 Well, everyone, we have some updates on the whole GameXplain situation between the former staff members and Andre Seegers, who runs GameXplain, founder of GameXplain and all that jazz. Obviously, GameXplain is starting to make headlines. I think ScreenRant actually has an article up about the situation and there will probably be some more in the coming week as details come out. And there are more and more details. If you haven't, don't even know what's happening, go watch the video up here. I'll also link it down in the description so you can get caught up. It is a rather lengthy video because there's a lot of stuff happening. But it is near and dear to my heart to talk about this stuff because GameXplain has been such an important part of my history as a content watcher on YouTube. I've been watching them for many, many years and I've even had them as inspiration. Although a lot of the inspiration I had were for some of the now former members that did a lot of the actual work there. Not that I'm saying Andre doesn't do work there. It's just some of the best work, some of the most unique content to come out of GameXplain over the years were by the former team, four members in particular, that left last year. Now instead of recapping all of that, because again, there's a whole nother video you can watch for that. I want to get into the new stuff. And before I do, yes, I am running a giveaway right now. I am giving away a PlayStation 5, an Xbox Series X or a Nintendo Switch. There'll be information on that down in the description as well, a pinned comment as well for you guys to enter and all that jazz. We'll get into that later. Really the story is more important. So shout out. A lot of this I found over on the GameXplain Reddit, but I found some stuff on my own as well. So shout out to the poster who made this Reddit thread, Fluffy Chipmunk put up a drama summary and there's a lot of stuff in here. We're going to go through some of the things, but obviously we all know, you know, the subreddit pre-shut down, you know, at the very beginning of the drama, Andre added new host to GameXplain. Derek resigned as a host, John gifts his channel to Derek, Ash, and Steve. John was, you know, someone who resigned earlier from GameXplain, Ash and Steve resigned as well. Andre responds and he doesn't really say much, you know, if you want to look at some of the responses, you know, best of luck with everything, you know, when you're making a public response, you're not going to make, you know, any hullabaloo about it here. So you say, you know, there's a heart there and then excited for your new project. So everything seems amicable and it seems like everything's all hunky-dory, right? Like water under the bridge, lessons learned, move on, CVG launches. Now what's interesting after a good Vibe Games launches is that we have a first little bit of controversy that wasn't covered that well. And that is obviously that their Patreon lost support. Now, if you go look at the Patreon, I have it loaded up here somewhere. Is it here? Yeah, here. So this is our way back machine. This is what their Patreon looked like before the resignations of Steve, Ash, etc. Derek. They had 741 patrons at $1,519 a month. They had a current goal going on where they were going to attempt to get to, it looks like, you know, 2,500 euros or so or pounds or whatever currency that is. So they could have Derek, Ash, and Andre team up in order to race through every track in the Mario Kart series from Super Mario Kart on the SNES all the way to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Switch and everything in between. Really, really cool that they had that goal. Well, after they resigned, naturally without Derek and Ash working there anymore, people were going to be less interested in this. So this is how the goal shows, 56% complete. Now you look at this, oh, okay, that's not too bad. Why can't we see the exact amount? Well, it's obviously lower than this, but the exact amount is gone now. In fact, look at this, you can't see how many patrons there are or how much money is being made anymore. We do see that 638 exclusive posts exist, but we have no idea how many patrons are anymore or how much money is made. We can kind of infer, you know, if you look at this, you know, we're there at 1500, you know, and now they're like down to here, it's probably closer to like 1,000 at the time. So they lost about 500 or so euros of support. Who knows how many patrons fell off? But for some reason after they left, because the Patreon was losing support, Andre decided it was best to hide the revenue. Now, notably not every Patreon has the revenue public, so this is kind of a small thing, but the fact that it was public and then after those major names left, they decided to not make it public anymore, kind of ruined some transparency that GameXplain was always kind of known for, being rather transparent with their fans. Alright, but that's kind of a mini thing, not worth that much. Steve elaborated on his departure originally, so he went in here, this is a couple months ago. You know, there's not much here, just as I won't speak for Ash and Derek, but I have my own unique reasons for leaving and here's mine, I wanted to start something new, I wanted to be able to explore my creativity without limits, little thing we know what those limits were. And I wanted to create content with a group of friends that felt the same way, that's how I ended up involved with Good Vibes aiming. I know my departure announcement was abrupt and that's because it all happened suddenly. I had planned to let my involvement be a surprise for you guys today, rather than last night and unfortunately the information leaked and I was forced to announce it without the preparation I have liked to have had, I hope my explanation helps you understand a bit and I hope you choose to share this in this momentous occasion, abrupt. That means there was almost no time, like literally they just quit, they quit, they just straight up quit, there wasn't like a oh you know your contract runs through a certain date or oh this or oh that, they just said we're done, we're done with GameXplain and they didn't want to speak ill of it because obviously they knew a huge part of their initial following was going to be from GameXplain, so you don't really want to speak ill of the place that you just helped popularize, so I could see you know why they might have taken that route, but as you go down here you see a ton more. So we obviously know that Andre did technically support Good Vibes gaming or something like that, someone on their team did. So GameXplain sponsored like their first ever episode of today's news tonight or whatever and so it made it look like things were great and a sponsorship thing is something you do through their Patreon, it's not like a huge amount of money, especially for a channel like GameXplain, but it was kind of a show of good faith where okay the sides are going to play peaceful, maybe Andre kind of talked to them and was like hey look let's just keep this peaceful, let's not talk about things publicly. Well things kept going on and eventually things came out because you know it gets rather annoying, especially when you start to worry about what's happening with the new hires at GameXplain. Alright, so going on down, the GameXplain shared account, decided to remove post and there's a lot of evidence suggesting that Andre himself did it and he locked down the official GameXplain after the CVG podcast came out and shared details on GameXplain's work conditions, those details which we went over in the prior video just to briefly sum them up involve a lot of crunch and $1 to $2 in our work, very little compensation, definitely not fair compensation and even a poison pill that we'll get into in a bit, this was detailed a little later. So Derek was removed from the subreddit's information at some point during prior to him resigning, so even though he technically subreddit GameXplain he was removed because Andre obviously knew he was leaving. After the subreddit shutdown Steve reassures everyone that he wasn't behind it, so people wondered if Steve had access to the GameXplain account anymore, he did not, the only people with access is Andre and anyone else on Andre's team. Steve's wife reveals how much Steve was paid. Alright so this is where we're going to get away from this post because there are some things from this post that are linked well, some things that are not, so we went over the Patreon stuff, so let's close up that. Next up, you know, we have this post here because one thing that was mentioned was about the women thing, about being manipulated, so Steve's wife came on here and is like, all I have to say is that Steve was treated like a person instead of a machine and paid fairly for the amount of work that was expected to put out. I would have fully supported him staying on it, GameXplain, however for what worked out to be $1 to $2 an hour, and this is where we got into this, and we talked about this in the last one, but this is where we got that $1 to $2 an hour thing in the whole slave work. Alright, moving on here, we have some additional information here from Steve, as you see from Good Fibes Gaming. He has talked up on Reset Era. Here we go. Alright y'all, I've been trying to keep my distance from this, but I see a lot of questions that I feel deserve some context and I don't want to remain silent when I feel the community deserves answers. Everything I'm going to say is rooted in fact. I won't be offering my opinions on GameXplain or of Andre, just things I know to be true because they happen to me. I joined GameXplain in December of 2018. Andre started paying me for my work in September of 2019. Massive red flag there. So he was just working for free. He was just a volunteer. Ugh, that's not good. Anyways, we discussed a fee of $550. I had no idea if my videos were even worth the amount I had asked for, and I didn't know what anybody else at the channel was paid at the time. That $550 was a flat fee per month, not per video, and without any additional performance-based incentives. That means if I did a couple of newsvit updates and discussions, I got the $550. Conversely, it also means if I was reviewing The Last of Us 2 while playing through Paper Mario the Thousand-Year Door and participating in Game Club, I still got $550. Every month, I also maintain GameXplain's email server, and I worked with publishers and developers to secure review copies for the entire team. If I brought in a sponsorship deal, meaning I negotiated the deal, wrote, recorded, edited, and posted the video, I would receive 33% of the proceeds with the remaining 67% going to the channel. But those were few and far between. Also, that sounds really crappy, because you literally did all of the work. The channel did none of it. Anyways, moving on. I didn't consider what my hourly rate was until my wife showed me the math. She was right. After Derek left, Andre offered me a full-time position for $50K annually. With 25% of the sponsorships I brought in being offered, this was far lower than Andre was aware I was making at my full-time job. Again, can't fault Andre for not knowing that. And I couldn't accept it while supporting my family. Makes sense. When you do have a family, you know, I have a family of 350,000 is not enough. It's just not. All right, so moving on here. I had concerns after seeing an employment contract offered to somebody else. There were clauses contained therein that would have brought a negative impact to my career. So somebody else at GameXplain was offered a job, a full-time position that had things in their contract that would have ruined Steve and made him dispensable. That is horrendous. That is pitting employees against each other. Wow. All right, we're not asking people to unfollow GameXplain and we definitely don't want to undermine the work the new staff there has done and continues to do. They deserve the same consideration and love that you've all shown us over the years. And all of us are unanimously agreed that we don't want to undermine or reflect negatively on their efforts, regardless of your own opinion of Andre or GameXplain. I'd like to ask that nobody engage in harassment of any kind. That isn't what CVG is about and we don't condone that type of behavior, period. I hope this shed some light on my experience with GameXplain. There's actually more. All right, so when you scroll down further in here, you'll see some other people responding in terms of John. So John from GameXplain was a big deal and he was one of the first, he was actually the first major loss for GameXplain when he left. And he responds, you know, to oatmeal. He says, so does GameXplain just play a flat B and that's it? If that's the case, there's no language as to what that pertains. It seems easily exploitable by Andre and the channel. It's kind of a weird monetary setup. John says, I was also a flat B and we all know John was working a lot. Now, it's come out that John has actually made more than Steve, but not in a significant sense for the amount of work that he was doing. So you scroll on further, John has more to say on this as he elaborates. Here we go. He says, so a big MK68 says, oh, big yikes. I thought you and Derek were full time. As I said, Steve too after he did Animal Crossing. This is just so sour. I like Tris and Chris, so I want to support them. But it feels like supporting some poor crap too. Like, I hope none of them are getting a flat fee pay. They aren't freelancers. If I recall correctly, the three new employees were announced as full time employees. John says, I should specify. I was paid more than Steve, but was still on the low side of Game Journalists, which, you know, 21K after tax or so. So he was paid a decent amount, but nothing. I mean, that's minimum wage. Unfortunately, my hours were all over the place, which people could probably interpret from the upload schedule. I needed to put that lifestyle behind me when I learned I was having a baby. The sponsorship cuts in Steve's statement weren't ever communicated to me, which was a bit disheartening. So he didn't even have a chance to earn sponsorship money. That's, wow. If I knew there was a way to make a bit more money, I might not have had to juggle two channels just to get by. So John actually launched the channel that became Good Vibes Gaming himself to try to make extra money on the side when he could have just worked with some sponsors, but that was never even presented to him as an option. As Steve said though, these weren't very common anyways, and they're still not common. I don't know why GameXplain doesn't take on more sponsors. They could be making significantly more money through sponsorships than they do through advertising, but it is what it is. I, you know, no one's ever said that Andre is a great business entrepreneur. He just created a successful channel. I'm not doubting Andre's passion, but maybe his business acumen is not the greatest. Frankly, I'm not sure why we weren't all paid the same. Steve covered both the PlayStation 5 and Series X launches at the same time, including games like Astro Bot and Spider-Man. So again, why are people not being paid the same? It doesn't make any sense. And then MK68 says, yeah, I figured the baby was the reason you left, and he says we could see the analytics which made Steve's pay even more baffling. Estimations here are pretty accurate. So estimations have come out for GameXplain, where they are pulling in on a bad month, a bad month. Keep in mind, bad months are, you know, nobody likes bad months, right? But bad months are indicative of, you know, what's the lowest you can expect to get. And that came out to $25,000 in ad revenue alone, once considered a bad month for GameXplain. GameXplain's average revenue based on estimates that fans have pulled together by adding up numbers and just guessing on what the CPM is. And they're actually guessing kind of low on the CPM because the bigger your channel is, the better ads you get, the higher your CPM ends up becoming. They basically have estimates that are rolling in anywhere from 50 to $100,000 a month coming into GameXplain. 100,000 obviously on the really good months, 50,000 on the average months, 25 on the poor months. That is wow. And all these employees that were uploading videos and handling things could see it. You can't hide the analytics if you have access to the backend of the channel. So they had access to see these numbers. So to now know what people were being paid. Like Steve could have been like, oh yeah, I might know the channel's making X, Y and Z but and I'm getting paid 550. But you know, there's a dozen other employees who knows what they're being paid. Maybe they're doing eight times the amount of work I am. Not really. Turns out maybe the only person doing quote unquote more work is Andre. And at this point, I'm not even sure how much work he has done. He doesn't even appear in videos that often anymore. You don't hear his voice in videos very often. I don't know if he's just resided himself to more of a manager role at this point. I don't know. What I do know is I didn't want to make this video until Andre responded. So when I did the first GameXplain exposed video, I wanted to wait until Andre had something to say. But it's been days and Andre has yet to respond. Now he could just be waiting to craft a response. He could be hoping this blows over, which is something I presumed. I also presumed in my last video that these employees were working on flat rates which means you can abuse the hello to them for extremely cheap labor. And that's exactly what was happening. They were being used and abused for extremely cheap labor and not really reaping any monetary benefits. Or if you look at the size of like good vibes gaming, they're smaller than my channel. 40,000 subscribers now. Congrats, hey. You guys hit 40,000, that's good. But still, they're not doing like the kind of numbers GameXplain does and they're not making the kind of money that GameXplain does. So they didn't really even gain any clout from this. Now John happened to move on to Nintendo Life and he's part of a three pronged attack there with Alex Zeon. God loves Zeon, man. Me and him go way back. So Alex Zeon and John. But John's also doing two other YouTube channels in that network too as well. So he's doing a lot of work and being paid what he says is a very livable salary for someone who obviously has a child. So way more than 21,000. I'm assuming he's more to the 50,000, 60,000 in terms of the euros, which is a significant bump over what 50,000 to 60,000 USD would be. We're talking more like 80,000 to 90,000. He might be making, which is great. Again, presumptions. I don't have the exact data. Maybe it's less than that. Maybe it's more than that. But he's obviously making more than the 21,000. He was making on average with, and again, 21,000 when he break the number up is going to sound like a lot, right? You know, he's making over 1,000 euros a month. But when you consider the amount of work John was doing in the sporadic hours he was required to work and reviewing games, like in the end he ended up not even really making above what minimum wage is here in the United States, which is still, by the way, at $7.25 in most of the country. So this is, to me, a life lesson for Andre. I don't think GameXplain's dead in the water. As of today, GameXplain has hidden their sub count. You can still see it in certain searches or whatever, but you're seeing their old sub count. If you go a bottle and look at Social Blade, they've lost 10,000 subscribers yesterday. They're probably going to lose several more thousands. Are they going to drop below a million subscribers? I have no idea. It kind of depends on how widespread this gets. Right now, I think GameXplain can recover. And I think there's one way, one way Andre can address this and could actually be honest, assuming that he's not bullshitting his way. And if he does this exact response, I have to wonder is he just watching my video and taking from my queues? I've made mistakes, right? Everyone makes mistakes. I used to run fan sites where we had volunteer employees and paid employees. I understand the inner workings of trying to learn this stuff on the fly. And I understand that Andre founded GameXplain, before, technically before he left IGN, but as he left IGN, he had no idea that his clout from IGN was going to lead to a successful channel, which it did. So kudos to him. And he had to learn a lot of things on the fly. He had to learn to be an accountant. He had to learn to how to file business taxes. I've had to learn that too. He said to learn how to manage people and to manage a team of people and to handle volunteer workers and paid workers and full-time staff and not full-time staff and try to keep a channel going all the while. And I can understand that he probably didn't go to college for any of that. He probably didn't go for accounting for business management, for HR. He didn't go for any of that. So it's interesting to me that he has a way out. And the way out is to be open and honest. One, I clearly think that he has no idea what he's doing from a management's perspective. He is learning on the fly. He had a sweet deal going with these excellent workers that he was paying these flat fees to, which are just cheap as hell compared to what the channel's making. And he was reaping the benefits of it. And there is nothing wrong with it on the surface. But when it gets to push comes to shove. John needs more money or he's gotta leave. Steve needs a better full-time position or he's going to leave. And Steve's positioned me and offered to him even if he seriously considered it, taking a pay cut and taking that job, presuming there would be advancement opportunities. Notice that somebody else on the team was offered a contract that poisoned the well of his contract, making him likely dispensable in the future. This is something that Andre needs to come on and just be honest that he doesn't know what he's doing. That he's learning that the new employees he has, the trists and christs of the world, Joey Ferris, that he is treating them better, that he brought them on as full-time employees, is paying them reasonable wages and even a part-time, reasonable part-time wages that not only might have a flat fee associated, but compensary time for time spent over a certain threshold. So say he has a flat fee for say Joey Ferris, I have no idea if he does, but let's say he does for $600 a month, right? And Joey does X, Y and Z. If Joey exceeds a certain amount of work hours making content that he has compensated for those extra work hours. You want a review from him? That should be outside of that very cheap payment because a review is gonna make you a ton of money. Like we talked about this before, you know, making $700, $800 on a low-view review. Well, they have reviews with like a million views that are making hundreds of thousands of dollars. And the actual person who put in all the work on it is making pennies. That's not right. There needs to be a change. I'm not gonna tell him exactly what to do whether it's percentage cuts from videos made. I think that is obviously one fair way to look at it. You know, he does that percentage cut on sponsorships. Why not make it a 50-50 cut where the guy who does all the work gets 50% out of the profits and obviously the channel keeps 50% since the channel provides the audience, right? Like something, something needs to change. He needs to come out and just fully admit he doesn't know what he's doing. He made mistakes. He's sorry that he didn't treat them better. He wishes he could go back and change it. He can't. He needs to focus on the future. He needs to learn his lesson. He's treated his other employees better. The new employees obviously need to come out and show massive support. None of them are complaining publicly right now, but I don't know what's going on behind the scenes. Maybe they're still in that bliss. So Imran Khan came out from Game Informer. He used to work at Game Informer. And he said, hey, you know, when I first got hired by Game Informer, I was working six or seven day weeks, 10 hours a day. And I was happy, but he was being overworked. He had this initial rush of, I'm just excited to have this opportunity. I can't believe I'm working at this big outlet. I'm gonna push, push, push, push, push, not realizing he's being significantly underpaid. And eventually that grind is going to get to him. And it did. And now we no longer work at Game Informer. The point I'm making is, there's always this initial rush of excitement when you're hired by a channel. I used to see this when I would bring on some volunteers back in the Zeldin former days. I'd get a new volunteer who's super, super excited, would push really, really hard and try to impress me and do all this massive work in like a week. And then they would just vanish because guess what? They're slaving away for almost nothing in return. And I didn't want them to do that, but that's just what people did. Even the ones that were paid, they would do that. They would barely fulfill their bare minimum after six months because, hey, that initial excitement where I was overworking and the site was reaping the benefits, no longer existed. They needed to be paid more because it is a job. Whether or not I like to consider YouTube a job, it is a job in some ways. Money is involved. Time is involved. People's lives are involved. And on a channel the size of GameXplain, you could easily have three employees making over 100,000 a year doing full-time work. You could easily have an office building. Spawn Wave, half the size channel has an office building. You could have an office, have everyone in studio, in person, making this work even easier, even more affordable. And the sad thing is for Steve, the making $550 a month, Steve, poor guy, who was running all this stuff and was offered a podcast position. By the way, he was offered, when he reached out to Andre Sand, he needed to make some extra money. Andre said, oh, you can run the podcast and host it and do everything for 50 bucks an episode. 50 bucks and what? He had to buy all his own equipment. He had to pay for all his own software. So, you know, say he has a subscription for a Premiere Pro or whatever, he'd have to pay that out of pocket, 20 bucks a month minimum. You know, and that's assuming he doesn't have to get all the other programs, which would end up being 50 bucks minimum per month. Or if he just outright bought, you know, software for hundreds and hundreds of dollars. You also have to consider he had to buy all his own mics, all his own recording equipment, his own mixers, his own everything. Cameras, whatever he needed, capture equipment, he had to buy it himself. It was not provided by the job, even though that stuff was required to do the job. They didn't provide the equipment. A channel that, at least before this controversy, was almost at 1.3 million subs and averaging over 15 million views per month. Something's not right. And I hate cancel culture, but at this point, GameXplain probably needs to be canceled for a while, at least until Andre can prove that he's not treating employees like this anymore, that he can be sincere. And any sort of apology or statement that comes from him, if it comes at all, comes across as genuine and not a panned, I'm trying to just HR my way out of this. GameXplain and the work Andre has done, I have a lot of respect for, but go follow Good Vibes Gaming. Just go subscribe to them. They deserve yourself more than I do. And, you know, they're not doing some crazy giveaway. They just want you to subscribe because they make great content. That's always the best reason to subscribe. But we are doing a giveaway as well, so I don't know, subscribe if you feel like it. All right, folks, I'm Nathaniel Robojans from The Tender Prime. This probably will be the last time I talk about this until Andre makes a statement because we obviously need to follow up with the other side of the coin, which right now doesn't really exist. We have all the accusations. We have all the former employees talking out. Now we need to hear from the man himself who was behind all of this. All right, folks. I'm Nathaniel Robojans from The Tender Prime. Mario Super Mario 3D World's coming soon with Bowser's Fury. Yay. I'll catch you guys in the next video. Peace.