The gaming community is in an uproar after one of one of YouTube’s biggest stars, PewDiePie, finds himself in the hot seat for using a racial slur during a filmed play through of a game called Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds.
The video clip (be forewarned, it’s filled with game play violence and increasingly profane language) shows the Swedish host PewDiePie, also known as Felix Kjellberg, getting increasingly frustrated during game play. “What a fucking nigger!” he says about another player at the 20-second mark. He then began to awkwardly laugh off his remark and said, “I don’t mean that in a bad way.”
The incident prompted video game maker Sean Vanaman, the CEO of Campo Santo, to call out the behavior on Twitter in a multi-post thread that revoked Kjellberg’s access to Campo Santo products.
https://twitter.com/vanaman/status/906983575337107456
A DMCA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act, takedown allows the owner of a website or owner of the content’s copyright to remove it from the web.
And then finally:
https://twitter.com/vanaman/status/906984318685155328
This type of control is not unusual, notes Polygon, a gaming publication that reported on the incident in detail. “Others, most notably Nintendo, do not have a hands-off approach to streaming, setting rules for what games YouTubers may play and taking a cut of the advertising revenue,” they said.
But gamers have been vigorously debating Vanaman’s response online, wondering aloud if the CEO’s decision was just politically correct overreach. But Vanaman stayed firm. “His stream is not commentary, it is ad growth for his brand Our game on his channel =endorsement,” he tweeted. “Furthermore, we’re complicit: I’m sure we’ve made money off of the 5.7M views that video has and that’s something for us to think about,” he said.
https://twitter.com/vanaman/status/906989938532524032
Kjellberg hasn’t responded to ban publicly yet. Fortune will update this post if he does.
And this isn’t the first time that Kjellberg has been in a jam. He was dumped by Disney earlier this year after videos with anti-Semitic content were found on his YouTube channel. The videos tested the “joke” that you could pay anyone on the internet to do anything, including men who had been hired by the gamer host to hold a sign that said, “Death to All Jews.”
Once discovered, Disney canceled the second season of a 10-episode series called Scare PewDiePie, which had been scheduled to air on YouTube Red, Google’s premium streaming service.
Kjellberg’s got real skin in the online game. In 2014 alone, he earned $7.4 million for his videos.
