 Hey everyone. I want to talk to you today about the Nintendo Ambassador's program and mostly just because of what happened to beat-em-ups. I'm sure you guys already heard the news by now. He's got over a million views on his announcement about him not working with Nintendo anymore and what exactly they did for him and his theories on why the Ambassador's program has dropped them. And it's interesting because I'm not a Nintendo Ambassador. I've never been a Nintendo Ambassador. I have gotten review copies of Nintendo games however but this was back when I worked at Zelda Informer as the editor-in-chief. And I want to talk about that a little bit because I don't think the Ambassador's program should even be a thing. I know it sounds controversial I guess because there's a lot of YouTubers out there that are. You know Nintendo Kade is a Nintendo Ambassador. There are people that I respect those two people greatly. Obviously Player Essence is a Nintendo Ambassador and Beat-Em-Ups was a Nintendo Ambassador and to me he meets all of the criteria for what I would think is a very good representation for Nintendo. Beat-Em-Ups is essentially the biggest solo channel and I say solo he's got editors and stuff but the biggest solo channel for Nintendo anything in the world on YouTube. So he's kind of a big deal and he obviously has a pretty good reputation. Even if you don't like him. Even if you don't like Beat-Em-Ups you don't like Wood it's okay. He's okay if you don't like him too. Like nobody has to like everybody but it's hard to say he's not a brand friendly type of guy. The only controversial stance he maybe has is in the positive for mental health and yeah that's really it. He doesn't really talk about politics, religion or other stuff. He leaves it all alone. He doesn't have any major controversies. I mean there's more controversies on my channel than his and he's just he's generally a seemingly really good guy that just is passionate about Nintendo like crazy. So to see him drop from the ambassador's program is kind of like hearing that GameXplain is dropped from the game. You know the program like right GameXplain's the biggest Nintendo focused channel that's not ran by Nintendo on YouTube and hearing that Wood was dropped by them makes me like it kind of hits me a little bit because it's basically GameXplain but one guy. So I feel like the ambassador to this program is a big joke. Now I wasn't always a YouTuber. I was editor in chief at Zelda Informer and they have this PR company. It also handles the ambassador's program as well. They're kind of like a middle man but it's a PR company that Nintendo's been using for basically forever called Golan Harris and I've got probably I don't even know 17 different contacts. I still have a lot of those same contacts at Golan Harris. They do respond to my email still to this day but I got a lot of those contacts while I worked at Zelda Informer. If you don't know what Zelda Informer is that's okay. The place doesn't exist anymore. They're still a thriving Twitter and Twitter handle and Facebook page for it but the actual website doesn't exist anymore. It was merged into Zelda Dungeon through a purchase a long time ago whatever. I'm not here to go dig into my past too much. It's a little bit of a soft spot because I put a lot of work into that website but back in those days you would fill out this form on Nintendo's website and I think you still can do that if you are a Nintendo news website. Now we're talking traditional news written work etc and on that form you can request a PR contact. That PR contact is then how you would get a hold of review copies of games. Now if you were a really big outlet sometimes you would just automatically get those like the IGNs of the world of the game spots. You're just automatically given those copies but once you have a PR contact and you make known that you want review copies of games your website is basically put on a list and yeah if they get to you on the list you get the game automatically. If they don't tough luck. Now I didn't get a ton of review copies of games. I got a review copy of Skyward Sword. Actually I know I got a review copy of Skyward Sword. I got a review copy of Ocarina of Time 3D Majora's Mask 3D and I'm trying to think. I think there was one other game we got a review copy of from Nintendo. We also got a review copy of Epic Mickey for some reason not a Nintendo game but yeah that's how it worked back then. So we got like three or four different Zelda games because we were one of the biggest Zelda websites in the world so and it was a fan site you know we weren't some official business entity like the IGNs of the world. It was completely ran by fans. It did make some money. I made money off of it but it wasn't necessarily this huge venture right. I mean it had decent traffic but I mean I get more views on YouTube in a week than I got there at least when I'm making videos that is. So the real question then is what what what's so different about that versus being on YouTube and I think the reason that Nintendo treats YouTubers differently is because it's not the traditional written work. You could have actually more controversies on a given website and Nintendo will still give you stuff if you request it because I don't know if Nintendo pays as much attention to what the controversy is on traditional websites because the controversies on those websites tend to not leave those websites whereas on YouTube if there's something controversial if I say something dumb on a live stream or whatever there's going to be 20 other YouTubers that are going to cover it. Well in my case I'm kind of small so maybe only one or two other YouTubers but you know if you're a bigger deal one like would you know beat him up if he if he says something dumb in a live stream or in a video he's going to get called up by a bunch of people and I guess it's easier to get more attention drawn to your mistakes than it is at a more traditional outlet. Even though obviously if you're so big like IGN you can't really get away with anything we all know about that with a certain plagiarism scandal that happened with a now defunct former YouTuber. So the reason that I don't think the ambassador's program though needs to exist is because how it worked at Zelda Informer is probably how it should always work. You would just contact a PR guy and politely request a review copy review copy shouldn't be something you expect review copy shouldn't be something that you just you know want to want. That should be because you legitimately want to be able to play a game early so you can review it and there will be review embargoes and there would be different paperwork that came in with the games that would explain things like you can have you know 10 second video clips you know and a minute total but they have to be 10 second clips or you can do you could talk up to this certain point in the game but not this part of the game or whatever because they want to keep spoiler free like they would they would really control how you could talk about the game and that's probably why a lot of YouTubers that do reviews I got more and more popular because you know once the game is out in the public there's no restrictions all restrictions even on the outlets are lifted but because they live by those restrictions it could have affected the review. So it's really interesting to see that they started treating YouTubers a lot different than these traditional websites that had to ask one PR contact and most of them only had one one PR contact that you would get a hold of and request games and you either get the game or you won't get the game and they'd let you know you know if you were gonna get it or not so I don't I don't think that on YouTube it's weird so I obviously might I don't care that I'm not a Nintendo ambassador I've I've applied for the program through all my various contacts and I think we all know regardless of any other controversies or anything else that's happened on the channel I mean there's one reason alone that's gonna get me to not be an ambassador for Nintendo if you've ever been to a live stream you know the deal so it doesn't bother me that I'm not a Nintendo ambassador I think the problem Nintendo has within the Nintendo ambassador program is when you are called a Nintendo ambassador and it's on all your social media profiles it's in the description of your videos it makes people feel like you are an extension of Nintendo themselves because after all you are an official brand ambassador now what does that even mean well what does ambassador mean well an ambassador is in traditional terms an accredited diplomat sent by a country to officially represent them so in a way brand ambassadors for Nintendo these Nintendo ambassadors are technically representing Nintendo according to Nintendo and this is why I feel like this is a really really bad program to exist it shouldn't exist because Zelda Informer never once was affiliated with or represented Nintendo just because we got some review copies of games they never called us a brand ambassador they just sent it to us out of the kindness of their heart so we could do coverage of the game make walkthroughs all that stuff that is how it's it's it works in traditional print media why is it need to be different for video makers why do we have to take these individuals and hold them accountable as brand ambassadors because in the case of wood they told them they'll keep sending them games you just can't be a brand ambassador but that's the point of the brand ambassador thing for us as creators the only benefit that a content creator gets from being a Nintendo brand ambassador is you get you don't copies of games and as wood said they weren't even sending copies of those games early so you couldn't even use them for review purposes you would get them either day of launch or later and at that point you just buy the game yourself if you really want to cover it and talk about it so it kind of defeated the purpose unless you're just someone who wants free games and that's not me I don't want free games I want if I'm going to get a game I want to get it early to review it so Nintendo isn't treating new media which is what youtubers are we're new media they're not treating us the same as they would treat other media and I understand that there is a difference between traditional print media and youtubers but when it comes to covering your content there it's not that much different what's the point of sending a review copy of a game to a place like IGN right it's to get attention to your game on the day of launch so what would be the point of sending a copy of a game to a youtuber obviously beyond live streaming like if they're just going to make a video on it but you don't send it to them in time to make a video for launch day you you lose your chance at all the additional eyeballs you can get around launch which is traditionally when the hype is the highest for your games so again the brand ambassador program is stupid because it puts these expectations on two content creators that most of us ignore I don't think any of us that have been brand ambassadors have even paid two craps of attention to what you have to do to be one um giving an example player essence love the guy great content creator way more successful than me but here's the thing he has a bit of a way in which he speaks that can be really a grind your gears kind of way he goes after people whether they deserve it or not doesn't matter he goes after some people and to me if a nintendo employee you did that they probably wouldn't be a nintendo employee anymore and giving what being a brand ambassador means I think he's more controversial than beat em ups but he's smaller and doesn't have as big of a following and nintendo's not paying as much attention that's that that's the difference and I think for for wood it's very clear what caused him to lose it I don't even think woods theory is correct on it um he created a video because this happened after this video went out he created a video talking about a bunch of mods in breath of the wild nintendo doesn't like mods because the way to use them is to play roms which nintendo doesn't like and views them as 100 illegal so to make that video would require a wood would have to feature something that nintendo does not actively support and so in doing that down he goes now um they they did tell wood that uh none of his content is the reason why but that's because nintendo is not gonna try to make a kerfuffle out of that video and draw even more negative attention to themselves reality is nintendo could avoid the whole situation by just not having a brand ambassador program and making youtubers go through the pr contact form on nintendo.com and just get a normal pr contact which you get anyways as an ambassador and just email them and politely ask for you copies of games and they either get you one or they don't that's all it ever it never needed to be more than that that's what's so frustrating about this this whole brand ambassador thing with so much pressure on content creators that are ambassadors um at least in terms of trying to maintain family friendly image especially as you get popular like i don't think player s is going to have an issue now but he starts getting 100,000 200,000 he starts getting 50 to 90,000 views on a video nintendo is going to pay more attention and you know he goes after one person during a live stream and they're just gonna take it away and i again they don't send out review copies early enough to review anyways for most youtubers i just i feel like it's a useless program and uh it is what it is uh now for the rest of this video um from this point forward i'm not really talking about the brand ambassador thing um i'm gonna be talking about myself for a moment um just because it's been a little bit since i've been consistent on the channel and uh i'm gonna try to be a bit more consistent here over the next uh couple of weeks and see how it goes um i lost myself i don't know if you guys could tell i'm sure some could i've been under a lot of stress i've been under a lot of stress pretty much since before this channel existed um it's probably been a good six years uh there was an incident that happened back when my uh first uh biological kid was it was it was coming onto this plan i had a good job um i had a salary gig i actually technically worked for my father at the time um but he didn't run the company he was just cto there was someone above him um and literally three days before my son was born i was i was let go and the reason i was let go is because the company was running under money which didn't make any sense to me i worked for the company they had money but the ceo misappropriated funds which meant they could no longer afford my salary and i had to be let go and my dad wasn't even warned about it so he couldn't even warn me hey you gotta start looking for another job because you're gonna be losing this one right before your son is born i lost my health insurance i'm still to this day paying for the birth of my first son still to this day isn't paid off because hospitals are expensive and he had issues and we were in the hospital for five days it's well over $20,000 in bills because he needed special treatments and i had no insurance policy to cover any of it because i was dropped just before he was born so that made me feel like i failed as a person i failed as a father up to that point in my life um throughout my entire relationship with with my fiance um our you know our daughter and then obviously uh our newborn son i i had been the provider i had been um stable i had always had an answer to every question in life um and then all of a sudden it was ripped out from under me and i thought i did something wrong why would they get rid of me but not other people i must have done something wrong i must have upset the the ceo in some way you know i maybe i should have worked harder maybe i should have did this differently or that differently i thought about some of the team meetings we had where did i come off wrong did i offend anyone um and i used to live free as a bird um the way that i view life uh at least viewed life at the time when i was you know 25 26 was i didn't really give a hoot when anyone else thought um if something bad happened in my life i kind of brush it off pick myself up move on to the next thing until that happened because it happened right before my son was being born and i already felt like i was failing him as a father before he got here uh and then i was unemployed for nine months so i collected unemployment checks but it you know not even close to what i was making uh and it just i didn't feel like i was doing what i needed to do now through all this zealot informer rose up and got popular and i made money doing that but reality is i that started a downward spiral for me where i lost confidence in who i am as a person um later i would go to college again and end up dropping out uh i would have these ebbs and flows and then eventually about a year and a half later i lost myself entirely to depression and this isn't a woe is me story um it took you know five six years and a lot of crap to get to today and today i'm back none of you guys have really met the real me um you maybe you seen glimpses of it while i was drinking on stream or something uh and i know for a fact there's people from like 2018 that missed an eight uh that was there during some of those streams because a lot of those streams was raw me uh it was me being me but uh i haven't been me on this channel in a long time and uh it's because i let life weigh me down uh and life is far from perfect um by the way i don't think it's perfect for anyone we're all having a pretty rough 2020 but i gotta say my life it's pretty freaking great um i'm losing weight i'm well on track for my weight loss goals uh if i have it my way by july ish of next year um i'm on i'm gonna be back to having a flat tummy i'm gonna be at my ideal weight and potentially even rock in a six pack that is a goal of mine i don't know if i'm gonna maintain the six pack forever but i'm gonna i'm gonna get one at least um you know and i'm again i'm well on my way to that um i'm confident as ever with my woman um there's a long time that i wasn't but now i mean things just flow out of my mouth and out of my mind i just say what i mean and mean what i say uh and things are just great um you know i'm standing up for myself and all this stuff that i that i used to do i i am back to being the man that i was before i let myself down and then never forgave myself so what i want to put out there for you guys to end this video is i want you to stay strong in who you are uh and believe in who you are and when times get rough because it's gonna get roughing in from in the future there's gonna be something that's gonna knock me down but the difference is i know how to get myself back up again now because now i know how to recognize when i'm down and why i shouldn't be down and what i have that's worth fighting for and living for including my children my fiance this house this channel uh my future career because i got you know i'm going into for programming uh college and gonna finish that off so i'm back baby like you guys are gonna see a refreshed or rejuvenated a happy neat on this channel and that can't do anything but make my videos and my live streams and everything in between that much better so thank you guys so much for tuning in take care of yourselves and i'll catch you in the next video