Guise of the Wolf Dev Takes Down Negative YouTube Review - Update 2

[Mersadeon]

I'm inclined to believe that this is one huge hoax. If only because of how idiotic this company seems to be behaving.

I can understand the censorship. What I can't comprehend is how any company would choose to communicate in such an unprofessional manner.

I mean really, this woman has the vocabulary of a high-schooler. She doesn't even know the difference between then and than.

It definitely isn't a hoax (why would anyone have this hoax? TB doesn't need that, especially since he is already seeking help because of how much "internet drama" stresses him out), it's just an overconfidant developer who thinks they're bigger than a Youtube channel - because lots of people who don't think about it understand how much internet power a Youtube channel can have.
As to the unprofessional manner - they are a tiny developer. They don't have anyone to handle PR with any sort of education in marketing. Believe me, if you talk to people who for example design websites for companies, you will see that a lot of smaller (and quite a few bigger) companies actually have no idea how to talk to someone they don't know without ordering or threatening.

 

[Wolf In A Bear Suit]

It was a really bad plan going after TB. He's probably the most well known and vocal commentators on the state of the industry along with Angry Joe on Youtube. Like him or not his videos are always used on forums like this during a debate, so anything he says will invariably heard and he was never going to take it lying down. Like even if the e-mail was doctored they still issued the strike and got the video taken down so what were they hoping to achieve by starting a Twitter spat and acting like children.
The clever thing to do would have been to shut up, withdraw the strike and pass it off as a mistake and a miscommunication. My god if that e-mail TB posted was real, somebody (presumably whose job it is to deal with this stuff and PR) has serious delusions of grandeur and needs to lose their job. They pissed gasoline onto the shitstorm fire.
I can kind of understand a company trying to protect the rep of a new game, it really isn't good publicity at all but my god have some sense in how you do it. Don't target the Internet's prickliest man and give him a pedestal.

 

[Cerebrawl]

What really bugs me about this the most is the Chilling Effect this will have on TB going forwards. How long until three Bad Game Developers all issue coordinated strikes against him simultaneously? Youtube's automated nightmare bureaucracy robots will simply delete his account before he can jump through the hoops necessary to prevent it.

Nah, AngryJoe gave a description of how this works [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAi81_uvztM]. You have a BIT of control over how this happens. When the whole automated system debacle happened, a lot of youtubers got dozens of videos taken down. You only get strikes in the process of fighting to have them re-added, so you can only work on getting two videos reinstated at a time if you don't want to risk losing the channel. It still sucks, but you won't lose everything instantly.

That's how it normally goes, indeed that's how the automated content ID system does it, FunC just went manually directly to strikes. The system allows that too. So a coordinated attack straight to strikes could very well take a channel down.

 

[Flames66]

Update 2: It looks like this story has a happy ending for the Cynical Brit. TotalBiscuit has reported that his Guise of the Wolf video is now back up on YouTube, and both copyright strikes against his channel have been removed.

Source: Twitter [https://twitter.com/Totalbiscuit/status/438803014821117953]

That's a start. Now the developer should pay TotalBiscuit for all lost earnings from the video during the period it was taken down. That should serve as a deterrent.

 

[Yopaz]

The worst part about all of this?
That woman can't spell "than" and I presume it's more-or-less part of her job.
How. Can. It. Be. So. Hard!?!
"...Our company is a lot bigger then your little youtube channel..."
Raaaaaahhhh!

It's my pet hate. (Can you tell?

[edit] Actually where are Fun Creators (what a shitty name) based? Because from reading all the mails that Jasmine woman wrote, it doesn't actually sound like English is her first language.

I commented on that too. While my grammar isn't perfect some of those ordinary mistakes such as "then" when you should use "than" your, their rather than you're they're just causes a twitch in my eye. Now for the shocking revelation, this company is US based so it would be fair to assume that English was the first language of whoever wrote those emails. If they were doctored then it might have been an attempt at making them look silly, but looking at the twitter account the grammar is just as terrible, some times worse.

OT: I just went over to their Twitter account. They have announced a new game and they also said they were restructuring the company. Mainly devs and PR department. Now if everyone who is surprised by this could raise a hand... Counting... 0?

 

[szaleniec1000]

I'm more concerned about their computer literacy than their regular literacy, and GotW really does look like it was developed by the kind of people who think that Photoshop is the best way of falsifying an email.

 

[WarpZone]

Look on the bright side. There's no way they can just reskin and re-release a game like GOTW. They'll have to actually go back to basics and build a new game from the ground up. Who knows? Maybe they'll focus on mechanics and find the fun first, instead of starting with "wouldn't it be cool if there were a game where you could..." and then building a buggy broken invisible wall fest around that.

 

[deth2munkies]

Look, the problem (as has been pointed out repeatedly, especially during the last wave) is that there is no way to punish people who issue frivolous strikes. Nothing in the Youtube ToS and a virtually impossible standard of proof* in the DMCA (which is secondary to the ToS in these cases).

That can't happen, there needs to be a valid way to challenge and punish people who constantly issue frivolous strikes. Awarding attorney's fees to people forced to challenge is one way to go, and is one remedy suggested for patent cases by the Innovation Act in an attempt to counter patent trolls. The problem is, unlike patent holders, youtubers and others who post things on the internet, typically don't have the money to start and maintain the suit, and not a lot of attorneys are willing to work for free until they win.

Anyway, it's just another symptom that US IP law is broken and in desperate need of repair and revision.

*You have to prove both that they did not own the copyright in question and that they KNEW they did not own the copyright. There is no way to punish someone who issued a strike that was obviously fair use.

 

[Otaku World Order]

If I recall correctly, when his video on Day One: Garry's Incident was taken down, TotalBiscuit revealed that he sends a standard legal agreement to all publishers before featuring their game on WTF Is. Presumably, he did that with Guile of the Worf as well.

As for Guys of the Blorf, if Fun Creators didn't want negative reviews, they should have put soe actual effort into making their game.