The military MMO War Thunder has a problem with its most popular Russian YouTuber and has temporarily banned him.
Tension between War Thunder and 140,000-subscriber channel since November 2013
As reported by silicon.rus, Gaijin Entertainment has had the YouTuber “alconafter” banned from YouTube. The YouTuber himself thought it was because he had recently been involved with mail.ru and “Armored Warfare”. He previously worked closely with Gaijin, had a press account, and enjoyed certain privileges. All of that was taken away from him in November 2013 when there was a controversial stream in which one of his guests called for a flash mob in protest against a patch.
Despite these disadvantages, alconafter remains the largest War Thunder YouTuber in the Russian language with 140,000 subscribers.
The current reason for Gaijin’s numerous copyright complaints to YouTube was that Gaijin accused “alconafter” of promoting a stream by claiming that a “Gaijin employee” would appear. Furthermore, it was alleged that “alconafter” wanted to create a false impression with cheap sensationalist journalism.
The corresponding “employee” is a history expert who has also worked for War Thunder but is not an “official employee”. Alconafter has since admitted his mistake.
World of Tanks and Armored Warfare are said to have offered help
The situation is getting even trickier: According to the “Military MMO” blog Ritas Status Report, both Wargaming (World of Tanks) and mail.ru (Armored Warfare) have offered legal support to the banned YouTuber to help him get his channel back. This was learned from relevant “sources” which are not disclosed.
The postings from Ritas Status Blog suggest that War Thunder wants to bury a YouTuber who now prefers to cover Armored Warfare and World of Warships on his channel instead of War Thunder.
Incidentally, “Ritas Status Report” itself recently had trouble with Wargaming.
Peace Agreement under news articles
As silicon.rus continues to report, legal support from the tank MMOs may not even be necessary. It seems that an agreement has been reached. The ban on the channel by YouTube was a mistake, an automatic process at YouTube that Gaijin did not want. An overzealous employee reportedly reported numerous copyright violations on his own accord, triggering the automatic ban. The strikes have since been revoked.
Apparently, War Thunder offered the YouTuber a “cooperation agreement”.
The somewhat bizarre aspect of the matter is that the discussion between War Thunder and the YouTuber took place in the comments of the post by “silicon.rus”. There, the YouTuber Kirill Fyodorov discussed with the Executive Producer of War Thunder, Pavel Kulikov. After a while, things became a bit more conciliatory, but they have now fallen into a dispute again about whether the details of the cooperation agreement should be public or not.
A reported version of the contract states that the YouTuber is obliged to produce 4 videos a week about War Thunder and remove material that discredits War Thunder. Whether the contract is accurate and whether the YouTuber has signed it is currently unknown.
