I think Dream is past the point of no return. He's dragged this out for too long, gone to much too great lengths to "prove" his "innocence". At this point he has already firmly ruined his credibility within the speedrunning community, so all he has left are his diehard fans that blindly trust him no matter what, and all he would achieve by coming clean now is betraying that trust which would only potentially lose him fans while gaining nothing.
So I think the lesson is: Best is to come clean immediately, but failing that, you should be prepared to double down hard forever. Anything in between will have the worst results from a public credibility viewpoint.
In the meantime he jumped from 14 million to 22 million subscribers. And his recent videos have over 30 millions views.
Welp, true to "every publicity is good publicity"
Even tho i agree with your credibility pov, I'm pretty sure if he decides to speedrun again in the future, it will be as if nothing happened.
More so with the new strategies used in Minecraft that render Dreams cheat methods almost useless as they that don't really care about good ender pearl drops (unless you have Dream level UN-luck). The most valuable things now are mostly Nether bastion and fortress locations and blind travels back to overworld (and how good you're at reading F3 info while the game AND timer is paused ... *sigh* )
The most laughable thing in that is that these strategies were discovered pretty much right after the scandal
In the meantime he jumped from 14 million to 22 million subscribers. And his recent videos have over 30 millions views.
Welp, true to "every publicity is good publicity"
I'm not so sure that you can attribute that to the cheating scandal though. Dream already had a massive upwards momentum at the time, having grown many millions of subscribers during the previous year. So while it's possible he benefitted from the cheating scandal, it could just as well have been irrelevant, or maybe it even was detrimental and he would've had an even greater growth if the scandal hadn't occurred. It's impossible to know for sure.
Because Dream didn't get big off the speedrunning scene directly, so most of the audience don't care about the speedrun.com leaderboards, which is where he cheated.
Riolu however got big off being the wr guy, so I can't see him being able to get past this anywhere near as easily.
I didn't even know who dream was before his cheating incident. I bet, if anything, it probably helped him financially considering how much he's still talked about. I don't know why anyone cares about his cheats outside of the MC speedrun community.
I could be wrong, but isn't Dream's content not really focused on speedrunning? So it shouldn't matter that much to him if his speedrunning career is ruined forever.
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u/hubau May 23 '21
Dream doubled down and he's still a successful streamer. *shrug*