The Revival and Crash of G4

Luketheawesomeboy, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Well, that didn’t last long. The failed video game and nerd culture-centric cable channel G4 that was revived last year is already closing up shop. To be frank, I never watched it much when it was originally on. The reason for that is a combination of having few if any people in my friend group who watched it, not knowing if I even had the channel, and, eventually, being sated with watching the occasional clip on the Internet among a wealth of other options. Not watching the channel on an actual television seems like a problem.

The Internet is largely what killed G4 the last time, YouTube especially. Once online video and high-speed Internet became commonplace, G4’s reason for being largely evaporated. A random person with a camera could produce similar content faster, cheaper, and, in many ways, better than G4 could. This is not to say the new media companies that sprung up in the mid ‘00s to now that attracted the same audience were perfect. Controversies sprang up and continue to spring up from companies such as Defy Media and Rooster Teeth. It’s just that a television channel doesn’t provide the type of content the targeted audience is looking for fast enough. And a television channel is expensive.

But beyond that, the emergence of another factor is what put the final nail in G4’s coffin last time. G4 first shut down at the end of 2014. The years leading up to that saw the emergence of a brand-new type of video game content that G4 could not possibly compete with: The Let’s Play. For those unaware, a Let’s Play is essentially a person recording themselves playing a video while providing color commentary. PewDiePie, Markiplier, Tobuscus (the less said about him the better,) Jacksepticeye, Game Grumps, The Yogscast, Smosh Games, and plenty of others all brought in incredible viewership to YouTube and led to long-form content (15 minutes or longer videos) dominating the platform, a formula that continues to this day.

Most of these content creators posted at least one video every day, including weekends, usually on a strict schedule of the same time table. And the turnaround (the time from recording to upload) on those videos could be less than a day. That kind of content schedule engenders dedicated fan bases that a television channel just can’t compete with. Instead of seeing a television personality once a week at a specific time on a specific channel, a video game fan can pull up YouTube and watch new content every day whenever they want to watch it.

And this problem only got worse. The emergence of Twitch, a live streaming service, eventually led to some Let’s Players shifting to playing video games live. Sometimes for hours upon hours at a time. How can a produced and pre-recorded television channel possibly compete with live content?

In the just under seven years before G4 broadcast again, none of these issues improved. Cable television continues to be a dead man walking as streaming platforms continue to proliferate. So, why did G4 return at all? I think the people behind the revival thought they could co-opt the Let’s Player community to take advantage of the many eyeballs that were up for grabs. But then the new problems started.

The most glaring one I’ll get to shortly, but I just want to talk business. A YouTuber who manages hundreds of thousands of views per video who uploads every day can make a decent chunk of change, especially with sponsored content. Even after the Adpocalypse (a whole mess that is a subject for another day,) this formula works and doubly so for the biggest names. The Let’s Players who supplement YouTube with Twitch, sometimes posting Twitch livestreams in episodic form on YouTube, saw further success. And even those who only use Twitch can make enough bread to survive and thrive. The biggest names on both platforms pull in millions of dollars a year, some cracking millions monthly. That’s insane.

Are you starting to see the problem? No? If you’re an executive attempting to co-opt the Let’s Player community to revive a brand, one of your first tasks would be trying to get people on board that that audience would recognize. What YouTuber or Twitch streamer is going to tie themselves to a corporation when they’re already making bank? Not many. Of the ones G4 went with, I only recognized one of them, Jirard the Completionist. They managed at least one other name I am now tangentially aware of, Scott the Woz. And neither of those or any of the other people they brought on were huge names, so that meant trying to build up new personalities. Which is hard and prone to failure. Plenty of Let’s Players emerge who gain zero real traction.

Now for the elephant in the room. The rant heard ‘round the world. One of G4’s personalities in the early days of the revival went on an “unscripted” rant that could not have been more shortsighted. Froskurinn (I will call her Frosk for the duration) decided it was a smart idea to rant tangentially about sexism in gaming, concluding it with “If you don’t like it, don’t watch it.” While that is the most obviously memeable part of the rant, the entire rant was an issue because it is clear the executives didn’t really believe in it. This is the same network that would occasionally or often have streamers that also do OnlyFans on their shows. A large point of the rant was to say the days of Olivia Munn (and others) wearing skimpy clothing to attract viewers to the network were over, that the revival would attempt to be better than that. Obviously not. The blatant hypocrisy was obvious. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

A bigger problem with the rant was G4 attacking its audience. Much like one of the clear problems in video game journalism highlighted by the GamerGate kerfuffle, G4 was essentially telling its audience that it hated them. A publication or television channel that shows such clear disdain for its audience ain’t gonna have an audience for very long. By arguing that the old viewers of the network that made it in its early days are no longer the type of audience G4 desires, where does a new audience come from? What audience would G4 target? It’s a gaming and broader nerd culture network. Who does the network really have other than super nerds and hardcore gamers?

The revival was, from the jump, doomed to failure, for all the problems I discussed above. The many executives and behind the camera people who fled the sinking ship over the last year all but confirmed this. G4 just didn’t have a profitable lane to exist in, at least as a television network. If the owners had decided to rebrand as a Twitch channel and/or a YouTube show, maybe G4 wouldn’t have shut down again. While there would potentially be a lot less money in it, such a move would cost substantially less in both start-up and upkeep cost. But, probably most likely, the executive salaries for such a move would by its nature be substantially less, which is almost surely why the less risky road was not taken.

You may notice I put quotation marks over unscripted above. Why would I do that? Frosk, since being laid off from the network, has accused G4 of abandoning her after the backlash against the rant was really starting to affect the bottom line. She claims the executives or whoever made the decision for the broadcast pre-approved the broader points of her rant. It wasn’t fully off the cuff, although it appeared so initially. While I will not defend Frosk because I find her a contemptible individual with an overinflated sense of her own importance, she was at least a little right about the network abandoning her. All clips of her rant were stripped from official G4 platforms and social media in September. Why executives waited that long when the damage from it was long since done, I’ll never know. Probably because those same executives and many of the people associated with G4 (and the same video game journalists hardcore gamers already hated) supported Frosk vociferously after the inevitable online backlash gained steam. Which only made the problem worse by G4 essentially cementing her entire rant as company policy. G4 would clearly attempt to backtrack and do damage control on that shortsighted move well after the horses had already fled the burninated thatched roof cottage.

But let’s circle back. “If you don’t like it, don’t watch it.” Such a mind-numbingly stupid thing to say. Because the audience that Frosk had just finished attacking took her advice to heart, especially after the rant went mega viral. The network bled viewership. Proving that there is such a thing as bad publicity. I don’t revel in people getting fired, but what did G4 honestly expect?