Mojang vs. Yogscast?!?

[–]TotalBiscuit 651 punten 1 dag geleden*
Looks like the witchhunt on both sides is in full swing, here's my two-pence on the latest developments, point by point.
Yogscast repeatedly insulted people, talked behind their backs, refused to cooperate, and acted like total spoiled divas nonstop.
This really doesn't sound like the Simon and Lewis I know, who are generally extremely chilled out fun people, both online and in real life.
They called us "a bunch of nerds who don't know how to run a company", demanded that we pay them to come here (nobody else got paid).
Alright so, when you bring celebrities to a convention, do you generally ask them to come for free? If you run a Star Trek convention, do you ask Riker and Spock to attend gratis? You expect them to go without compensation, which usually includes transatlantic flights and accomodation for several people as well as an appearance fee? No, you don't. Conventions rely on the celebrities in question to bring people to the event, drive traffic to the stream and add value. Yogscast are not just a couple of random fans, this is their full-time job. I've been doing events for a while now as a commentator, if an event didn't offer to pay for my services I'd have to think twice about going. Why? Because it's my job, doing things for free devalues you and it's very easy to be taken for a ride if you act like a push-over. If it was down the road, sure, maybe. If it's half way across the planet, well yeah, I'd kinda want to get paid for doing that gig, as would pretty much every eSports commentator. Yogscast went to do a panel and sign autographs, that in itself is a service, not to mention the fact that it takes them away from their regular jobs. The fact that no-one else got paid does not indicate a problem with Yogscast, but with a multi-millionaire staffing a convention with volunteers. Having seen some of the footage from Minecon, "a bunch of nerds who don't know how to run a company" is exactly how I'd describe Mojang and y'know what? I wouldn't even say that's a bad thing. The whole grass-roots "hey we're just one guy and his idea who made it big" thing is endearing and honest, but as we've just seen from this rampage, professionalism is not the highest priority of Mojang at the moment and they really don't know how to run a company. That line can be taken in many different ways, particularly coming from 2 British guys that are known to take the piss (like every British guy ever born).
And they claim they're the reason minecraft is big and that we should thank them more than anyone else in the community. They're total dicks
They are certainly the biggest driving force behind Minecraft at present, you only need to look at the view count. After Seananners stopped doing Minecraft content, Yogscast became a massive source of free promotion for the game. Their videos hit the frontpage of Youtube every day, showing Minecraft off on the second largest search engine in the world time after time. I'm not sure Notch fully grasps just how much that many views on Youtube can do for your product. To give another example, the Magicka developers told me that they attribute the majority of their sales to WTF is Magicka and The Yogscast and TotalBiscuit play Magicka. This would make sense, if you look at the views on those videos, they are massive. For an indie company, Youtube and word of mouth are the two biggest forms of free marketing available and guess what generates word of mouth? Well how about literally over a million people watching and talking about Yogscast Minecraft videos? If anything, Notch does actually sound a little ungrateful here which is a rather flabbergasting attitude from an indie dev and one I've never seen before (those who don't know, my main source of income is my WTF is series which hilights indie games, it's fairly well viewed and I've had nothing but gratitude from devs whose games I've promoted). I suppose when you get as big and as wealthy as Notch, the attitude can change.
A kid wanted them to sign something I had signed, and they said they'd cross it out and put "Fudge you" there instead.
Welcome to Yogscast humour and more to the point, British humour. The easily offended need not to apply. How old was this kid? The Yogscast demographic is quite young anyway and there is plenty of harsh language in their videos, not to mention they would hear much worse on the playground. This sounds like a joke, not a particularly good one, but a joke none-the-less and not worth getting in a tizzy over.
Everyone else in the Minecraft community is all about respecting and caring. They're not. They're an isolated island of egos.
Well no, it's not Notch, you've bred one of the most retarded fanbases in gaming history. It's not your fault, but the entire Minecraft community is not in fact, about respecting and caring. There are subcommunities within it that are, /r/Minecraft is a great subreddit from what I can see, Yogscast also has a large community of it's own over on it's forums that does just as you describe. However, you also have a lot of immature, raging assholes in your "community" as well as plenty of others who are just out for themselves. Those people don't do massive charity streams like Yogscast do, they don't promote mods (and yes I am aware of the issues with the Yogbox, nobody goes through life without fuckups), they don't act as an extremely important stimulus to the community that you apparently love so much. Yogscast is without question one of the most important forces within not only Minecraft but at this point, gaming in general. They wield a massive amount of influence and they make a hell of a lot of people very happy.
Who knows what actually happened, it will be interesting to see if the community points the pitchforks back at Notch after Yogscast is able to make their statement (they are probably still on a plane right now) and tell their side of the story. Everyone loves a good witch-hunt, but a little perspective here please and do we really have to air this dirty laundry in public?