This is from what I recall that was discussed in Patreon Q&A, and what I've seen elsewhere (from other articles with the Undertow folks, etc). I don't know anyone involved personally, so this should not be considered definitive. Hopefully I'm correct on the broad strokes at least.
When Mark originally launched The Game Room with himself and Dave, the FromUSAlive internet startup was part of Alcor, a software development firm co-owned by Mark's father, Michael Bussler. The company was right idea, but wrong time, since streaming video didn't take off until years later. Mark and Dave were in film school, and working on production for other productions for the company, and started The Game Room as their side project.
After the Game Room was cancelled, FromUSAlive's resources became Inecom. This is the period where Mark worked on direct to DVD documentaries under that brand. Some of them were repackaged content from the FromUSAlive days (Civil War Minutes), and others were new productions (Like Expo: Magic of the White City, and Westinghouse). The "Classic Game Room: Rise and fall..." DVD was released in 2007 at the end of this era, which is why the Inecom offices there were still the same ones used in the original Game Room days.
In 2008, Mark started with Classic Game Room HD content, mostly filmed at home if I recall. Folks remembered, and this was after streaming video had started to explode, and creators doing video game-related content in that were able to get a lot of views (AVGN for example). So, my understanding is that Inecom was sort of re-purposed into something focused on CGR production, and outside investors were brought in.
At this point, CGR kind of followed the path of many startups. They were flush with cash, and answerable to investors as to how the business was run. As Mark's videos got more popular, more people were brought in to try and translate CGR's popularity and viewership into something capable of generating revenue. We had Undertow with not only Derek and TJ, but various other rotating in to do reviews. There was was CGR Overboard as a third game review channel, extra channels for comics and toys, etc. I believe there are even still old videos up of a daily gaming news show with a woman named Angela, and Edit Station 1, so they were clearly trying a lot of things. This doesn't even account for staff not on camera. Camera, audio, video editing, website development, shipping for merchandise, etc. I recall seeing somewhere that at the height of CGR, it was a full time job for aroubd 15 people, not including part time folks, like the people we saw come into Undertow to just review a few games and leave.
This is a guess on my part, but I think this was an effort to try to transform 'Youtube views' into tangible profit. Views themselves don't earn a lot in direct payments from Youtube, and as the nature of video-game related content changed and became more saturated, even that was harder to come by. This is why we saw a push for merchandise sales (and I have some great stuff I really enjoy from that era), for t-shirts, physical media, etc. I think this is the time when Undertow also seemed to become like a bit of a 'review mill'. I think I remember seeing an interview with TJ or maybe Derek where he talked about coming into work, getting told to grab some games from a pile and knock out a few reviews. That pace is difficult to keep up, and I could definitely see it turning an enjoyable job into a monotonous task.
When I saw that, I remember thinking that in a lot of TJ's JRPG reviews, most of the footage was from the first hour or so of gameplay. It seems likely that a lot of those JRPG reviews were from games he'd previously played in his own time, and then was just capturing some footage to add to the review. Given the way CGR seemed to be be run, that seemed a lot more likely than the management allowing him to come into work and finish a 40 hour game on the clock....to product a 5-10 minute review. Not nearly the same as playing a quick game of 'Nuts & Milk' and knocking out some impressions.
I think it made sense for a much larger company (IGN for example, or back when GameTrailers was owned by Viacom), but CGR/Inecom was a smaller outfit. That shotgun effect of 'let's try everything and see if anything makes money' eventually got to the point where it really couldn't sustain the business, and like a lot of startups, the investors pulled out and the money dried up. Staff was let go until it was just Mark left closing up the shop. I think a lot of us remember that last year or so when Mark and Derek seemed visibly quite stressed in their videos.
It sounds like when CGR was going to end 2015 that once the investors left, Mark was able to regain full legal control of the Inecom LLC, and CGR brand. Mark had thought of returning to do CGR as a hobby with the occasional video, but ultimately decided to try the Patreon model. I'm glad he did, as I think we got several years of great content, but it can be difficult that kind of one-man effort, and keep everyone happy...including yourself.
In some ways, Patreon subscribers are like investors. They don't have legal ownership/control of the content, but there is a give and take between what patrons and creators want, and there was the inevitable bleed away of paid subscribers. Some folks only intended to subscribe for a bit as a show of support, others didn't like various changes in content, some folks are splitting support between many creators' Patreons, and I think some never really understood that we'd gone from a full production crew to just Mark.
That said....I really liked a lot of the content produced during those few years. From the extended reviews, to the walks with Stella and behind the scenes chats, to the Amazon 2085 show, to Mark's podcast. A lot of these were interesting, but none were permanently growing audience or revenue. And I can see how that can be really mentally draining for someone. So, much as I enjoyed the vast majority of the 2015-2018 CGR content, I wonder if Mark might have been happier just doing the occasional video as a hobby.
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So, if the publishing books, or short comic reviews are something he's really enjoying, I don't mind at all. I had years of great CGR content for a great value, and occasionally still get come cool CGR video content. I grabbed the CGR 20th Anniversary Retro Spectacular last week and really enjoyed it. Mark has a huge body of work of which he can be proud.
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I can completely understand the comic or promo content not being for everyone, and I doubt Mark would fault you for unsubscribing if you find it tedious there, Balder. I get why some would suggest starting a new channel for it but...that never worked with any of the other CGR channels. Doing it this way, he reaches the feeds of a lot of folks who are bound to have some interest. Classic video games and 1980's comics have a lot of the same fans. If he started a new channel from scratch, there isn't that advantage. And if folks don't like it, it is easy enough to unsubscribe. Those classic CGR videos are still available...provided they haven't been de-listed by Youtube for some reason.
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Side note, another site/company that parallels the CGR story in some ways is GameTrailers.com. (Again, this is heavily abbreviated, and probably riddled with errors on my part
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Started by Brandon Jones and Goeffrey Grotz in 2002. Jon Slusser invested, and the operation was eventually sold to Viacom. They pioneered collecting a lot of video game multimedia content that just wasn't available online at the time. Video game companies brought trailers to trade shows, but in the pre-Youtube days, they weren't really available elsewhere. This branched into their own reviews (Brandon Jones is best known the 'Gametrailers Voiceover Guy' though he only wrote a small number of the reviews himself. They partnered with other properties like Screwattack for original content, and became known for their reviews, top 10 videos, and excellent long form retrospectives on several series. Under Viacom and MTV Networks, there was a ton of money put into Game Trailers as part of the Spike TV brand, and things that Game Awards stemmed from this partnership....
But then youtube came along...Viacom was adamant for a long time that none of its subsidiaries put any content on Youtube, as that became peoples' platform of choice, it became harder and harder to drive people to your own site for exclusive content. They had a lot of original content that I enjoyed from those days, but when you're depending on traffic and views for add revenue....
Eventually they were sold to Defy Media, with a drastically reduced staff. The few years there had some good content, and finally allowed to put their back catalog of content on Youtube. However, that only lasted 2 years, and the few remaining staff members were laid off. IGN thankfully acquired the rights to their name and back catalog and keeps the old content available, but some of the last few staff members, including co-founder Brandon Jones, went on to found Easy Allies, a Patreon-funded company in 2016.
Their time on Patreon had some interesting parallels with Mark. I believe they started around the $30k/month mark, (as opposed to CGR around $10k US/month), but had 9 staff members instead of just 1, and initially operated out of a converted garage. They've been able to slowly grow this up to $50k US/month over the last 3 years, and move into a studio environment again. To contrast this with CGR, I think is largely an advantage in having so many more people remaining. Community engagement, and expansion is a lot easier when you have different folks able to handle reviews, regular streaming content, podcasts, etc. There hasn't been the polish of their GameTrailer days, where there was a much larger production staff, but sharing the work load makes things easier. I think in order to do this, only a few of them were able to treat it as a full time job, but I think that is the case for most of the team now.
(That isn't meant to dump on Mark either. He did an amazing job as a solo act for years, when CGR shifted into the Patreon era, but there are only so many hours in the day and burnouts do happen.)
I'm not sure if I have a point here. I just think CGR and GameTrailers/Easy Allies followed paths with some interesting parallels and differences. A big boom due to outside investment....that not really panning out for the investors in the long term...and going independent to still keep making quality content. Both have a distinct style, and although they're not at their crazy heights of the most popular online content creators, both sites/teams/etc have managed to carve out a decent living at it.
(If any of you enjoyed the old GameTrailers retrospectives, I'd suggest taking a look at the Easy Allies retrospective on the Souls series. Really interesting stuff, even if you're not a fan of the sames themselves.
SOULS RETROSPECTIVE LINK)
Anyway, I think that covers my ramble quota for a while.
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