen, another media company founded in 2011 which is also owned and operated by Otter Media.
Oh. Oh dear. I wonder how long my Machinima contract has left before it runs out?#MachinimeBecomesFullScreen pic.twitter.com/bfUFojTiCg
— Nerly Señor Citzen (@william_roeben) January 16, 2019
For many fans, the news feels like the end of an era. One of the old YouTube giants now gone.
“I cannot begin to understand the motivation behind nuking every official Machinima channel… That’s like 7 years of core gaming content, gone forever,” one fan tweeted.
“It’s so weird now that I’m going to be a part of that generation of people that will say, ‘remember Machinima?’” wrote another.
Using the #RIPMachinima hashtag, others reminisced about their favourite creators and derided the decision to set the channel to private.
What will happen to the Machinima channel and all of its videos is unknown at this time. The channel currently has 12.3 million subscribers. Otter Media sent Kotaku a statement about the future of Machinima:
We are focused on creating new content with the Machinima team, which will be distributed on new channels to be announced in the coming months.
In the meantime the Machinima network of creator channels continues to showcase the talents of the network. As part of this focus on new content, we have pivoted from distributing content on a handful of legacy operated channels.
Comments
10 responses to “Entire Machinima YouTube Channel Set To Private”
This is why it’s super-important to download videos you really like and want to keep. It sucks that Youtube doesn’t have a downloading feature, but there are ways around that.
For creators, this is a huge reminder of why you should have a local copy of every video you make, as well.
On the bright side, Machinima probably isn’t gone forever, it’ll be back on the new video platform that Otter/AT&T are making, apparently.
I doubt not having backups is the problem here, because I’d be incredibly surprised if many creators didn’t have drives full of backups of videos they made.
The problem is that they likely can’t legally put them up for anyone else to view.
I suspect there is a fair bit of content without outside backups. When Blip shut down there were a number of semi-high profile creators who realised that they couldn’t recover content, either through not having backups or the backups proving unusable.
Given how old Machinima is, there would probably be a number of contributors who simply wouldn’t have had space to save the original project files, and may have assumed things would live forever in the cloud. Furthermore, they might have seen it as Machinima’s job to preserve the videos.
And once again, shareholders ruin gaming.
It is getting out of hand. We’re missing theoretical classics because of it. Some of the great games of yesteryear exist only because of protracted development time and overblown budgets. That’s not being allowed to happen anymore.
Also, destroying a legacy of work like this stagnates the growth of our culture and diminishes the work people do to further define and evolve ourselves as a form of generation. Ya know what I mean?
Did they have anything good? I don’t think I’ve watched anything on Machinima in the last decade, just kinda lost interest in the content they were pushing.
Does it matter though? I cant remember the last time I looked either, but why not just put it in caretaker mode? At this point its just data on a server, which wont change unless they actually delete the data.
Any sort of audience means this is a loss, at least to them.
I was just asking out of curiosity since I haven’t watched anything they’ve hosted in a long time.
This is why you don’t put all your eggs in one basket, why digital only is a bad idea & why you should create platforms away from YouTube.
Or you know, don’t sell your business.
That’s why this has happened.