 Alright folks, I know I'm hair crazy, everything seems to keep happening in the morning hours, which is a little nuts for me since I deal with a lot of my children's school stuff then, but here we are and we're talking about GameXplain again. Now I said last video that I meant it, that I would not make any more videos about GameXplain until Andre Seegers, the owner, founder, everything of GameXplain responded and he did, he actually responded yesterday evening, I was just too busy to get anything out and not only did he respond, we have a whole bunch of responses to his response, we have a whole bunch of statements now from other people including moderators of the GameXplain Discord server, we also have a response from a current full-time employee and also some other part-time employee, another one anyways, that said something rather interesting. Before I get into Andre's response, because that's what we're going to call it, I'm not going to say it's an apology, I want to remind you guys we are giving away a PlayStation 5, an Xbox Series X or a Nintendo Switch, details down in the description or in the comments, this is rough, here we go. Andre Seegers, statement by Andre Seegers of GameXplain, for many years I worked with a group of talented and driven independent contractors on our videos, remember independent contractors, keyword there, we shared a deep love of gaming and I'm forever grateful for their contributions as our channel grew from an idea to an incredible online community full of amazing fans. When these contractors, again second time you use that word, chose to branch off to launch their own YouTube channel, I gave them my full support and to this day wish them every success. I was quite upset to hear their experiences because I consider them to be true friends and I hate that they felt subjected in any way to unfair compensation or unrealistic deadlines, often a result of adhering to tight embargo deadlines beyond our control, it's not beyond your control, you could just tell them they don't have to have the review out by the embargo date, which it appears he might have actually fixed since losing the staff, but we'll get into that in a moment, so it says it was never my intention as I respect those former colleagues immensely, professionally and personally, so he says I am not a perfect person and there are enormous challenges in managing a channel, but I promise that I am absolutely committed to ensuring open communications, a positive work-life balance and fair timely compensation for my team as we move forward and navigate the pressures of the gaming industry. So my initial thoughts before I get into other people's responses is that this statement is a legal statement, he is legally protecting himself, now it's notable you'll see people who can reply, only people that mention that the Andre mentioned, but she doesn't mention anyone, so you can't reply, you hit this, nothing happens, it says who can reply, you can't do it, you can retweet it of course and do a retweet reply, but you know other people can't read those replies, so literally you cannot reply to this statement, so for someone who in the statement says he commits to open communication, he's preventing others from being able to communicate with him or respond to him, at least in a direct fashion, so this literally reads like a lawyer wrote it, he's protecting himself legally, because these were some serious allegations or serious stories that came out, Andre's not denying any of those stories by the way, there's no denial, there's also no admitting, there's no apology, there's nothing, you know he says you know I hate that they felt, but you're the reason they felt that way, there's no admittance of that, there's twice mentions of them being contractors, before he says I consider them to be true friends, that's because this is a legal statement, this was never a legal issue in the first place, no one was accusing Andre of doing illegal activity beyond the whole pay thing and not paying on time, you could argue that might have some legal ease that you could put into it, actually paid, it is what it is, but this statement is nothing but I am legally protected, so we're moving on, that's the route Andre chose to go, he's dehumanizing himself, he's disconnecting from being a forward thinking person and instead not taking responsibility, not taking blame, not refuting anything, just oh hey they were contractors, which is kind of the attitude we were told the whole time, now there is one person who has been defending Andre, that is Joey Ferris, now Joey Ferris is someone that I have worked with, full disclosure he's been on my podcast before, the Nintendo Prime podcast, I think he was on last year for an episode, I have open communications with Joey Ferris, I have talked to him privately before, not about this because out of respect to the situation, I have not been reaching out to current employees to figure out their side of the story, I'll let them respond on their own time, he put this up yesterday basically right at the time that Andre put his statement out, or right before I think it was, so his statement says, hi everyone, in case you don't know me my name is Joey Ferris and I've been working full time as a news and features editor slash reviewer for GameXplain since October of 2020, it has always been a dream of mine to work in games media and it's an incredible blessing to be able to do that under the GameXplain banner, I cannot thank Andre enough for giving me this opportunity to make a living doing what I love, that said there's a narrative going around that Andre underpays and overworks his employees, from my experience this has not been the case, I've had a lot of jobs over the years and I've had to deal with a lot of horrible bosses and Andre is not one of them by a long shot. Now not only am I being paid enough to support myself and my wife, but not once have I been pressured to overwork, as a matter of fact I've been encouraged by Andre not to burn myself out on the job or take on more than I can handle, there was an instance where I wasn't able to meet a deadline for a project without working outside my normal hours, I brought this to Andre's attention and he suggested I turn what was supposed to be a video review into a review in progress discussion which saved me a lot of time, this was only possible because I communicated what I needed to Andre and he's always been available to talk to which we've heard from others wasn't the case before, this is just one example of the many ways he's been supportive and understanding, in my time at GameXplain I've had nothing but happy Andre has encouraged me to take time off for my mental and physical health and to spend time with family especially during the holidays, I look forward to continuing to make content for the fans at GameXplain, I truly couldn't have asked for a better job, now this is fine I'm not going to sit here and refute him point by point because that very well could be his experience, I don't know if this is a canned response and you're going to understand why I'm questioning if this is a canned response in a moment, but hey, it's possible that this is actually a good sign, this could be the first real sign that Andre has learned after losing almost his entire staff at the same time, it's possible the reasons he lost them are well aware to him because after all they did bring up these reasons directly to Andre before leaving and he chose to be better about it moving forward, this could be actual positive evidence that Andre potentially could have even referenced saying hey you know I have learned from my mistakes because he mentioned he's not perfect so he's kind of admitting he makes mistakes but not really admitting to what those mistakes are and this could be a nice example of hey look I am learning, this is the new staff, this is how I'm treating them, I am not going to go back down the path that I did with the old staff but again I don't know this could be canned and I'm saying this could be canned because of this, Andre asked freelancers to share positive experiences, he couldn't get enough people saying good things to share them alongside his statement so this has been verified and confirmed to come from a part-time person who used to work at I do well did occasional freelance work for GameXplain and Andre, he did message me a few days ago asking if I could share some positive experiences, I decided not to respond until morning wasn't going to participate but he had deleted the discord message by then so it's like a notification on the phone and then when you went to respond it was gone, here's the thing he's soliciting people to say positive things, if you have a lot of positive experience from your staff you shouldn't have to solicit them to defend you, they should easily defend you without question without asking but they're not, the only person to do so so far is Joey Ferris, either Joey Ferris was also asked and is dying on that hill of supporting Andre or Andre legitimately is actually treating him really well and possibly making him a full-time right-hand man kind of person I'm not sure but whatever he's got one current staff member on his side but those are all current see that's the thing it's possible Andre has learned and is doing better which I hope he is but that doesn't change what happened moving on we see here that Steve's wife who liked a couple posts that were you know basically critical of his response in a way and I haven't actually looked at the responses you know ginger Bob he says like Joey I love you man but this is bogus the statement goes on about your experiences with Andre and games without acknowledging John Derek Ash and Steve's experiences it's completely pointless to go on about what it's like now when the issue is in the past um you know he and to Joey's credit says I can't speak for them obviously um you know I really want to believe this but some of the things said contradict statements the former crew have spoken about for leaving again this is about what happened in the past not what's happening now but again I hope the things are going well for Joey Steve's wife getting banned or blocked by him because she'd like some post-critical of him whatever it is what it is um but this is a mod of their discord server says all right well hesitant to say anything on this until more information came out but seeing where everything is going in the statements released over the night I feel I need to go into this uh long thread important to those who know of my past history of game explain I was one of the moderators on the discord server one of my most influential eras where I met so many people and helped me become a better person I joined in May of 2018 and on request to John got the position and did my part in helping blossom a community now while this is all well and good actually getting the server to be recognized was another issue Andre typically would leave us hanging when we needed to consult him or not respond at all when we needed the staff others such as Derek John and Matthew were much more helpful in getting changes done but it all had the issue of so much having to go through Andre and the only reason we were able to grow the server so much was because we pushed about it which made the whole process so draining but it's not like they acknowledged our presence we were typically ignored it made me distant from the content you'd see on the main channel even though any of the mods could tell you that we were a huge backbone in the making a game explain community thrive we loved the people and server Andre would almost never check in on us for better or worse and as such we just took it as we went this all goes until 2020 as most of the staff leaves you've probably seen that the story go around enough already but that November I left the server and stepped down as mod mainly to take better control of my time and projects though there was a feeling I didn't belong anymore and in August I sort of realized this on my attempt to set up a charity stream I tried to contract Andre about helping out with it and the falsehood of my mind that I and other mods meant something to game explain only to be put on read only even when I was told he would respond later this is all to cement the word Derek gave out but again so please don't harass anyone about this I've just had a lot on my chest about this and it's a very involved part of my life I'm just glad now I still have contacts with people from the server because they're people I truly care about and of course I hope the best for the new staff game explain they're all good people and I hope things get better because it hurts that it came to this so Andre again not taking care of his own community not supporting it telling people that he'll do things and then just silencing them pretty par for the course for all the other accusations we have espion here what an absolute lie and non-apology for those who don't know I used to be a moderator for game explains discord server and it was certainly a time I'd been less active in the months leading up to what recently and was already considered stepping down from the mod team Derek's statement is what ultimately led me to decide to step down shortly after the reset era thread was posted and started gaining traction which is a forum where a lot of the stuff's being talked about Andre called an emergency meeting with the mod team by pinging us all in the chat and saying hey let's do something wild okay that's Andre there was no indication that it was going to be a serious discussion before I joined the voice chat in any case this discussion gave me pretty bad vibes to he kept vaguely mentioning one specific ex-member with his frustration in his voice as if they were the source of this or whatever like the source of his frustration by the way he does not John has not followed Derek and has not said anything to Derek and quite some time he's the one member of all of this that that Andre is actively just avoiding like the flag for some reason and Derek as you know it was one of the biggest people I gave explain all right he made no effort to say that he would take responsibility for this and essentially told the mods hey you all are going to have to deal with this soon good luck wow eventually decided to redirect all discussions of the reset era thread to the support channel because you know not allowing it at all would come off as suspicious you know like not letting people reply to your actual official response so he essentially left the mod team to deal with a ton of messages all pouring into the same channel as he did nothing to address the problem that he had created himself before this all happened I was frustrated doing a lot of things on the server because the mod team was given very little agency initially we had to ask for permission to add delete edit channels but we were eventually given agency over that things like changing the server's icon the rules etc all had to go through Andre which seems fine enough on paper right except for the fact that he would take forever to get back to us again more evidence of him not making himself available the only times he really had a presence in the server was when he needed to for a bit of personal story there was a personal drama between me and another x mod won't give names since that's not relevant here because they follow my private account at some point but I soft blocked them because I needed to vent about how the mod team was about to confront them but their tendency to argue with other users this culminated in the other x mod sending a massive message to my discord DMs saying a ton of harmful stuff to me calling me a liar things like that it took over a month for Andre to resolve this situation eventually we asked other game explaining staff members to help out and step in ash and john ended up taking a talking to this x mod and instead of Andre since he just did absolutely nothing to help I like to close out the thread by sharing another story and then we get to that please don't direct your ire at the new game explain step they're all wonderful and I don't think they had an idea what was going on this is all on Andre his statement apologizes for nothing doesn't even mention issues they had with them and does not provide any clear intention that things will change now again if we go off of Joey Ferris's statement it does appear that Andre has changed and he has been going bending over backwards to encourage mental health and that's before this stuff came out so again it's possible Andre has changed okay I'm not here to debate whether Andre's learned from this situation whether things are better now a game explain than they were before I sincerely hope that joey's joy ferris's statement was not one that you know that Andre had to specifically ask which the timing of its release makes it seem like it's something Andre asked for but I'm hoping that it wasn't coerced I'm hoping it wasn't influenced like he was trying to do with some of the other former staff members but it is what it is this is what we have to go off of all I know is Andre's statement if we just look at that on its own is very very telling for the way that Andre Segers has managed game explain it is very much a business to him okay now there's nothing wrong with that because all of us that make money on YouTube we're legal businesses this channel is a legal business I file business taxes I have a business license this is a business okay now not all youtubers have a business license some of them run it as a sole proprietorship which you do not need a business license for you end up using your own social security code as your business tax ID all that jazz basically everything falls on you and there's a lot of easy units with that there's also a lot of risk with that but we are all legal businesses because we make money and we're paid by YouTube paid by Google specifically so that's fine and if game explainer so large treated like a business makes a lot of sense you're gonna have a team of people you're gonna manage that team you're gonna have payroll you're gonna have taxes you're gonna have business expenses all that jazz you're gonna have a lot of stuff under the sun to deal with so treating it like a business is fine but this was never a question of business acumen yes we could talk about the one to two dollar pay accusations we could talk per hour we could talk about the overworking we could talk about the laughing at them for their request to get paid on time on a timely schedule that happens on the same day people begging to get their pay checks some people not even getting paid for nine plus months you know Steve not getting paid for nine plus plus months you had John not getting paid for the same amount of time about nine plus months before he started getting paid and then John not realizing that Derek as an example was making significantly more than him and despite him doing the same amount of work as Derek and Derek not realizing that nobody else was getting paid like he thought everyone was getting paid around what he was getting paid and that turned out to not be the case they weren't getting paid where Derek was getting paid which Derek was the only one getting paid what I would consider a reasonable wage not the greatest of wages of course for the amount of hours he was putting in but still he was getting paid a reasonable wage and if everyone was being paid that reasonable wage he was making about you know well I think it was 60 000 a year if everyone was being paid that I think things could have been a lot different but that wasn't the case and then when he offered contracts poison pills put in contracts and stuff like that that could hurt people like Steve so there's again there's been so much information and so many accusations that have come out it's baffling to me just completely baffling to me that this is Andres response I mean I'm gonna look over to the side here and just look at it one more time for many years I worked with a group of talented and driven independent again first thing he calls them is contractors if they're true friends okay he later calls them true friends if they are true friends you stop referencing them as contractors the only reason to reference them as independent contractors is specifically because he's protecting his ass legally if he comes out and admits I underpaid my staff I overworked my staff if he comes out and fully admits to this stuff instead of saying you know I'm not a perfect person and there are enormous challenges in managing the channel like he's kind of saying I made mistakes but I'm not going to tell you what those mistakes are because if he admits to them there is a legal liability factor that could lead to him um facing lawsuits now none of the former staff members by the way have indicated at all that they want to actually go after Andre and pursue legal actions and get back payments or whatever for work done or work done they weren't paid for it doesn't sound like anyone's even interested in doing that but from a legal standpoint this was written by a lawyer absolutely 100% written by it reads like a lawyer statement it comes off like a lawyer statement it's very technical it it's very much uh we are not going to admit any fault however clearly you know we're sorry that other people feel like there was a problem so it's kind of like oh the problem's them not me uh but it says we shared a deep love of game of gaming and I am forever grateful for their contributions as our channel grew from an idea so he admits that some of these people like Derek were there before the channel was anything to an incredible online community full of amazing fans fans have nothing to do with it things right now but that's okay one of those contractors again chose to branch off to launch their own youtube channel I gave them my full support and publicly he did he told them all he wished them all well besides Derek uh and uh he did sponsor like one of their early episodes of today's news tonight so um again he publicly was showing good will towards them of course to show negative will towards them at the time wouldn't have looked good on him so take that for what it is I was quite upset to hear their experiences because I consider them true friends if you consider them true friends you'd stop referencing them as independent contractors look I plan to if my channel ever gets big enough and can afford to hire a video editor someday to make my videos even better and I the video editor will highly likely be an independent contractor like legally but I will never reference them to their face or behind the scenes or publicly as an independent contractor they are a person they are a person that yes is performing a job I will be paying them for but they are a person okay so even if they I didn't consider that the they got to be a friend and he was just like an employee which technically legally independent contractors are not considered employees but that they're doing work for me even if uh even if they aren't my friend I'll never reference them as just a contractor I I don't I don't understand what Andres is doing um I mean I get it I said there was a couple ways he could have responded he could have copped to everything uh said oh sorry he was and gave examples of things like Joey Ferris mentioned uh that he is doing better now or he could just say nothing and this statement is akin to nothing it would be better if Andres never responded this comes off as callous this comes off as out of touch this comes off as I'm not admitting fault but I'm also not denying these things happen so he's not denying he's not admitting he's just hey they were independent contractors and I'm sorry they felt that way all right folks that's all I got thank you so much for tuning in I am Nathan Robodance from The Tanner Prime sad situation I don't think we're gonna have anything more to talk about unless Andres or you know decides to say something other allegations I'm sure are going to come out just as we got from the mod team I'm sure there's gonna be more and more uh you know independent people saying that they were solicited for positive commentary I'm sure that there is going to be more things added to this story over time but unless something major happens on game explain side or there's another follow-up with the new staff uh or like if Joey came out and said he was co-hosted into a statement or whatever the case might be unless something big comes out from the new staff or Andres after this I don't think there's really anything else we can do um and out of all this good vibes gaming is blowing up in fact I don't even know what's good vibes gaming at right now there were over 50,000 last I checked but I have no idea what they're at now I did not check this morning they've been gaining like 5,000 subs a day or something like that um but I'm actually curious where they're at currently and yeah there are 55,000 that that that that checks there are 50k yesterday 55 today probably 60 tomorrow they deserve all the success I hope they pass my channel here in the next few days because they are way better content creators than I am and I am not afraid to say that kudos to them all right folks catch you guys in the next video