Mike Rose, founder of SpiritTea publisher No More Robots apologized for his tweets criticizing YouTubers and content creators who do paid coverage of games.

In a thread meant to celebrate the success of SpiritTea, Rose suddenly took aim at YouTubers, bemoaning that the game got “absolutely zero coverage *at all*”, next to a photo of the coverage the game got on YouTube.

“Now look, I get it — that’s just how this works now”, Rose follows up. “YouTubers want you to pay them to cover your games. Alright, sure. But I just don’t want to do that. It feels weird and icky and disingenuous, and I just can’t do it. So I guess our games won’t get covered on YouTube anymore!”

As of this writing, simply typing SpiritTea into YouTube will yield at least four different content creators covering the game.

The tweet’s Quote Retweets are absolutely swarming with hot takes, ranging from the explosive “freelancers should be paid for their work” to some implying “freelancers being paid for services rendered is somehow ethically dubious”.

Hours later, Rose apologized for the tweets, saying he “missed the mark” with appearing to conflate influencers with charity.

“I’ve really fucked up here, and I’m massively sorry”, Rose said in a Tweet. “I’ve been reading your comments and replies, and it’s clear that I’ve completely missed the mark”.

“I absolutely value the work that YouTubers and content creators do, and my words didn’t reflect that at all. I’m going to be reading loads more on all this, and get better educated so I can be less of a dickhead in the future”, he concludes.

Meanwhile, others have warned that the solo developer behind SpiritTea, Cheesemaster Games, shouldn’t be punished amidst some calls to cancel coverage of the game.

“This post from the publisher is definitely questionable”, writes Josh from Josh’s Gaming Garden “But I hope people can remember that there’s also a solo dev who worked on this game for years and has completely nothing to do with that. In fact, he was extremely grateful when I streamed the game and it would be unfair to punish him for actions that are not his.

Media, Publishers And The Circle Of Influence (Editorial)

Thanks to smear campaigns against influencers, content creators and the media in the past decade, many online tend to imagine paid endorsements as somehow morally wrong.

The truth of the matter is that this content creators of all types are professionals- equating what are essentially communication specialists to crooks for communicating for money is just as absurd as assuming a man with an “Man I Love Fishin'” hat is morally compromised for getting a paycheck for his haul.

That’s not to say Mike Rose was somehow held at gunpoint to work with a YouTuber- like any business relationship, No More Robots was also well within their right to say no to whatever asking price he was given.

At the end of the day, the backlash was moreso from his seeming outright dismissal of paid influencers altogether- not a great look for a publisher, considering how much of modern marketing strategy revolves around working with said people.

On the influencer side, it’s also important to be responsible with paid endorsements: that means declaring which opinions may be sponsored.