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World of Tanks maker Wargaming has apologised for its seemingly heavy-handed tactics in a recent row over criticism it received from a YouTuber.
The games company reacted badly last week to a video by avid World of Tanks player SirFoch in which he criticised the new $79.99 Chrysler K Grand Finals tank. He regarded it as a pay-to-win purchase owing to its high survivability. In fact, the best way of taking it down is with specific ammo that is also a premium purchase.
The video pulled no punches, labelling the company as greedy f*cks”.
Wargaming did not react well, threatening to issue SirFoch’s video with a copyright claim and kicking him from World of Tanks’ Community Contributor program.
However, such was the strength of the community backlash to the move that Wargaming has now apologised for its reaction.
We could have handled the situation a lot better,” it has now said. 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. Over the weekend we released a statement to some media outlets regarding the content of SirFoch’s video that inferred that SirFoch’s videos contained hate speech and homophobia. While we would obviously not want such content to be associated with any of our games – this video clearly did not. We apologize for this statement, and we don’t stand behind those claims.
We love our players and our contributors – and we appreciate their honesty and commitment – we are committed to using this incident to grow and improve.”
