The makers of the online social multiplayer game Roblox appear to have blocked controversial Swedish YouTuber Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg from playing their game while using a variation of his famous online name. His name, it seems, is a problem for them.
In a new video weighing on on the matter, PewDiePie shared a notice from Roblox which stated that his Roblox account had been deleted due to an offensive username: pewdie123t32.
While PewDiePie treated the entire affair like a joke, calling on Roblox to apologise within 25 hours, his fans, including some who play Roblox, are upset, especially after some have reported being hit with similar terms of use violations for simply invoking the YouTuber’s name.
PewDiePie has only streamed Roblox a few times in the past. He did so most recently on Sunday as part of a bid to win more subscribers to his YouTuber channel as part of an ongoing competition against the Indian music label T-Series, which currently operates YouTube’s second most-subscribed-to channel.
They have approximately 85,342,000 subscribers at the time of writing. He has 85,394,000. As the stream went on, fans and Roblox players started joining whichever server PewDiePie was in in order to hang out with him. Some even typed his name in message bubbles or greeted him while others tried to create in-game objects with things like “sub PewDiePie” on them.
In at least some of these cases, players have reported getting hit with notices from Roblox that they had violated the game’s terms of use by using the offensive term “PewDiePie.” One player who created an entire train with “sub PewDiePie” on the side of it said on Twitter that they were forced by the game’s moderators to remove it.
The account PewDiePie used to play Roblox, pewdie123t32, which he created specifically for the occasion, was eventually deleted sometime after the stream concluded. Even now, there are several variations of PewDiePie’s name, like “peewdiepie” and “pewdeepie” are listed as “inappropriate” when entered on the game’s account registration page.
Some fans have speculated that Roblox has chosen to shadowban the YouTuber in this way because of the mature nature of the content he produces outside the game and his past history of doing and saying offensive things. In 2017 Disney broke off ties with PewDiePie over his anti semitic jokes.
Later that same year he apologised for using the n-word during a livestream. Just last december, the YouTuber gave a shout-out to another channel which happened to host anti semitic content, something PewDiePie later said he wasn’t aware of and deleted from his video.
Traditionally, games ban players for things like cheating or toxic behaviour. In this case, it appears Roblox isn’t banning PewDiePie so much as banning mentions of his name. In Roblox’s terms of use the company does state that it retains the right to remove user generated creations and names from within the game that it deems to be offensive.
As of yet Roblox Corporation hasn’t come out and clarified whether that’s what’s going on with PewDiePie and, if so, its rationale for wanting all associations with the YouTuber removed from its game. Neither PewDiePie nor Roblox responded to a request for comment.
Comments
19 responses to “PewDiePie Clashes With Roblox, Which Appears To Have Banned His Name”
I kind of wish more games/communities would put “PewDiePie” on their offensive language list…
Why? Dude just plays games and does video content like so many other YouTubers don’t get the hate.
That was a bit tongue-in-cheek so I wasn’t entirely serious there… though I do find his online persona to be quite obnoxious and intolerable.
I won’t disagree that it’s a bit shitty of them to ban him like they did.
Same reply to @excelneko
Noted, and up-voted for non-malicious content :p
Why though?
In the video he shows the ‘ban notice’ as well as a Roblox post from back in the day – they banned him for action taken outside the game…. that seems like a sort of heavy-handed-scummy-borderline-censorship to me and outside the T’s&C’s on Roblox website (I think he shows an example of this not 100% sure though)
I would be like if you were banned from [insert latest BR game here] for a comment made on Kotaku.
Its fine if you don’t like the guy or what he does but don’t support this weird behavior by the company/developers.
All these people trying to encourage us to sub to his channel have inspired me to subscribe to T-Series.
I was already sick of this guy before all the bullshit with T-Series and his rabid fan base trying to keep him on top.
Seriously somebody start a subscribe to T-Series unsubscribe to PewDiePie campaign that i would get behind.
I sub to him and watch his vids almost every day. he’s a funny guy. pity you don’t appreciate his humour 🙂
My humour is extremely dark, I find him childish, the times I’ve watched him has been him screaming at a screen putting on a show and that’s all it is he plays a character that isn’t who he is I’m real life, I believe he stated this before that he turns it up too 11 becuase that’s what people want apparently.
And like the rest of the general public, you clearly haven’t seen any of his new stuff since 2013, can’t remember the last time he screamed and carried on and I watch daily.
And why should I watch any of his videos now? He was a dipshit before so it turned me off him entirely, I really can’t be bothered watching him now, not only becuase he was a dipshit but becuase he doesn’t produce content I enjoy watching.
Everyone else can do what they want, I like similar stuff (people playing games) from Seananners and Sovietwomble, it’s sometimes scripted but it’s funny to me not everyone’s cup of tea, quality over quantity.
Just looked at his latest video, yep still acts like a total dipshit.
Sovietwomble is a fkn legend. Pewplzdie is an asshat. Have an upvote, comrade!
He cant be that oblivious to the reason his name was banned from a children friendly game… he has a ferocious subset of his community that have been going around spamming people for subs, and worse people fool around with that or similar name being a**h***es.
I want roblocks to list all the banned accounts with his similar naming scheme that got banned and what they did… theres got to be sime really offensive xhats in that list 😛
So you’ve got a bunch of arseholes playing a children’s game for the sole purpose of advertising someone’s YouTube channel. Perhaps marking the name of that channel as “offensive” was the easiest way to stop the spam within their auto-moderation framework.
I was thinking something similar. I wonder what would have happened if he’d just created an account and played the game “normally”. No spamming, no advertising, just to play. Would he have still been banned or would it have just slid past unnoticed?
i could be way off but if theres automation in the name and moderation system it could just be flagging “die”
The article mentions variants such as “pewdeepie” were also banned, so it doesn’t seem to be based on that string of three characters.
There are so many common words (and people’s names such as Eddie) that contain “die” that it would lead to way too many false positives.
Meh, live by the douche…