The story
Founded by Felicia Day in 2011.1
Independent era (2011–2014)
The company originated as a pitch made to the YouTube Original Channel Initiative by Felicia Day and Kim Evey. The two learned of the initiative in fall 2011, and set about producing a pitch based on a fifth and sixth season of The Guild, Wil Wheaton's Tabletop, Day's The Flog, and Sword & Laser (hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt) among other shows. Some of the shows in the pitch were only devised the day before the meeting with YouTube. Around half of the package of shows received funding in the form of an advance payment "against future advertising revenue to jumpstart production."
The channel's founders and show hosts attended a number of fan conventions over the following years including ComicCon, Dragon*Con, VidCon, and WonderCon. In June 2012, Forbes suggested that "if successful, it could help blaze a trail for the future of network television." In March 2013, the channel announced three new series: Felicia's Ark (featuring Felicia Day), Fetch Quest (created by Jordan Allen-Dutton) and The Player One[s]. Two programs, Tabletop and Space Janitors, were renewed for season 2 of the channel starting April 1, 2013. Day later described the production schedule for the company as exhausting, as they were producing a large amount of content with only eight full time staff at the time. She came close to "pulling the plug", but elected to keep going, and received a second round of funding from YouTube.
YouTube announced in December 2013 that it would not be continuing to invest in original content; Geek & Sundry continued however by relying on crowdfunding support. The next season of Tabletop received $500,000 in a single week. The surge in fan support led to commercial interest in buying the business; in August 2014, Geek & Sundry was acquired by Legendary Entertainment for an undisclosed sum. In December 2014, Geek & Sundry was listed on New Media Rockstars Top 100 Channels, ranked at #68.
Twitch, Alpha and peak (2015–2018)
In March 2015, Geek & Sundry launched their Twitch channel with a 48-hour stream in support of The Lupus Foundation. After Day heard about a private Dungeons & Dragons home game from Ashley Johnson, she approached the group about playing it in a live-streamed format for Geek & Sundry; Critical Role began airing on March 12, 2015; however, the show remained creator-owned.
On January 11, 2016, Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group announced that it concluded an agreement with shareholders to acquire Legendary Entertainment for $3.5 billion. In April 2016, "Geek & Sundry's website had 290,000 uniques [...], per comScore. On YouTube, where it got its start, it has 1.4 million subscribers". In June 2016, Legendary Digital Networks (LDN) announced a new subscription streaming service, Alpha, which would include programming from both Nerdist and Geek & Sundry. In 2016, Critical Role's spinoff show Talks Machina premiered on Geek & Sundry's Twitch channel; in January 2017, Talks Machina: After Dark premiered on Alpha and included 15–20 minutes of extra cast questions pulled from Alpha viewers.
In 2016, Felicia Day left Geek & Sundry after growing "fatigued in a less creative, more managerial role in the company". Day said "I gave it my heart and my soul. When I realized I had given as much as I could, I needed to move on". In January 2017, it was announced that Thomas Tull, Legendary's founder, had exited as Legendary Entertainment CEO and that Eric Campbell, a writer on Geek & Sundry shows such as The Flog, Felicia's Ark and Signal Boost!, would become the Director of Development for Geek & Sundry. In July, Marisha Ray became the Creative Director.
From 2017 onwards, the network increasingly focused on tabletop gaming shows. This included actual play shows such as Sagas of Sundry, miniature painting with Painter's Guild and game master chat shows such as Roundtable. Season 4 of Wheaton's Tabletop was exclusive to Alpha in 2016 before premiering on YouTube in 2017. The Twitch channel reached its peak subscriber count at 55,349 in February 2018.
Critical Role split (2018–2019)
Legendary started to scale back their digital division after "Joshua Grode took over as the company's CEO in 2018". In June, Critical Role Productions started to self-produce new shows and content which did not air on Geek & Sundry's channels. Ray stepped down from her position at Geek & Sundry to become the Creative Director for Critical Role Productions; Matt Key replaced her as Creative Director, and would remain until the post was eliminated the following year.
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In July 2018, the Star Trek role-playing game (RPG) show Shield of Tomorrow ended and was replaced by the superhero RPG show Callisto 6; the cast, with Campbell as the game master, were carried over to the new show. L.A. by Night (based on Vampire: The Masquerade) premiered in September as a weekly show; Jason Carl, Brand Marketing Manager for World of Darkness, acted as the Storyteller.
In February 2019, Critical Role's split from Geek & Sundry and LDN was completed, with their flagship show having been recorded at a new studio since July 2018. Critical Role and Talks Machina aired exclusively on Critical Role's channels from this point onwards, and were no longer distributed via the Alpha streaming service. The move also suspended the Alpha exclusive show Talks Machina: After Dark, which would never be reinstated on the new channels. Older episodes of Critical Role and Talks Machina were later deleted and re-uploaded to the new Critical Role channels.
Further splits, layoffs and decline (2019–2023)
The departure of Critical Role in February 2019 marked "the beginning of a swift decline for the company", as it and Talks Machina had been Geek & Sundry's most popular shows by far. A short-lived D&D show Relics and Rarities premiered on Alpha that month; Deborah Ann Woll was the show's DM and the campaign had a celebrity guest each episode. It ran for only six episodes. The Alpha service was shut down in March – only weeks after Critical Role's departure – with Geek & Sundry content migrating to their YouTube and Twitch channels. In April 2019, Wheaton announced that he was suing Geek & Sundry for breach of contract over distribution deals for Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana which he was not consulted on. Campbell left Geek & Sundry in the same month, and Relics and Rarities was not picked up for a second season. Some further tabletop shows did however run during 2019, including Jason Bulmahn's Pathfinder: Knights of Everflame and Woll's Lost Odyssey: The Book of Knowledge. The latter was followed by a short series of cast interview videos.
In late 2019, Paradox Interactive's World of Darkness team took over production of L.A. By Night; seasons 1-3 remain archived on the Geek & Sundry YouTube channel while season 4 premiered exclusively on the World of Darkness Twitch channel in 2020. In January 2020, Campbell and the cast of Shield of Tomorrow/Callisto 6 launched a new Star Trek show, Clear Skies, on the QueueTimes Twitch channel. Campbell stated that Clear Skies is not a sequel and that "Shield of Tomorrow is Geek & Sundry‘s (and rightfully so). I had hoped to come back to Shield again, but honestly? We wrapped that story up so well, I love that it will exist forever as a completed campaign." Twitch subscription numbers for G&S declined rapidly from a 50,000 high in January 2018 to 300 in January 2020. Game the Game ceased broadcast in April, and the Geek & Sundry website stopped updating in June with a final episode of How to Play.
In July 2020, Legendary laid off 30% of the LDN staff. Variety reported that "there was a sense that the operations were a money drain on the company's profitable film and television operations. Those cuts were accelerated by the onset of COVID-19, which has resulted in layoffs and furloughs across the entertainment industry". The Hollywood Reporter reported that "the digital brands have become less important to the strategic direction of Legendary in recent years as the online content business has shifted away from the networks that grew big during the early heyday of YouTube stardom. Legendary Digital is not a moneymaker for the business the way its core film and TV divisions are". Twitch Tracker stopped logging subscriptions in October 2020 for the channel, at which point there were 52 remaining, and Geek & Sundry was left largely inactive.
In April 2021, CBR reported that "Geek & Sundry as an original content producer hasn't exactly been operational for a couple of years". The channels were sporadically used by Legendary to stream Nerdist shows such as Save Point and CelebriD&D, while the YouTube channel was largely used to re-release existing content. This included material that had originally been exclusive to Alpha such as CelebriD&D and We're Alive: Frontier. Additional episodes of Becca Scott's How to Play were released from February 2021 to June 2022, as the first original content on the channel since the layoffs the previous summer and the sole ongoing G&S property at the time. A single new episode of Game the Game, led by Scott, also aired in April 2023. In January 2022, Wheaton and LDN settled their lawsuit outside of court. The Geek & Sundry website began redirecting to the Nerdist website, and direct links to specific pages using the geekandsundry.com domain began to return 404 links. Geek & Sundry branding was integrated into the Nerdist website, under the "play" banner.
Relaunch (2024–present)
In August 2024, Legendary Digital Networks announced a new actual play podcast series titled Sagas of Sundry: Goblin Mode which began airing in September 2024 on Geek & Sundry's YouTube channel and on the Realm Media podcast network. It is led by game master Amy Vorpahl with Danielle Radford, Dan Casey, and Jason Nguyen as the main players. Casey, Vice President of Creative & Development at Legendary Entertainment, explained that while the previous Sagas of Sundry series was a Dread LARP/AP, the creative intention behind using Dungeons & Dragons for Sagas of Sundry: Goblin Mode was "to go back to basics" and to line up with "the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons and the 10th anniversary of Fifth Edition". On revitalizing Geek & Sundry, Casey commented that they "have been working on this relaunch for a few years" and that it had "really gained meaningful momentum in early 2023 thanks in part to [their] partnership with Realm". Casey highlighted that the relaunch's initial focus is on "video content and podcasts" with "projects in production and development that encompass everything from board gaming to wargaming to collectible card gaming to painting minis"; however, they "eventually" plan to bring back editorial content on the Geek & Sundry website.
In March 2026, Casey announced that Geek & Sundry was planning to rerelease "fan-favorite legacy content" that was "trapped" behind the former Alpha paywall now that music licensing and other clearances had been approved. The first rerelease was Sagas of Sundry: Madness which premiered on March 30, 2026 with a weekly release schedule.
From Wikipedia’s article on Geek & Sundry, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3