Posted on October 20, 2013, CJ Miozzi TotalBiscuit’s Negative Review Flagged, Removed from YouTube
UPDATE: TotalBiscuit has posted a video about the incident; scroll down to view it.
Indie dev Wild Games released Day One: Garry’s Incident a little under a month ago. Popular YouTuber John “TotalBiscuit” Bain was sent a review code, and after he uploaded a scathing review to his channel, Wild Games filed a copyright claim. As per policy, YouTube took down the video.
In his video — which went out to his over 1.2M subscribers — TotalBiscuit describes elements of Garry’s Incident as “horrendous” and “awful,” particularly the game’s framerate, saying that “the game does run dreadfully.”
Wild Games issued the following statement on the game’s Steam forums:
“We protected our copyright because Total Biscuit has no right to make advertising revenues with our license.”
TotalBiscuit’s side of the story, which he related via Twitter, tells a tale of censorship:
“I should point out that this is a game I was sent review code for, it was also the top-ranked video on Youtube for that game.”
“It is fairly obvious what they are doing here, abusing Youtubes copyright system to censor criticism of their product.”
TotalBiscuit believes his review was censored because it was negative; Wild Games asserts it was taken down due to the review being monetized. It seems TotalBiscuit will be challenging the copyright claim.
Do you believe TB was censored?