Rooster Teeth plays the video game: ‘We’re competing with Netflix and HBO’

“We were three years late to YouTube! We didn’t join YouTube until late 2008, because when we first looked at it, honestly, I viewed them as a competitor. But then it grew to the point where if you wanted to be part of the conversation, you had to be on YouTube.”

Burnie Burns, co-founder and creative director of Rooster Teeth, is sitting in the company’s booth in the basement of Cannes’ Palais des Festivals at the MIPTV television industry market, one of a number of digital production companies here to parlay massive YouTube popularity into licensing deals with broadcasters.

And Rooster Teeth is massively popular on YouTube – its main channel generated 879m video views in 2014 alone, and currently has nearly 8.2 million subscribers – but the US studio’s first show Red vs Blue actually debuted online two years before YouTube in 2003.

Burns is in Cannes to explain that history to TV companies who are simultaneously fascinated and terrified by the huge audiences watching YouTube channels.

Not just in Rooster Teeth’s booth either: on Wednesday, he did it from the stage of the Palais’ Grand Auditorium in a “digital screening” that saw clips of Red vs Blue and other Rooster Teeth shows showcased on the massive cinema screen more usually associated with the glitz of the Cannes Film Festival.

Burns and his colleagues are also ensuring TV firms understand their company. It makes a lot of shows about games and is steeped in gaming culture, but it also makes comedies and action adventures.

It is well known for making machinima – dramas produced, like Red vs Blue, within games – but it also does live-action like Lazer Team, an upcoming sci-fi comedy film based on four hapless heroes charged with saving the world from an alien invasion.

‘We always focused on narratives’

“We’ve been doing this for 12 years, and the television industry is just now starting to really pay attention to it. And that’s great, but we’ve been ready for that the entire time,” says Burns.

“Even in the days of early YouTube we always focused on narratives, and we always focused on franchises. We didn’t do a lot of vlogging and stuff like that. And over the years, we had some organic things like Let’s Play that grew out of what we did with machinima.”

Let’s Play videos are big on YouTube, and they’ve evolved from being play-throughs of video games with commentary on top to something that in many cases is its own entertainment genre.

“To me, the machinima artform has essentially evolved now into the Let’s Play streaming world. That’s what it is: it’s people performing and creating art using video games. It’s just more personality-driven rather than story-driven these days,” says Burns.

Red vs Blue still falls into the latter camp. Billed as “the longest running sci-fi show in American history”, its 13 seasons have been filmed within various Halo games as a sharp parody of science fiction and gaming tropes alike. It’s a comedy that happens to be set within a video game world, a bit like The Simpsons is a sitcom that just happens to be a cartoon.

“That was the philosophical approach from day one. Just because this thing is in a video game doesn’t mean it has to be about a video game,” says Burns. “And it’s evolved. Red vs Blue as a show has evolved dramatically. It looks an entirely different show to what we started with, but the format of the show has changed so much over the years too.”

Rooster Teeth’s online empire has grown from that one show, picking up an audience of – an overused buzzword at MIPTV – “millennials” that TV broadcasters are worried about losing to online channels.

“When we go to talk to TV people and talk about the teenage male demographic, they’re like ‘We don’t programme for them, because we don’t know where they went!’ And I’m like ‘we know where they went: I can show you exactly where they are, because they’re watching our content online!’” says Burns.

Rooster Teeth’s audience may be online, but the company has had one eye on the TV world throughout its history. That includes filming some shows, like sci-fi action series RWBY, in 11-minute episodes that can be packaged in pairs for a 22-minute TV show.

“TV can be a frustrating industry, because people are very set in their ways and they can be very risk-averse. Online, we can incubate shows: we can put a show out and after two episodes if it’s not going the way we want it to be, we just completely rework it. We have a lot more freedom online,” says Burns.

‘People just want premium content’

He says Rooster Teeth has always thought of its shows as franchises in their own right, which helps now that it’s having licensing discussions with broadcasters. Even from the start of Red vs Blue, the studio deliberately described it as “the popular web series Red vs Blue” to ensure people understood its episodic nature.

“Back then there were Flash animations but usually standalone. Even a series like Homestar Runner, you didn’t need to watch multiple episodes to know what was going on. But we were trying to communicate even back then that this was something different,” he says.

“‘There’s going to be one show, and then next week there’s going to be another show, and you’re going to come back next week’. Training the audience, even though they’re used to episodic content from television. So we’ve always had a franchise mindset.”

With Red vs Blue now available on Netflix, Lazer Team set to be released across all screens, and traditional broadcasters buzzing around, Burns is excited about the potential to get these shows out to even bigger audiences.

“The way you deliver content, there used to be really hard lines. ‘This is a theatrical movie, this is a television show, this is a web series’. But as technology becomes ubiquitous for delivering content, those hard lines blur and you end up on a spectrum where it’s not always clear,” he says.

Rooster Teeth doesn’t know whether Lazer Team will be in cinemas, for example. “We honestly don’t know! And we don’t know that it’s all that important any more. It’d be great for marketing certainly, but we’re reaching a point where people just want premium content, and those audiences will consume that content however they best see fit.”

Burns cites his own children as examples. “I’m not entirely sure they would know how to tune in to a television channel. They just don’t do that. The way they consume media is all through either an Xbox and the video on there, or an iPad. That’s it.”

‘We always knew we were going to make it’

Lazer Team will certainly be a good calling card for Rooster Teeth. It’s due to be released this year through parent company, multi-channel network (MCN) Fullscreen, which bought Rooster teeth for an undisclosed amount in 2014.

“We have a lot of fans who watch a lot of our shows, and we are always trying to find ways to introduce that content to the other people in their life. I think the movie will be a great way to do that,” says Burns.

“People will be able to say ‘okay, you can’t sit down and watch a 13-season show to get caught up with these guys, and you probably won’t want to watch a Let’s Play, but you might want to watch an hour-and-a-half movie’. So it’s a great introduction.”

Lazer Team isn’t a new idea for Rooster Teeth: the company has been talking about it for years. “We always knew we were gong to make it, but it was always the project after the next project: ‘Oh, we’ll work on this then we’ll work on Lazer Team after that, because it’s such a big effort and it’s going to take such a lot of resources. Then we solved that problem with crowdfunding.”

They certainly did. In 2014, Rooster Teeth raised just under $2.5m on crowdfunding site Indiegogo to make its first feature-length movie – nearly four times its original goal of $650k.

‘The audience exerts creative control’

“Crowdfunding is amazing, and we were late to the game on that because we just hadn’t participated in it, but it worked really well for us. We have huge numbers: 3.9m viewers per month, 18m subscribers on YouTube and 4bn views, almost: all those huge numbers that you hear associated with YouTube properties and online media,” he says.

“But when it came to funding a movie, we hit our goal with 22,000 backers. That’s a manageable number: essentially that’s pre-orders. People get a lot of movies funded because they can sell the international rights ahead of time: a movie like Clerks 2 was profitable before it even put a single reel in the theater. Now you can do that with crowdfunding as well. This is the new pre-orders, at a premium price with some extra perks.”

Crowdfunding also brings more creative control, in theory. Or does it? Burns points out that while Rooster Teeth doesn’t have Hollywood studio execs breathing down his neck while making Lazer Team, there are still financial backers who have views to share: the fans. And in fact, they have views on everything the company makes.

“Creative control is interesting: you never do have that entirely because you have an audience, and the audience exerts creative control, especially online. If I post a video, within a minute I’ll have a second-by-second breakdown of what somebody thinks of the video!” he says. “The audience online, I think they drive content and they shape content more than they think.”

‘The last year in gaming has been a hard one’

Some of my favourite Rooster Teeth videos recently have been on its standalone Game Kids channel, which launched in December 2014 with a family-friendly focus, including videos of Rooster Teethers and their families playing games like Minecraft and The Sims.

“We’re not trying to transition any of our current audience to Game Kids. We’re just trying to have it slowly, organically be discovered by the audiences we hope will like that content,” says Burns.

The reason I love Game Kids is the way it reflects something I love about gaming in 2015: a shared experience between me and my children, who have almost-visible lightbulbs popping above their heads as they’re starting to explore these digital worlds. It feels like a truly precious thing, passing on a love for games and creative play, and Game Kids reflects that too.

It’s also been a breath of fresh positivity after a year in which the gamer community was enmeshed in GamerGate. Burns chooses his words carefully when I mention the word, but doesn’t dodge the subject.

“The last year in gaming has been a hard one for the culture. With GamerGate and everything that’s gone on with that, it’s been tough to watch.’” he says.

“I will freely admit there have been times in the last year when I thought to myself ‘Do I identify myself as being a gamer at this point? Am I part of this culture, do I fit in to this?’ It’s like anything: a very vocal minority that are saying things because they get attention for them. And that happens all the time.”

‘We’re not here to tell you why something is bad’

Game Kids was not a direct response to GamerGate, but rather had its roots in Rooster Teeth’s desire to “focus on things that we like” rather than negativity.

“That’s why we don’t do game reviews, because we’re not here to tell you why something is bad, because a lot of people worked on that thing! And also there’s a lot of people who enjoy something, and they don’t need someone telling them it’s not to be enjoyed,” he says.

“So Game Kids is something we thought would work very well with family-friendly and kids content: just having a very positive and good experience. Games are fun, y’know! Games have a terrible reputation: I was a very early gamer back in the Atari days, and my parents would always tell me ‘get off that thing!’. Now I do this for a living…”

We’re not quite finished with GamerGate yet, though. Burns has some nuanced views on how the last year’s online debate - and game culture more generally - may have been perceived by the wider world.

“The way gamers are is they’re competitive by nature. They talk about press conferences at E3, they’ll say ‘The Xbox conference is today and the Sony conference was yesterday. Who won? Who lost? But how do you win a press conference?! Well, it’s just the way people talk,” he says.

“Gamers, it’s part of their vocabulary, that winning and losing is important to them. So much of the culture that’s built around that, you can’t really separate it when issues come up. You have to understand that this is the way that those people communicate.

“And it can seem aggressive at times, and sometimes I personally don’t agree with what they’re discussing or their viewpoints. But the way they discuss it? I can’t really cast aspersions on it, because I do well the rest of the year based on that same passion, you know what I mean?”

‘Now we’re competing with Netflix and HBO and Amazon’

Rooster Teeth is doing well, and it’s riding the wave of YouTube’s growth and the emergence of other ways to watch video, from Netflix to startups like Vessel.

Burns compares it to the first dotcom boom, when a significant investment in technology - broadband networking - spawned companies like Google and Amazon with “really cool services that engaged audiences”. He sees a parallel with what’s happening now with online media.

“The second coming of the dotcom era, but a lot more stable. A lot of people invested a lot of money in technology: they’re launching things like Vessel, and everybody it seems is starting a video platform. Amazon acquired Twitch. And now there’s a huge need for content,” he says.

This is why Rooster Teeth agreed to be bought by Fullscreen in November 2014, to give it the resources and tools it needs to compete as more and more producers of all sizes flood onto these platforms.

“We knew everyone was heading in this direction: we had that feeling that technology would get to the point where everybody would eventually be streaming everything online digitally. It was just the way it was going to work,” he says.

“In the last 18 months, that eventuality has become imminent. Before, people were kinda heading in the direction of where we’re standing. Now people are full-out sprinting in this direction.

“But now we’re armed. Now we’re not competing with the PewDiePies and the Homestar Runners of the world. Now we’re competing with Netflix and HBO and Amazon. And we’re more than ready for that challenge.”