What's going on between Linus Media Group and Gamers Nexus?
I've been seeing a few posts about this, and judging by comments I've seen on posts related to this, there's been bad sentiment building up with LMG for some time now that has culminated in this recent dispute. Anyone have a brief catch-up of events?
My understanding is that LMG has been throwing subtle shade at most smaller creators who don't have the ability to create a state of the art lab for testing. In a recent video they specifically called out Nexus and another channel. Nexus decided to do a very tasteful and unbiased response showing why LMG is completely unreliable in their testing data. I've not seen a response from LMG yet. There's some real fucked up stuff that LMG did to a small creator of a water block recently that has made me unsubscribe.
They used the wrong hardware, and when it didn't work as expected, they destroyed it in their review. The company asked for their prototype back, but then LMG auctioned it off instead of returning it.
Linus did do a response. My general takeaway is, he's well-intentioned but poorly skilled at running a company this size. His response basically boils down to:
He acknowledges that his work was sloppy and he's been in the process of improving the workflow (although he does not mention exactly what these changes are)
The waterblock was a misunderstanding and LMG fully compensated the company for the cost of the waterblock
Linus was disappointed that GN did not reach out to him, since Linus was willing to answer questions about it and he felt that it would have created a more well-rounded video
Linus was disappointed in the viewers because they were willing to vilify him due to the video
Yeah he auctioned off their best prototype, with no guarantee it's not going to someone who will just knock it off. Is he compensating them millions in opportunity cost?
They didn't reach out to Nexus before trashing them in a video.
He's repeatedly vilified himself at this point by being a douche who refuses to take responsibility for his own mistakes.
I'm done with them at this point. Especially with all the other ethical issues.
He acknowledged that the work is sloppy but pushed an excuse that it is "growing pains" while disregarding every other criticism for quality.
LMG had on several occasions promised to send the prototype back, but never did, even after various deadlines had been set by Billet. Additionally, according to Billet themselves, they heard nothing about compensation or payback until about 3 hours after the original GN video went live. Which Billet hadn't even replied to before Linus made his post saying they've already made the deal on compensation. This shows there is no misunderstanding, just bad ethics and bad management.
As another commenter has written in another thread. Linus would've used any contact for comment as a way to attempt to clean up their fuck-up and try to make GN and Billet look bad. Similar to how a company dumping toxic waste into a river would take any contact for comment to clean up the river for a week as a news report was being made. There is no need for contacting a major company for comments when what they are doing is actively harming people.
For many people, the concerns of quality between viewers and employees of LMG alike have not been heard and often just flatly ignored.