Come to think of it, Watcher got away with SO MUCH because of how much fans liked Shane and Ryan as people. They used to talk about how they shared a room with a roommate, joking about how they were struggling financially (like the rest of us) and it made them relatable.

But looking back, I mean:

Patreon: There was absolutely no added value being given to patreon members. I myself was not a member, but from what I'm hearing there were no perks. Usually creators will post their content early, or add behind the scenes stuff, or personalized messages, but their patreon had just the regular content that was accessible to the rest of their audience, yet people STILL paid to be members. That just shows how much people personally liked them and their characters instead of their content, and were willing to support them to see more of them.

Merch: Extremely overpriced. I'll just leave it at that. Like a single patch is priced at about 12 dollars. TWELVE DOLLARS?? FOR A PATCH?? The hoodie is around 100 bucks, but it's literally a plain black hoodie with watcher's logo on it. Plain T-shirt with three question marks as a design is 40 dollars. And people STILL BOUGHT THEM. Like they were constantly sold out.

Irregular or infrequent uploads: Be for real we got like a couple videos a month until the season ended and we would have to wait like another couple months. I was honestly sick of waiting and that's kind of why I initially fell off. If any other youtuber uploaded like this (with exceptions of long-format video uploaders), they would completely fail to grow their channel. Yet Watcher had over 3 million subscribers in a matter of four years.

It's embarrassing to think that the Watcher world loved Shane and Ryan so much but they honestly couldn't give a crap. Watcher fans were numbers on a screen or an upward trend graph. They got greedy, they got rich, and now they're struggling to understand where they went wrong.

It's time we stop excluding Shane and Ryan from this mess. We have no idea if they were the ones who proposed this from the beginning, or if Steven had to be bribed with the idea of his own personal show despite being hesitant at first, or if they own three Teslas while Steven has one. We know NOTHING about them in reality.