A YouTube Gaming legend is lost

As of January 18th 2019, the entertainment network Machinima, Inc. has put all of their YouTube videos to private.

The move comes without prior notice, catching the channel's current creators unawares, as they received emails telling them their contracts would either be moved to Fullscreen or simply dropped.



Machinima was recently acquired by Otter Media (a division of AT&T and WarnerMedia), who has plans to merge the content into its current library. Rumors abound that the videos will be kept offline due to the issues with sorting out copyright.

Funhaus's Lawrance Sonntag quoted on a live stream regarding the videos "Warner, at this point, cannot verify the copyrights to all videos in Machinima's network -- and there are a ton of videos," he says. "It'd cost a lot of money to do it, and this is on videos that aren't getting any views. So, they cut it loose. That's that. It's a business. That's how it goes, man."

Sonntag was one of the key members of Machinima’s Inside Gaming group. He and other important members left the series in 2015 to be quickly picked up to run their current spiritual successor in Rooster Teeth's Funhaus channel. Both Funhaus and Machinima are now owned at the top level by Otter Media. Some old Inside Gaming content has even recently shown up on Funhaus's live program Funhaus TV.

It should be noted that at time of writing many series that were big features on Machinima are still watchable through Amazon Prime Video, adding credence that the merger will simply choose videos easily repackageable and distribute them elsewhere.



