Game Theory host Matthew Patrick has announced the passing of the popular YouTube channel’s 25-year-old editor Ronnie “Oni” Edwards, whose death has reportedly been ruled a suicide. Ronnie edited videos on the Game Theory YouTube channel, with his editing style becoming widely influential across the site. Though the vast majority of Ronnie’s work was behind-the-scenes, he was still well-known by Game Theory fans, with Matthew expressing his shock at the news.
According to the Game Theory host, Ronnie passed away on July 4th, though the crew behind the YouTube show felt it best to reach out to his family before going public with the news. However, as a result of the news having eventually made its way online regardless, Matthew posted a video to The Game Theorists channel discussing Ronnie’s passing.
The video, titled ‘Losing the Battle,’ sees an emotional Matthew discussing Ronnie’s contributions to the show, along with paying tribute to his friend and colleague. “On July 4th Ronnie was found dead, a victim of suicide. We found out two days later,” Matthew explained. “We had been communicating about a project he had been editing on, he went silent for a couple of days so we went to his apartment to check up on him, only to be met with a coroner’s notice.”
The video can be viewed below:
Matthew also touched upon a recent controversy that Ronnie had been swept up in, with the editor having been called out by an E3 2018 booth worker who had posted to Reddit explaining how he had been “rude and disrespectful” to them. Matthew later commented on the post explaining how the Game Theory team would be speaking with Ronnie to address the concerns, though the host stated in the above video that he did not believe the E3 incident was the cause of his inner turmoil, and that they had been working together since.
Matthew took to Twitter to provide some “additional context” to the video, adding that there were a “lot of personal issues” Ronnie was working through at the time of his death. Touching on the E3 incident again, he added: “On our side, Ronnie was not fired over the incident, we didn’t yell at him or anything like that.” The tweet also explained how as his passing took place two weeks following the E3 incident, it’s “understandable why these things would be conflated,” though that Ronnie was struggling with other problems around the time of his death.
Some added context around today’s video pic.twitter.com/xYrFj7sGX0
— MatPat (@MatPatGT) July 25, 2018
It’s unclear how the Game Theory channel will move on without Ronnie, with Matthew explaining how important the editor was when it comes to their output. The Game Theorists has over 10 million YouTube subscribers at the time of this writing.
