Day One: Garry’s Incident developer Wild Games Studio appears to have selectively pulled a popular TotalBiscuit review due to its criticism of the game.
After a failed Kickstarter campaign, Day One: Garry’s Incident found its way to release via Steam Greenlight about a month ago. The general consensus was that the game wasn’t very good, which wouldn’t be remarkable – until the developers apparently decided to fight back against critics. Popular YouTuber “TotalBiscuit” had posted a video review full of harsh criticism against the game, which quickly became the most-viewed video about Day One. Lately, though, that video has been unavailable to watch. Wild Games Studio, the title’s developer, took it down with a copyright claim – which TotalBiscuit believes was a deliberate censorship of his negative review. In response, the studio recently withdrew its complaint.
TotalBiscuit uploaded a new video in direct response to the takedown. He defends himself with several points, including the facts that Wild Games Studio itself provided him with the Steam key he used to review the game, and that using copyrighted material for criticism is protected as Fair Use. For a while, Wild Games Studio stuck to its guns; the developer posted on the Steam forums that “We protected our copyright because Total Biscuit has no right to make advertising revenues with our license.” After the situation began to spiral into a PR disaster, the studio officially withdrew its complaint to YouTube.
Long story short. Dev sends code, code used to make critique, dev dislikes critique, dev abuses system to censor critique.— TotalBOOscuit (@Totalbiscuit) October 20, 2013
The details of the kerfuffle with Wild Games Studio aren’t necessarily the focus of the new video, though. TotalBiscuit admits that his channel and network are successful enough to recover from the loss of one video’s ad revenue, but many smaller content producers would not be able to bounce back. YouTube’s copyright policy has caused a lot of grief for game critics in the past, and one developer abusing the system isn’t as concerning as the fact that the system was so easy to abuse in the first place.
Source: Reddit
