Quoted from DennisK:
This is fair. Originally there were a lot more hints but editing changes dropped some of the more obvious ones. Zach does love his hype after all!
That was actually coincidence. SwL and TWIP are the only two coordinated departures that related to the TPN launch (and Zach was going to leave TWIP Podcast this year anyway, for real no matter what, but he moved up the timing for this). We didn't know H2H was ending; Martin joining up was unrelated. Same with Pinball Supernova. The announcement of stopping came, someone thought "maybe he'd be interested if this was his marketing umbrella" and reached out and he was. But his quit was a "real" quit as originally intended. Anyway, just some behind-the-scenes fodder.
Yes, looking back at the video (I only could screen it myself once between meetings today, everything has been moving fast) I can totally see where the impression comes from. All I can do is apologize to anyone it upset there was no intent to make anyone feel left out. We've been discussing diversity internally specifically for quite a while and pre-reveal we were only comfortable reaching out to a handful of folks to try and control the messaging (and this included women, but we had no confirmation of acceptance before the trailer drop, which was motivated in part because there was concern that it was playing around with people's emotions too much to just drag it out after all the quitting announcements).
And yes, the whole idea of TPN is to have an team-based umbrella for content creators to use. I have no idea if it'll work or not. But all sorts of differing voices are wanted.
Thanks for clearing things up Dennis. I appreciate it. From an outsiders perspective, this appeared to be a highly choreographed set of departures and announcements designed to generate the greatest amount of publicity, even at the expense of misleading your audience a little bit. But it sounds like much of this was coincidence. I guess it's one of those things where you guys know what was intended, and what was truly going on, but to people on the outside it looked fishy. I think waiting longer to announce TPN might have actually have been better, as it would have given a little more distance from the departures and might have made things feel less "staged." But hey, what's done is done. I think everyone has learned something about how you do or do not launch a new media venture, and everyone has been given something to think about whether it be about transparency, or about diversity optics.
I'm looking forward to the new content, and to seeing how this will all work. Hopefully, Zach and the rest of you guys can take this all in stride and move forward in a positive way. I'll echo what I told Zach on Facebook. If you guys are able to, you should try and do a Women's Roundtable discussion as one of your earliest pieces of content on the new platform. Invite Lauren from Backbox, and some other ladies to come on and give their perspectives on the hobby. It would be a great way to come out the better on this, and it would give women the voice that they felt was missing from TPN's announcement. Also, see if you can get the Youtuber and Twitch Streamer "Mystery Pinball Theater 3000" on the network. He's an African American pinball player who has a good personality and who streams a lot of Pinball. I think he'd be a good fit. Cheers Den Den!