Early Access: The Best (& Worst) of BattleBots Update

This is kind of a weird post because technically this is something that belongs on the Patreon for BattleBots Update, the project I started in 2015 that followed the reboot of the BattleBots TV series. The Patreon associated with BBU was voluntarily closed down a few years ago when the slow erosion of diminishing returns killed off most of the grassroots support of the endeavor. BBU is something that has always been (mostly) completely separate from this place. But I have nowhere else to make this post and since there's a teeny bit of crossover between the audiences of the two projects perhaps some of you will find this interesting.

The aforementioned "slow erosion" is why we are here, though. BattleBots Update is coming to a close after nine years of operation making it the second longest project I've worked on in my lifetime. (Gatorbox obviously takes the top spot with an ongoing project lifespan of 13 years and counting. Radio F has technically been around for 29 years but the periods it was active was sporadic.) My reasoning for shutting down BBU is complicated and I plan on going into the deeper details of it in the final post that will be made to the website. The short of it is that there are two main factors that have led to this demise of the blog, they are:

• 1) The ongoing deterioration of the BattleBots event and show itself. After a few years on the air the series just began to lose steam as the community that had built up around it eventually just grew bored and went on to other things. The audience for BattleBots Update has shrunk considerably which is obviously a bad thing but it's uniquely bad for BBU because unlike literally every other fan made production BBU is longform written content and not a YouTube show or podcast. Following BBU is a significant time investment compared to just putting on some talking head and washing your dishes or something. From the start the project already had extremely limited appeal.

• 2) The composition of the fandom surrounding BattleBots has changed drastically over the course of the past nine years. I barely even recognize the community anymore and the people who've come in to replace the original audience are just puritan carpetbaggers who've twisted and corrupted the community into a mockery of what it once was. They actively hate the kind of humor on BattleBots Update and because of this I'm largely unwelcome in much of the larger sphere of the community. Additionally there is also a newer generation of builders and competitors who skew younger and the nature of BBU, which is rooted in Web 1.0 history, doesn't appeal to them and I am completely disregarded by most of them.

It's time to move on. I know there are a handful of people out there who've followed BBU since day one and I hate to let them down but these articles wind up being 8,500-9,000 words long apiece and I have to churn them out on a weekly basis to follow the show. I get advance copies of all the episodes and even then I still struggle constantly to meet my self-imposed deadlines. I just can't do it anymore and I don't see the value in continuing to invest so much of myself into a project where the vast majority of the fandom it's meant for either actively does not like me or just doesn't care about what I do at all. It's very discouraging. It's not worth the time or effort anymore.

Starting in July BBU will feature its final three posts: "The Best of BattleBots Update", "The Worst of BattleBots Update", and "The End of BattleBots Update". The first two articles in this series are available from this early access post. (The final one cannot be fully completed ahead of time because I am planning on addressing comments and feedback that the Best/Worst articles get.)

Both the Best & Worst articles are a countdown of the top 15 moments in the history of the project. The criteria for inclusion is "anything that happened on, to, or because of BattleBots Update". I feel that revisiting high points is just something that you're supposed to do when a massive project comes to an end. I initially decided to include the list of the low points because I felt the contrast would be funny and in the spirit of the overall negative vibe of the site however as I wrote the article I realized that in actuality it was a good way to address my past controversies, share my thoughts on them, and finally provide closure once and for all.

Anyways, this is an early access post so please don't share its contents with others. Nobody other than those who have access to this post know that BBU is officially coming to a close. I'm intentionally not making a big deal out of it. I assume there will be people outside of this post who will see the "best of" article go up and assume something is up and chances are they definitely will when the "worst of" article is posted a week later because that's just not something most creators do. I intend to just quietly go out with the final post and lock down the website in the process to turn it into an online archive.

Thank you all for your continued support, whether you came here from Gatorbox or BattleBots Update. Moving into 2025 I have plans to perhaps reinvigorate the currently defunct Twilight Foundry media archive (twilightfoundry.com). We had a huge "re"-launch party for it in fall 2014 but before the website could even get a chance at life BattleBots Update -- which was also funded and produced under the Twilight Foundry label -- became an absolute smash hit and completely sucked all the momentum out of the newly launched website because all of my attention was focused into pursuing BBU and I couldn't split my time up between the two projects. With the sunsetting of BBU maybe it's time for us to try again with the Twilight Foundry website? Stay tuned!