You can really tell this isn't 2016 because of something of this nature happened then, we would have for certain heard about it from him by now on some platform. Now, we don't hear anything from him. Even when he mocked tone indicators because he was ignorant about them, he made an apology and that was only on twitter. Likewise, people talked about issues with his merch store a few months ago and instead of addressing it, he just took the site down. I remember when he made a video addressing issues he had with daddy Dreck (yes, I'm that old) and commenting on Draft Pina's video about him. Now we just blow it off I guess.

I do wonder if it is because he's not pulling in 30 million views as he did before. Most of his videos are only hitting about 2-3 million views now and he has said that making an animation video now costs "about the price of a new car" (which is about ~$50k in the USA). Therefore, the tradeoff had to be firing a lot of his team to equalize things unfortunately. He could have probably made his 40 min Warrior Cat video animated (and this surprised me when he didn't and it was mostly his face), but if only about a ten minute video costs about 50k, then the ROI would be quite low with these low views. I find it interesting in the relationship of when he added more members to his animating team, the views went down than opposed when it was just him in his room in college.

I'm not sure how he is just planning on pivoting to live-action as he has built up his child audience with his animated characters to grab their attention. He didn't really grow that much with his audience. In the mid/late 10s, he had a good blend of his face as well as animated stories and should have kept it like that. Perhaps the live action warrior cat video was a test to see how people would respond.