Hi. Stumbled on this post and I know itās older, but I wanted to argue this since it has a lot of notes, and I have plenty of knowledge as someone who is friends with the VAs and involved in some business things behind the scenes.
Support the VAs and creative talent behind the shows for sure! Enjoy their personal content, donate to their personal streams. Hell, Iām one of Reedās editors, so I definitely hope you enjoy his content! š
HOWEVER. A couple things in your post that are a problem and need to be addressed to avoid harming the very people you hope to help:
Blackshore is a company. They need to pay the people working for them on the Shows and views arenāt what they used to be, so view revenue from videos would be down. Of course they need money, thatās how businesses work! I wish everybody could be paid basic income and spend their time doing creative projects that donāt need to make money, but thatās not our reality.
The money donated on streams goes right back into the channels, not to the company as profit. This has been explained multiple times live, I guess not frequently enough though! Money donated goes towards paying the newly added VAs, other channelās VAs for cameos, paying for new maps and new models, paying the editors, the thumbnail artists, and now paying for more expensive merch items like plushies that cost $250 just to get one sample going. These are costs that 2022 SAMS didnāt have, and they need more support to keep up this quality of production.
This is something Iāve noticed in general, not just with a post like this, but with other ādonāt support the shows just the VAs contentā posts. Removing support from the VAs jobs, their source of income, directly negatively affects them. If the channels are not making enough money through views and streams, they will not be making profit with all those costs listed above, and the shows will be stopped. This is not a passion project, this is not a purely creative outlet, this is a job. The VAs and company cannot reasonably be asked to spend money and time and energy working on something that is not making enough money for rent and food.
Iām a biased source, but I am well informed in both directions and obviously pretty heavily invested in my friendsā wellbeing. Please support their private content too for SURE, I will always advocate for that (Flora streams, Reed has cool videos planned, Davis and Kat have wonderful Minecraft roleplay series, Mitch streams, Mario streams, etc etc etc). But please do not encourage boycotting the job that pays their rent. š
