Electronic Arts has come under fire recently for reportedly having a YouTuber delete his negative review of Anthem and for allegedly blacklisting him. However, Electronic Arts fired back stating that they indeed did not blacklist the YouTuber, only asked him to delete his review of Anthem due to a disclosure issue.

Kotaku In Action actually has an outline on the timeline of events that originated with YouTuber Gggmanlives, who claimed that he was blacklisted by EA and had to delete his Anthem review on February 22nd, 2019.

Gggmanlives’ tweet was picked up by the YouTube outlet Skill Up, which in turn caught the attention of GameDaily.biz, which outlined the events in an article.

Hours later the international manager of community engagement at Electronic Arts, Lee Williams, chimed in to correct the original story to say that Gggmanlives was not blacklisted, but that there were issues with the disclosure at the start of the video.

@Ggdograa Hey both, just want to clear something up. Nobody has been blacklisted by us, our team in Australia asked the video be taken down because some of our conditions on disclosure on sponsored weren’t met. Nothing to do with the content of the video.

— Lee Williams (@justbiglee) February 22, 2019

In the exchange, Gggmanlives popped into the thread to explain how he was honest about the game but still had the video removed.

Williams retorted that Gggmanlives was not blacklisted.

But I was honest in my content though? If I was being dishonest, I’d have said the game was good.

— Gggmanlives (@Ggdograa) February 22, 2019

I believe that you were giving your honest opinion on the game man, like I said we encourage the Game Changers to do that and you’ve not been blacklisted. I’m sorry you felt this way about the whole thing.

— Lee Williams (@justbiglee) February 22, 2019

Some people questioned the entire ethical spectrum of being part of the Game Changer program while also reviewing products. When one content creator – Larry Bundy Jr – hopped into the thread to praise Gggmanlives for sticking up for his beliefs, content creator Shaun Joy countered that there still seems to be a gray area between being part of a promotional campaign for a publisher and reviewing the product.

I would like to hear a more formal response on his element of this however. That a review was labelled a review despite money seemingly going to change hands. https://t.co/0K5rZx7en3

— Shaun Joy (@DragnixMod) February 22, 2019

Regardless of the outcome over the ethical quandary relating to the Game Changer program, Gggmanlives decided to re-upload the review on YouTube with the removal of the disclosure.