World of Tanks "fanfluencer" SirFoch went on a YouTube tirade late last week after it was revealed that a Grand Finals premium tank was sporting an $80 price tag. According to Kotaku, SirFuchs used some mighty colorful language in describing the company as well as flipping the virtual finger. In response, Wargaming threatened to have his video taken down as a violation of copyright.
Apparently, the community backlash against the company's stance was taken to heart and Wargaming has now decided that perhaps this was too strong a reaction:
Dear Commanders,
We have further reviewed the incident of last Friday involving SirFoch and his “Chrysler K GF rant” video, and know we could have handled the situation a lot better. 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.
The letter was jointly signed by Thaine Lyman, Product Director; Markus Schill, General Manager Europe; Jay Cohen, General Manager North America; and Anton Pankov, World of Tanks Publishing Director.
You can read more at the Kotaku link above or follow the issue on the World of Tanks site.
