MrBeast has revealed that Beast Games was ‘not a good financial decision’ as he shared that he actually lost over $10 million.
It has been widely believed that the Amazon Prime game show must have been a huge financial success given its enormous budget, which has been reported to be over $100 million.
However, MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, has said otherwise.
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Known for his outlandish YouTube videos involving extreme challenges with enormous cash prizes, it was no surprise when Donaldson shared that he was hosting his own game show.
And the YouTuber spared no expense. With the grand prize set to a whopping $10 million, Donaldson also gave an additional $15 million away to various other contestants throughout the show.
And that isn’t all, he even built an entire city where participants could live during filming, which cost around $14 million to construct.
Now, Donaldson has spoken out about how much money he made - or lost - during the production of the show.
Appearing in an episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett, Donaldson admitted that his game was not a ‘good financial decision’.
Bartlett asked the YouTuber: “How out of pocket are you?”
Donaldson responded with: “Tens of millions, yeah, it was not a good financial decision to make Beast Games, I lost money.
“I would have more money if I didn’t film it.”
But when asked if he had any regrets, Donaldson shook his head.
He continued: “No, no, it’s great. For me, it was about making season one as good as possible, you know I can’t let the YouTube Community down because creators don’t have a good rep when it comes to doing stuff on streaming platforms and I’m getting 200 million views a video on average over the course of the first year and I’m going to talk to these stream platforms and they're like, ‘we’ve been burned by creators before’.
“I’m like, ‘bro I’m not a TikToker that dances, I have a production company and I routinely make spectacles, and even me, these streaming platforms weren’t taking serious so I was like, ‘f***, if I fail it’s over, like no streaming platform is ever going to touch a YouTuber ever again so my big thing was just making sure this crushed.”
And Donaldson has said that the show has helped ‘open the doors’ for other creators.
He went on to add: “I already know of two creators that have signed deals just on the backend
success of Beast Games and probably, I mean hundreds of millions of dollars is going to flow into creators’ pockets just because of Beast Games in the next year.”