Hey everyone, here's my statement. I want nothing more than for us all to be able to put this situation behind us and focus on the future, so I appreciate your understanding in advance that I won't be engaging in dialogue here about the situation. I don't take the slightest bit of pleasure in any of this and just want us and GX to be able to move forward separately but amicably. Thanks, everyone.
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I've been hesitant to speak up because the GVG brand means so much to me and I don't want us as individuals and/or our channel to be mired in internet drama, but Steve and Derrick have already (rightly) commented on the situation as it pertains to them and I recognize that things have reached a point that I would be remiss if I didn't speak up as well.
First off, though, I would like to remind everyone that the new GX crew of Tris, Joey, and Chris – not to mention my dear friend Tom, who remains with the channel – have nothing to do with any of this and they deserve the same love and attention you all have graciously shown us over the years. I and we are categorically not asking anyone to boycott GX or pull support from their Patreon, and it is our genuine hope that the channel continues to flourish with its new crew. Also, I STRONGLY ask that you do not harass or otherwise send Andre abusive messages. Regardless of my and our grievances with him, Derrick, Steve, and I condemn in the harshest possible terms any and all harassment and abuse directed at Andre and we do NOT want this to be a witch hunt. I didn't want this to blow up at all, let alone the way it has, and I feel sick as I write this because I hate the thought of anyone at GX continuing to suffer over this situation and I just want us all to move on. Nonetheless, here we go.
Those of you who are longtime GX fans likely noticed that I started becoming less visible on and doing less work for the channel as the years wore on. The reasons for that have been widely speculated, but some folks connected the dots thanks to my occasional statements here and there that GX "didn't pay the bills." That's the long and short of it: pay was so low and inconsistent for so long relative to what the channel made (recall what Derrick and Steve have said about us being able to see the metrics while we were there) that I eventually stopped being able to justify all the work, time, and energy I put into the channel when I was getting so comparatively little compensation in return. There were no set, reliable content rates for freelancers (which – by my own choice – was what my relationship to the channel was considered to be for most of my time there even though I was a core staff member) despite my asking for set rates to be established many times, and Andre made it clear it was on me to invoice him for what I thought my work was worth and, essentially, come up with my own rates for him to approve or not.
Still, though, as poor and ultimately untenable as this relationship to the channel was as a freelancer, it was a million, billion times better – based on what I witnessed every day – than being one of its "full-time" employees and I was happy and relieved to mostly be able to maintain my own distance from GX in that respect. Let me be crystal clear about this: GX as you knew it and have known it simply would not exist, full stop, if not for Derrick and Jon. I will always give Andre all the credit in the world for creating GX and building it up the way he did, but over the years Derrick and later Jon did the absolute lion's share (and then some) of the actual work in maintaining the channel and putting out daily content – content they and we had little to no creative control over, might I add. Particularly later on, Andre gave the content orders, and we (mostly they) just carried them out. There was very little room for negotiation or compromise and, especially in the latter part of our time there, Andre maintained a very authoritarian, top-down staff structure with him as the sole decision-maker except in very rare circumstances.
The utterly mind-boggling number of work hours Derrick and Jon were expected to put in relative to their pay (especially in Jon's case) and at the expense of their quality of life was just… I've never seen anything like it, and I hope I never do again. Ultimately we were all utterly taken for granted and exploited – as Steve would also be when he joined later on – but none more so than Derrick and Jon, and even thinking about the backbreaking work they put into the channel pretty much every single day for comparatively microscopic recompense and basically zero credit fills me with an anger I can't describe. Without them, GX either would not exist today or would be far, *far* less successful than it has become, period, end of story. Accusations that any of us, but especially them, were work-averse or suffering from the "good problem" of too much work are patently false, unfounded, and ill-informed.
Now, it has been asked whether or not we requested better pay and/or working conditions before we left. Let me assure you beyond a shadow of any doubt that we did — more than once. I'm reminded, in particular, of a GX "team" (that's in quotes because by then, Andre had begun making it clear there was now an authoritarian split between him and the rest of us) meeting Derrick, Jon, and I called for while I was vacationing with my wife. I remember this meeting so clearly because I still, all these months and ultimately years later, really cannot believe Andre pushed back on and refused the arguably humble concessions we were asking for at the time. (For context, this was before Steve — whose accounts and grievances I totally back up, might I add — fully joined the team.)
So the three of us called for a meeting with Andre to ask that a couple things be formalized going forward, namely 1) on-time pay each month dictated by a Google Calendar reminder for Andre, because (as has been well documented by now) we very frequently had to chase down our pay by repeatedly reminding and almost begging Andre to just please remember to pay us for work that had already been done, and 2) a travel budget being set aside so we wouldn't incur personal debt flying to and working shows we were expected to cover, such as E3, PAX West, and PAX East. (In the interest of full disclosure and clarity, the E3 bit doesn't apply to me as I live in Los Angeles.)
His responses? For the first point, he outright refused to commit to a hard-locked payment date each month and suggested that it was unfair of us to hold him to such an expectation, as we had always gotten paid as long as we reminded him, so why wasn't that good enough? He did say he would try to do better going forward – and to his credit, for me at least he eventually mostly did – but he seemed almost offended that we would even think to demand such an "outrageous" (quotes are mine, not Andre's) thing as reliably on-time pay. As to the second point, his response to us was that we're technically "independent contractors" and thus not entitled to work-related travel being covered or compensated, so in a word: no, not happening.
Now, to be fair, he wasn't wrong in a legal sense: none of us had signed any sort of employment contract (thankfully, I would eventually come to realize) ratifying such terms and, as such, we were not legally entitled to any sort of travel coverage from Andre or the channel. In a moral sense, though? Considering how tirelessly we (especially Derrick and Jon) worked for the channel and how key we were to its growth and whole brand? Yeah… The end of that meeting was the first time I distinctly remember feeling deeply angry and resentful and thinking the writing was on the wall. And that was years before we finally left.
All this said, I don't want to make it seem like Andre never paid for or covered anything. While it was not usually offered outright, he would eventually reimburse me for most of my GX-related flights and all transit/rideshare/onsite food expenses as long as I did 100% of the legwork in invoicing everything and reminding him to pay me. He also paid for many post-show and post-event dinners and bar tabs, and he never pushed back on any of the invoices I sent him and almost never tried to lowball me any further than I was already lowballing myself. It's important to me that I highlight those exceptions where they exist, because it wasn't all bad and I'm not trying to claim it was.
I also want to remind folks that the kind of crunch conditions Andre has been accused of engendering at GX are not entirely his fault, and it was never our intention to imply they were during the GVG discussion this topic came up in; these crunch problems are, in many respects, endemic to game journalism/YouTube and, indeed, the game industry at large. Andre does bear some of the blame in that he rarely if ever put our mental and physical well-being above the non-negotiable mandate of getting news updates up immediately and having every single preview and review ready to go live the moment an embargo dropped, but he has no control over the time developers allow for review and preview periods. It was Square Enix's fault Steve had two days to fully play and write + produce a review of Final Fantasy VII Remake before release, not Andre's. It was Capcom's fault I had five or so days to fully play and write + produce a review of both Mega Man X Legacy Collection 1 and 2 before release, not Andre's. But neither was there ever any effort on Andre's part that I can recall to question or soften the expectation that our content had to be ready right at embargo time, regardless of any extenuating circumstances.
In closing, there's one thing I can say with absolute certainty: Had it been tenable, I know without a doubt that all of us at GVG and, I think (though I won't speak for him), Jon would absolutely have been happy to stay at GX and reap the benefits of its continuing success together with Andre, as a team. We're incredibly proud of what we helped build on Andre's excellent foundation, and my first several years at GX – when, despite any problems I had with being underpaid, our team dynamic was more collaborative and "a bunch of friends covering games together" rather than the authoritarian "a boss and his underlings" setup it morphed into later on – remain some of the best of my career and, really, my life. Of course we would've loved to stay under better, fairer circumstances. But at the end of the day, GX fully belongs to Andre, it's his baby, and he just chose to run things in a way that sharply diverged from our needs and wants for too long. I want to express very clearly, though, that I was, still am, and will remain absolutely fucking heartbroken over the way things turned out because I think we, together, could've taken the channel to incredible new heights and reaped the benefits, together. In fact, I'm damn near certain we could've and maybe in an alternate universe, we did! But sadly that just wasn't in the cards for us, and we had to take a chance and move on.
Which, as you now know, we did – to Good Vibes Gaming! To those of you who have followed us to GVG and supported our new venture in any way, whether you have from the beginning or only are now in light of all of this, it can never be said enough: thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for caring about the people behind the content you've loved over the years, and please rest assured that Steve, Derrick, and I are all much happier and healthier at GVG than ever before even as we remain hopeful that GX continues to be successful under the stewardship of its new team. Onward and upward!
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