Another day, another apology from Wargaming regarding a recent incident when one of their employees threatened to use YouTube's copyright strike claims to take down a YouTuber's negative review of World of Tanks newest premium tank.
To recap, YouTuber SirFoch posted an expletive-laden rant against World of Tanks newest piece of content, the Chrysler K Grand Finals tank. In a private conversation, a community manager at Wargaming insisted that SirFoch remove the video from his channel, threatening to issue a copyright strike via YouTube if SirFoch did not comply. They also removed SirFoch from the community contributor program. SirFoch published screenshots of this conversation sparking a huge outcry from players accusing Wargaming of censorship and general dishonesty.
After a soft apology, Wargaming insisted that they threatened removal of SirFoch's video because of "homophobic" "hate speech," but they later backed away from those claims. The latest apology, though, comes straight from the top, in a public statement jointly signed by the Product Director of World of Tanks, the General Manager of the Europe and North American divisions, and the Publishing Director of World of Tanks.
The statement reads "We have further reviewed the incident of last Friday involving SirFoch and his “Chrysler K GF rant” video, and know we could have handled the situation a lot better. We strongly support our players’, including our Community Contributors’, right to speak critically about us and our games. We acted too quickly and over the line when we threatened to have YouTube remove SirFoch’s video through a copyright infringement complaint and we are apologizing for that.
We’re committed to doing a better job on this front. We’re going to improve the way we communicate with our Community and our Community Contributors, and as part of that effort we will work with them on more detailed, specific guidelines to help ensure incidents like this don’t happen again.
Our official position is that Wargaming will not take copyright action against opinions based on our publicly released content."
In the mean time, SirFoch has seemingly moved on from the incident, breaking his silence for the first time since publicizing the private conversation in the form of the video above, where he spends around one minute of a twenty minute video talking about the recent controversy. His most significant commentary on the issue is as follows:
"Wargaming has apologized, so no hard feelings there. I don't care too much," SirFoch says in the opening lines. Bookending these comments at the end of his video, SirFoch says "Hopefull we can make some good for the game, because that was my intention all along."
SirFoch acknowledged from the beginning that his original video that sparked this controversy was a little too over-the-top, but maintained that it wasn't OK that Wargaming threatened a copyright strike against him. Now that Wargaming is on the same page, SirFoch is letting bygones be bygones.
