ExtraCredits drama? (The best non-Whiskey based gaming media)

So today, as I type this even, there is a whole crap-storm falling out between Extra Credits and the Escapist.

I can't really summarize, but here's a link to the Facebook response from the Escapist:

http://www.facebook.com/notes/alexander-macris/a-response-on-extra-credits/10150287107583910

For more info check out the twitter feed and Facebook conversations going on. The point of my posting this here, however, is not to fan the flames, or even to start discussion on the specifics of what's going down over there. It is this: Extra Credits is, perhaps, the most thoughtful and informative as well as heartfelt and in depth commentary on the video games industry around. (Yeah, the Whiskey media stuff is great, but GB doesn't dig much into the industry side of things, so there's not really a comparison to be made.) If it falls out that the Extra Credits crew still wants to produce, but finds themselves looking for a new home on the web, do you think there could be a home for them here? I'd be totally willing to pay an extra fee to get their content over here!

Just a thought.

/Fox

The best part of that Facebook post was the comments.

Meh, I don't want to log in to read that, could someone summarize?

It does make it seem the conversation is at least in progress. (Felt slightly, and uncomfortably voyeuristic to watch the posts appear in real time too... >.>)

As an addendum, here's a link to the relevant twitter feed for the ExtraCreditz side of it: http://twitter.com/#!/ExtraCreditz

So, it's like two teenage drama-queens having a back and forth over Facebook, only grown men talking about lawyers and neener neener, instead? Never heard of it, but I go to The Escapist about twice a year -- when I remember that Yahtzee has his videos there and I sit down to bulk view a bunch of them.

@Slaker117 said:

Meh, I don't want to log in to read that, could someone summarize?

It seems to be this:

Some guys have some sort of "online media business" and one of their guys said "hey, don't worry about paying me if times are hard - pay other expenses, first". So they did that, but because the economy has sucked, they've done that for a year or so. Eventually, their guy had some sort of family medical emergency and financial emergency and asked for some pay of some sort. Asked if they'd mind him starting a kickstarter to raise money for his needs. Business said "sure" and supported the idea. Kickstarter said "no" (you know, because they don't do charity). So they used some other service. Then instead of using the funds raised for personal/medical/whatever purposes, the guy apparently started his own indie media startup which irked the guys he was working for and they wanted to talk about finding a way to handle exchange/sales/transfer/whatever of their IP. Said guy said he didn't think the buys he was working for had any rights to the content/show/whatever and the other guys and their backers had to pay him off some $20k they owed him and something something yadda yadda, disagreement in something I can't quite make out at the end...

And then there's a bunch of back and forth in the facebook comments between the two guys discussing working with their lawyers to get all of their back and forth emails published online at the Escapist. (Seemingly a bunch of stuff that should be conducted through email between two guys, but whatever).

If I misunderstood any of it... well, that's what happens when there's some big-ass random post on facebook. It's kind of like waking up to find the email of that one half-crazy drama-queen chick who is always passive-aggressively exploding all over your wall with a bunch of her relationship stuff that nobody cares about or something.

Oh, and apparently they're slap-fighting over Twitter, too. Classy.

@Axxol said:

I'm not going to that link; just tell us what happened.

Exactly what I was looking for, now someone please, let me in on the drama... And don't understand anything except from "WHERE'S THE MONEY?!" 
 
Never heard of ExtraCreditz before... And only know Escapist from that thing where that guy rants on every fucking video game ever released (can't remember tha name, but I think the guy has a hat, is british and not TotalBiscuit)

@KoolAid said:

The best part of that Facebook post was the comments.

It's kind of like Reddit. Sometimes the comments are better than the article.

This is the body of the note that was linked to: (oh gosh, giant block of text incoming!)

Hey guys. This is Alexander Macris. I'm the publisher. Jame's statements are very one-sided so I think they deserve a response.
Yes, we are having a very unfortunate dispute with James over Extra Credits, and yes, he's planning to leave The Escapist, despite our repeated requests that he stay. It's also true that we fell behind in paying James.
Here are the key facts as I see them:
1. From November 2010 to June 2011, James told us not to worry about paying him and to focus on paying other people. His exact words were "I really don’t want to squeeze you guys if you’re in a crunch, so you can put us to the bottom of the list for right now…" Given that we have been in a crunch due to the recession, we took him at his word, thanked him profusely for the flexibility, and focused on paying down other debt. (Several other shows were cancelled around November 2010 you'll recall, as we couldn't pay them, but James' flexibility allowed us to keep working with him to promote Extra Credits.)
2. This continued until June 2011, when James emailed us to alert us that he needed funds urgently. The request was partly for family matters and partly for Allison's surgery. He asked for our permission to raise funds through Kickstarter. We more than gave permission, we threw our weight into supporting it. Unfortunately, Kickstarter refused because they don't do charity. I then suggested James try RocketHub and RocketHub agreed. We again collaborated to make it a joint effort. Our agreement was that we would be compensated for the wholesale cost of the t-shirts and Publisher's Club, and that the funds would be used to save Extra Credits. I reasonably interpreted "save Extra Credits" to mean that anything beyond what was needed for Allison's surgery would be used on Extra Credits production. I also Pay-palled James as much money as we had available at that time.
3. After the RocketHub was enormously successful and James had decided to use the funds to create an indie publishing label rather than to "save Extra Credits", James decided he would no longer speak to us directly and instead assigned a "business development manager" to speak to us. James' new business development manager demanded that we assign all the IP of Extra Credits to James.
4. We indicated we would be happy to work out an IP transfer but that before we did that, we would like to make sure we got paid for the wholesale cost of the t-shirts and the Publisher's Club memberships, and that we would like to see the Extra Credits RocketHub money used to create more Extra Credits. We did NOT ask that James send us $9,500 - we said he should use $9,500 to create more episodes of the show that the money was supposed to be used to save.
5. James' business development manager at that time emailed me and told us that his position was now that we had no rights to the show, no deal, and that our entire contract was invalid. This was out of the blue as far as we were concerned. We had no understanding at this time of James' intent to use the "Save Extra Credits" money to start a publishing business.
6. At this point, Russ Pitts, our editor in chief, flew out to meet with James and his business development manager personally. They agreed that we would continue to work together; that we would transfer the IP to James in exchange for some fee to be negotiated; and that James would handle the EC t-shirts directly rather than through us. We agreed to swallow the cost of the Publisher's Club memberships, a few thousand dollars.
7. I then emailed James and his business development manager to explain that I wanted to get them paid as quickly as possible so that the back debt was not a sticking point in negotiations. I then emailed them again to say that I had talked to our Board and investors and that payment would come in about a week.
8. At this point, James had his lawyer send us an email stating that we were in breach and that unless we sent money more quickly than I had just stated we'd be able to send it, that James was terminating his relationship with us. I presume that James thought we were playing games with him, although we were not.
9. We went ahead and mailed James the money we got from our investors the next week as we had promised. James' lawyer nevertheless sent us an email indicating they intended to terminate our agreement.
10. Finally, I should add that as of last week, we had paid James over $14,000 of the $20,000 we owed him, and that as of today, our company has mailed James all payments he is owed.
I have all of this documented extensively in email. James is simply in error if he believes we have ever lied to him or any of his staff. We are prepared to defend ourselves against future defamation in a court of law.
Cordial regards,
Alexander Macris

And the comments are just Alexander and James agreeing (in a really passive-agressive way) to contact their lawyers to create a compilation of their emails dating back to November and release them as a .pdf

Ok, two parts:

1) IF you don't know the ExtraCreditz video productions go here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits

They produce a commentary segment that address video games as a genera, speaking to both the production side of things, as well as the deeper underpinnings. (Such as using the "other" as a source of horror in horror games, or the differences between "playing" and "testing" and even the fall back of the Skinner Box as it applies to game design.)

2) The drama (in super brief) seems to be: ExtraCreditz is unhappy with the financial and IP deal they have with Escapist and, feeling that they have been shorted their due, have tried to withdraw. Escapist believes they are in turn being demonized and gipped. Both parties have come to the conclusion that things will be clarified if the relevant emails are published. (That's what comes from the conversation on FB)

I hope Extra Credits doesn't go away, I enjoy watching their show every week. More so than Zero Punctuation. 
 
Zero Punctuation, by the way, seems to have either gone down a bit in quality or just gotten old. If Extra Credits dies out, well, the only reason I'll have to go there is the forums. I sure as hell am not going for the damned Jimquisition.

I don't like the Extra Credits guy; I think he's incredibly pretentious. I'm definitely not rooting for him in this, though in the end, everyone is dicks.

From what is available publicly, I think I'm coming down on the side of the Escapist with this one.

However, I should point out that I have worked for them before really respected the way they dealt with me as a guy breaking into the industry as a freelancer, so I freely admit my opinion may well be tarnished.

Are Extra Credits the guys who did a whole video on Kanji as a gay character? Or something like that?

@Bocam: Yeah, this one on "sexual diversity": http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2520-Sexual-Diversity

The best part of that Facebook post was the comments.

I wonder if Yahtzee will weigh in on the conversation.

Moviebob and the girl who makes name game have chimed in, that half the reason i go to that site.

Throw this on the massive pile of "stuff that got ruined by money."

@Branthog: Technically they used the overflow money to start the Indie dev company. On the other hand, I think that's kind of a shitty move since they basically took in money that was in excess of what they needed for their artists' surgery instead of just closing the donation box when the goal was met. Unless they indicated what they were going to do with that money, it sounds like The Escapist is in the right on this.

@Branthog: Technically they used the overflow money to start the Indie dev company. On the other hand, I think that's kind of a shitty move since they basically took in money that was in excess of what they needed for their artists' surgery instead of just closing the donation box when the goal was met. Unless they indicated what they were going to do with that money, it sounds like The Escapist is in the right on this.

This is some internet ass drama here. I don't really know who I side with on this, but I hope it ends well. I really don't want Extra Credits to disappear from the site.

I was wondering why they were still taking donations a good weeks after the original donation goal was met and Allison's surgery was already completed, and presumably, paid off in full.  This kind of explains it and gives feel rather bad.
 
I enjoy Extra Credits, but this was certainly false advertisement on their part for where the money was actually going.
 
Edit: gives feel rather bad...You know what, I'm just going to leave that there.  My most glorious butchering of a sentence to date.

@Undeadpool said:

@Branthog: Technically they used the overflow money to start the Indie dev company. On the other hand, I think that's kind of a shitty move since they basically took in money that was in excess of what they needed for their artists' surgery instead of just closing the donation box when the goal was met. Unless they indicated what they were going to do with that money, it sounds like The Escapist is in the right on this.

You can't blame for trying to make lemonade.

I don't like the Extra Credits guy; I think he's incredibly pretentious. I'm definitely not rooting for him in this, though in the end, everyone is dicks.

I was never a huge fan of Extra Credits, but they had some insightful things to say on occasion. Sad to see the creator apparently went into douchebag mode.

@supermike6 said:

I don't like the Extra Credits guy; I think he's incredibly pretentious. I'm definitely not rooting for him in this, though in the end, everyone is dicks.

Y'know as much as I don't like accusing people of being needlessly pretentious, I think I kind of agree with you. I've only watched a few of the Extra Credits videos, but they seemed to indulge in that whole artsy-ass nu-journalism crap which drives me a little nuts.

That sucks Extra Credits was on my lists of things to actually watch on the Escapist, the others being Zero Punctuation, The music guy, and Doomsday Arcade while it was going on. Oh and Moviebob almost forget about him.

Not a huge fan of the fairly touchy-feely and semi-pretentious tone of Extra Credits, nor am I a fan of anything else The Escapist puts out (Either Yahtzee has gone downhill or I have gotten tired of his negative-nancy schtick about everything), but I am almost interested in seeing where this internet beef ends up going... when someone posts the requisite topic on these forums. I'm not going to search any of this out or anything.

I really want to see how this ends. On one hand i'm inclined to side with the Escapist as it does seem very suspect that the Extra Credit guy went and spent all that runover money on creating his little indie thing but on the other hand Escapist is a terrible site and only a terrible person could own in.

In the end my big question is - How badly can you hurt your hand that you can no longer draw low quality stick men? She's not even animating 60 frames per second.

I love Extra Credits. I love how much thought is put into his shit. I love how it examines the issue from all sides. I love it's motto even. Games do matter. They're a massive industry that has had a huge and continually growing impact on all of our lives. The issues facing them are the issues of today. Internet freedom, free speech, and hacking. Extra Credits explains that shit better then anyone. 
 
He's not pretentious. He's like the guy in your college class who makes it worth going to school because you know he has something relevant to say in the discussion. In fact his very first video was the replacement for a power-point presentation in one of his classes.
 
Honestly, stories have two sides, and I'd be interested in hearing what they have to say about this.

@SeriouslyNow: True that, it just seemed a little...underhanded. I'm not saying they schemed and planned to go over the $25K, and don't get me wrong, it's WONDERFUL that an artist still gets to practice her craft, but after they raised it, they should've either closed the coffers OR IMMEDIATELY said what they were going to use the overflow for since I'd imagine that most of the people who donated after the goal was reached thoguht they still needed the goal.

@kashif1: The thing is, it sounds like there was an understanding that the overflow money would be used to make more EC episodes (which makes sense since they were short on cash), so when he turned around and opened his own studio, it came off as a bit underhanded.

The only thing I know about the Escapist is Zero Punctuation, so I hate The Escapist. But that James guy sounds like a real shady fucker.

@Undeadpool said:

@SeriouslyNow: True that, it just seemed a little...underhanded. I'm not saying they schemed and planned to go over the $25K, and don't get me wrong, it's WONDERFUL that an artist still gets to practice her craft, but after they raised it, they should've either closed the coffers OR IMMEDIATELY said what they were going to use the overflow for since I'd imagine that most of the people who donated after the goal was reached thoguht they still needed the goal.

Sure, but I imagine that once they were closer to raising the full amount they wondered if they could continue to work with The Escapist anymore and if not, what would be their next source of long term income. It's great having a brand name being sold using another brand name - in this case EC being sold via The Escapist - but if the selling brand name loses viability your own product loses viability too. Better to start over doing something else for the future. I guess that's what they're planning to do.

Ah, this guy. He always seemed a little too soft spoken to me. Like one day he was going to explode in a fit of rage against those who oppose video games in any eay

@SeriouslyNow said:

@Undeadpool said:

@SeriouslyNow: True that, it just seemed a little...underhanded. I'm not saying they schemed and planned to go over the $25K, and don't get me wrong, it's WONDERFUL that an artist still gets to practice her craft, but after they raised it, they should've either closed the coffers OR IMMEDIATELY said what they were going to use the overflow for since I'd imagine that most of the people who donated after the goal was reached thoguht they still needed the goal.

Sure, but I imagine that once they were closer to raising the full amount they wondered if they could continue to work with The Escapist anymore and if not, what would be their next source of long term income. It's great having a brand name being sold using another brand name - in this case EC being sold via The Escapist - but if the selling brand name loses viability your own product loses viability too. Better to start over doing something else for the future. I guess that's what they're planning to do.

Fine enough, but irrelevant. If you're raising money as a charitable notion to cover medical expenses, don't go spend that money (even if there is extra) on your own business venture. That's shady as fuck swindling. The typical way people handle such a thing is to offer the excess money back to the donors or forward the cash on to another charitable cause, in the spirit that it was given to them in the first place.

If you want $5,000 to help get your business venture going, ask me to become a backing investor.

This is otherwise known as "fraud".

Fine enough, but irrelevant. If you're raising money as a charitable notion to cover medical expenses, don't go spend that money (even if there is extra) on your own business venture. That's shady as fuck swindling. The typical way people handle such a thing is to offer the excess money back to the donors or forward the cash on to another charitable cause, in the spirit that it was given to them in the first place.

If you want $5,000 to help get your business venture going, ask me to become a backing investor.

This is otherwise known as "fraud".

@benjaebe said:

@Branthog said:

Fine enough, but irrelevant. If you're raising money as a charitable notion to cover medical expenses, don't go spend that money (even if there is extra) on your own business venture. That's shady as fuck swindling. The typical way people handle such a thing is to offer the excess money back to the donors or forward the cash on to another charitable cause, in the spirit that it was given to them in the first place.

If you want $5,000 to help get your business venture going, ask me to become a backing investor.

This is otherwise known as "fraud".

This, really. It's in rather poor taste to ask for money for donations for a surgery from people on the internet, then take way more than you needed and do ANYTHING else with the funds. They should've closed off donations as soon as they reached what they needed (which was more than anyone could expect from people donating online in the first place.) They were taking advantage of people.

I'm sure you're aware that any of the services, like Kickstart et al, that take money have T&C which state that where the funds go is no business of those who give the funds, right?

This is otherwise known as 'reality'.

Sure is summer in here

Based on all the info in this thread I am now extensively happy I have never and now will never watch the show. I already knew I did not like The Escapist (something about their editorial demeanor I just don't like- I like yahtzee but I think hes the only legit thing on that site) but now I know for certain I don't like this producer either.

I agree with other sentiments here- it's like drama queen's whining on facebook. Comes off very unprofessional from all parties involved. There's some other interesting things, but I'll leave that out.

Some of the Extra Credits stuff I've seen is good, but a LOT of it comes off as pretentious and annoying. The whole thing about how "graphics" and "aesthetics" should be considered two different things really rubbed me the wrong way, and the attack on EA for the marketing of Visceral's games seemed really lazy.

@Branthog said:

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

So, it's like two teenage drama-queens having a back and forth over Facebook, only grown men talking about lawyers and neener neener, instead? Never heard of it, but I go to The Escapist about twice a year -- when I remember that Yahtzee has his videos there and I sit down to bulk view a bunch of them.

@Slaker117 said:

Meh, I don't want to log in to read that, could someone summarize?

It seems to be this:

Some guys have some sort of "online media business" and one of their guys said "hey, don't worry about paying me if times are hard - pay other expenses, first". So they did that, but because the economy has sucked, they've done that for a year or so. Eventually, their guy had some sort of family medical emergency and financial emergency and asked for some pay of some sort. Asked if they'd mind him starting a kickstarter to raise money for his needs. Business said "sure" and supported the idea. Kickstarter said "no" (you know, because they don't do charity). So they used some other service. Then instead of using the funds raised for personal/medical/whatever purposes, the guy apparently started his own indie media startup which irked the guys he was working for and they wanted to talk about finding a way to handle exchange/sales/transfer/whatever of their IP. Said guy said he didn't think the buys he was working for had any rights to the content/show/whatever and the other guys and their backers had to pay him off some $20k they owed him and something something yadda yadda, disagreement in something I can't quite make out at the end...

And then there's a bunch of back and forth in the facebook comments between the two guys discussing working with their lawyers to get all of their back and forth emails published online at the Escapist. (Seemingly a bunch of stuff that should be conducted through email between two guys, but whatever).

If I misunderstood any of it... well, that's what happens when there's some big-ass random post on facebook. It's kind of like waking up to find the email of that one half-crazy drama-queen chick who is always passive-aggressively exploding all over your wall with a bunch of her relationship stuff that nobody cares about or something.

Oh, and apparently they're slap-fighting over Twitter, too. Classy.

You are mostly right except the agreement supposedly was that the extra money from the donation thing was to go to extra credits production, he did use most of the money for the medical emergency

Everyone looks pretty bad, as happens in most Internet drama events. Not sure why the EC guy decided to go public with everything when they were still wrangling in the background with lawyers. Especially since his version of events seem a little suspect compared to the Escapist guy's.

I mean, it sucks that they didn't pay EC for a year and are still enforcing their contract and trying to keep the IP. But if you tell them you can wait to be paid, I don't think you have much to complain about. Both EC and the Escapist just appear to have a very shitty job of managing their relationship, which has culminated in lawyers having to get involved and sort things out. Unfortunate, but no reason to make your legal fight public and make you both look bad.

I think that it was pretty deceptive for the EC guys to raise funds for surgery and use part of the funds for a business venture, regardless of whether they were legally allowed to do so. 
 
On the subject of the main disagreement, all I can say is that based on the agreement to publish the e-mails, it seems like both sides believe they are right, and it will be very interesting to see the published e-mails... I initially believed The Escapist's side more because I don't know too much about either side (I've heard of Zero Punctuation and The Escapist but don't really consume them), and they were much more articulate and seemed more objective, acknowledging that there may have been a mistake or understanding instead of just blaming the other side. But we'll see.

@Seroth said:

Some of the Extra Credits stuff I've seen is good, but a LOT of it comes off as pretentious and annoying. The whole thing about how "graphics" and "aesthetics" should be considered two different things really rubbed me the wrong way, and the attack on EA for the marketing of Visceral's games seemed really lazy.

How is that any different than the terms "technical graphics" and "art style" that everyone else more or less already says?

I for one fucking love Extra Credits because it makes reasonable arguments and observations about the games industry. I actively spotted for anything to put me off but nothing he's ever said that I've seen (and it was quite a few videos) to do so. Even with issues like gender which easily send me off, he kept it nice and in the middle just how I like it. Seriously I don't understand where all the hate is coming from. Just because he's getting more in depth about games he comes off as pretentious? Man I thought indie devs who think "mainstream games are trash" are pretentious. Boy I better watch out when I talk about games then. God it makes me sick that there's two camps in games when it comes to the "art": dumb fuck dude bro assholes who dismiss video games faster than a penny beggar or pretentious snooty fucks who think the other camp is just a bunch of knuckle-draggers that wouldn't know a Rembrandt from a Van Gogh.

With that all said it's a goddamn shame that its playing out like usual on the internet: both sides are fucked and they're trying to argue their side as best they can. Of course either side is arguing a different issue. EC is talking yang about not getting paid and The Escapist is slangin' on about EC's sudden cold shoulder and questionable fund raising.