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Firewatch developer threatens DMCA takedown following Pewdiepie racial slur

Firewatch developer threatens DMCA takedown following Pewdiepie racial slur

Pewdiepie is back in hot water after dropping the N bomb during a livestream.

The Swedish YouTube star, real name Felix Kjellberg, used the slur during stream of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, quickly trying to claw back the remark by saying “I didn’t mean that in a bad way.”

The personality has come under fire for his use of the word, while many ‘right wing reactionaries’ (read: Gamergate assholes) have come to Kjellberg’s defence.

But the developer of Firewatch, Campo Santo, is taking a stand against the YouTuber, threatening to pull his videos of their game in a DMCA takedown.

Content featuring the adventure title is now gone from Pewdiepie's channel, but it’s unclear whether the DMCA has taken effect or whether Kjellberg has removed it as a precautionary measure.

Taking to Twitter (below), the studio’s co-founder Sean Vanaman said that he is “sick of this child getting more and more chances to make money off of what we make.”

Click through below to get to the full thread – it's quite the read. 

The ‘more and more chances’ part of this tweet is a reference to Pewdiepie coming under fire earlier this year, after he paid some users on Fiver to hold up a sign saying ‘Death to All Jews’ above their heads. This resulted in his network, the Disney-owned Maker, dropping the YouTuber, and Google cancelling his premium YouTube Red Scare Pewdiepie show. Kjellberg did apologise for this video, but not before taking swipes at the Wall Street Journal for its coverage for the incident.

Despite claims that he would go ‘family friendly’ in April, the star has repeatedly made Nazi jokes and started courting a far right wing audience. That was before the events of Charlottesville made the star realise that Nazis were not a joke. 

This most recent incident has other YouTube personalities scared about their business. Stars such as John ‘Totalbiscuit’ Bain, Jim Sterling and Daniel ‘Nerdcubed’ Hardcastle have been lamenting that this will damage their business as more advertisers – already wary of YouTube as a platform – become more cautious of pushing their wares on sites such as Twitch and YouTube.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.