YouTuber MatPat sells his Game Theorists channel to startup LunarX

YouTube creator Matthew Patrick, known as MatPat, and his business partner (and wife) Stephanie are in really unique positions for people who create content online. Together, they've built three successful channels with 30 million combined subscribers: Game Theorists, Film Theorists, and Food Theorists. On Tuesday, Patrick shared a major update: Game Theorists, a channel with 16 million subscribers, had been sold to a startup called Lunar X.

In his announcement video, Patrick shared that their small team could no longer do it all themselves. Between producing seven to ten videos a week, fundraising for St. Jude Children's Hospital, consulting, traveling to conventions, as well as keeping up with the behind-the-scenes labor needed to keep a business running, like taxes and payroll, it felt like they were losing sight of what they really wanted to be doing: creating.

Enter Lunar X.

Lunar X would alleviate some of these pressures as an "investment partner and production support company." According to Patrick, the company will provide "resources so we can all feel a little less pressure to execute without having to actually slow down," and will help avoid them all becoming "mindless content machines." Their creative spark had been dulled by the overwhelming obligations of running a business. "I'm just interested in building communities, not empires," Patrick continued. "I want to be creative. I'm not really interested in being corporate."

Patrick will remain the host of the channel and CEO of Theorists, the company that runs all three channels. Stephanie would remain COO, and their team would also stay on in the same roles.

The Lunar X acquisition is a huge development in a larger trend within the creator community, especially on YouTube, of leveraging the long-term returns of channels and content by selling them to third parties, sometimes for millions of dollars.

Patrick noted that his team had been approached by at least 10 companies over the last two years, "from small startups to some of the largest TV producers and distributors in the world" as a result of creators "finally getting the respect, attention, and resources" that they deserve. He likened the Game Theorists sale to Lunar X to that of YouTube to Google.

"By selling YouTube to Google, [the three co-founders of YouTube] took a successful idea and they supercharged it," he said.