Wargaming, the developers of World of Tanks, had sparked a proper shitstorm with a controversial threat towards a YouTuber, threatening him with a copyright strike. Now the company is backtracking and apologizing for its behavior.
The past week was a mechanical failure for Wargaming. The YouTuber SirFoch had uploaded a spiteful video criticizing the new premium tank Chrysler K GF as a pay-to-win machine and insulted Wargaming.
As a result, SirFoch was thrown out of the community contributor program by a Wargaming employee. So far, so understandable, but Wargaming went further and demanded that SirFoch delete the video in question.
After he refused, Wargaming threatened with a copyright strike on YouTube – too many of those will result in the channel being shut down. An attack on the existence of a YouTuber. And that’s when the shitstorm really began…
World of Tanks – Community unleashes shitstorm
Although SirFoch deleted the video (which has since reappeared on other channels), he made a 20-minute video that explained in detail what he thought of the tank in question and Wargaming’s approach. Many users seemed to feel similarly and expressed their displeasure in the official forum.
This was not changed by an official posting from the responsible community manager. Worse still, a post from the US department of Wargaming (which was not responsible at all) caused even more trouble, as it mentioned “hate speech and homophobia” in SirFoch’s video and continued to insist on the legality of the copyright claim.
That the EU community head had officially apologized to SirFoch seems to have escaped the US department. And while everyone agreed that SirFoch had really gone off the deep end, no one saw “hate speech” or even “homophobia” in his rant.
World of Tanks in the Jimquisition – The peak of outrage
The situation escalated further over the week, with numerous other YouTubers giving statements. Among them were also a few other community contributors. The well-known and popular Mighty Jingles ended his collaboration with Wargaming due to these incidents. He felt it was too risky now and didn’t want to put his channel at stake.
The peak of the shitstorm was finally reached when video game guru Jim Sterling took on the issue in the course of his format “The Jimquisition” and dissected it gleefully. All this negative publicity ultimately became too much for Wargaming. Therefore, the company recently issued an official statement.
In it, Wargaming explicitly apologizes for its behavior towards SirFoch and admits that “it could have been resolved better.” The official position of Wargaming is that no copyright claims are threatened to exercise censorship. They also want to work on guidelines with community contributors in the future to avoid such situations.
What do you think about the situation? Was Wargaming right after all? And if not, are you still angry with the company or is the matter settled with the apology? Let us know in the comments!
Also interesting: A similar incident occurred back in 2015 with the World of Tanks competitor War Thunder.
