World of Tanks developer, Wargaming, found itself thrust into the spotlight late last week after a fallout with one of its community contributors over a video in which he harshly criticized the studio.
In his video criticizing the game’s Chrysler K Grand Finals premium tank, YouTuber SirFoch used swear words which seems to have ticked off Wargaming. As GameRevolution reports, one of the studio’s Community Managers named Ph3lan messaged SirFoch over Discord (screenshots here), and informed him that he was being removed from the contributor program for his unprofessional tone. Fair enough. But then Ph3lan proceeded to ask SirForch to remove the video (re-uploaded here by a different user), and when he refused, he was told that Wargaming would have it taken down by a copyright strike.
Following backlash, Ph3lan defended the move and accused SirForch of using “his status, influence, and the exclusive preview content he was given to defame Wargaming and World of Tanks.” “To put it bluntly, we asked him to remove the video because he abused his status as a contributor and the content he received from us to create a video that defamed our company image with the tone and language he used,” he continued.
On Reddit, SirFoch clarified his side of the story, stating that he didn’t apply to become a community contributor and was selected by Wargaming for the program. He says that his video was not a “big deal” and that threats of copyright strike “because I called you names is not really cool.”
Worth noting that SirFoch is not employed by Wargaming and community contributors are not paid.
What do our readers make of this?
[Source: GameRevolution, World of Tanks, Reddit via Kotaku]
