It’s not the first time he’s caused offence.
YouTube personality Felix Kjellberg, AKA PewDiePie, has once again courted controversy after using a racial slur towards another player during a live playthrough of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
As reported by the BBC, Kjellberg – who has over 57 million subscribers on the video sharing website, and was the first person to reach 10 billion views – was livestreaming when he used the slur to refer to another player, appearing afterwards to realise his error and saying “I don’t mean that in a bad way”.
It prompted a furious response from Sean Vanaman, creator of Firewatch, who promised via Twitter to use the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to file for any videos of Kjellberg’s featuring Firewatch to be taken down. Since then, PewDiePie’s playthrough of Firewatch has since been removed from his channel, although it’s unclear if it’s as a result of Vanaman’s actions.
Vanaman referred to Kjellberg as “worse than a closeted racist” and concedes there has to be “leeway” with video games in the public domain, but that he is “sick of this child [Kjellberg] getting more more and more chances to make money off of what we make.”
Vanaman added that he “loves” streamers and pointed out that Campo Santo Games sent out “over 3,000” keys to streamers who wanted to play Firewatch. He also recognises that the company is possibly “complicit”, saying “I’m sure we’ve made money off of the 5.7M views for that video and that’s something for us to think about.”
Seemingly responding to some criticism elsewhere on Twitter, Vanaman vehemently defends his stance:
Freedom of speech is freedom of prosecution His stream is not commentary, it is ad growth for his brand Our game on his channel =endorsement
— Sean Vanaman (@vanaman) September 10, 2017
Kjellberg has yet to comment on the controversy.
It’s not the first time that Kjellberg has made headlines; in February of this year Disney’s Maker Studios ended its affiliaton with the creator following the emergence of Nazi-themed content (which he referred to as “entertainment” rather than “political commentary”).
So far there has been no comment from YouTube or anyone affiliated with PUBG. We’ll update this story if that changes.
Matt Davidson is a freelance writer for IGN, who is also on Twitter – follow him, if you like.