PewDiePie Facing His Biggest Boycott Yet After Dropping a Racial Slur

PewDiePie—no stranger to bone-headed, self-generated controversy—is facing his biggest boycott yet after saying the "n-word" during a play-through.

The YouTuber dropped the racial slur in a moment of frustration in Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. (We've decided not to embed the link, for obvious reasons, but for the sake of verification, you can see it happen here. Extreme, unacceptable language warning.)

PewDiePie, aka Felix Kjellberg, laughed off the comment moments later, saying, "I don't mean that in a bad way."

However, it wasn't enough to put the issue to bed, with Sean Vanaman, CEO of video game producer Campo Santo, distancing himself from the millionaire YouTuber by pledging to remove all PewDiePie videos featuring his games from the web.

We're filing a DMCA takedown of PewDiePie's Firewatch content and any future Campo Santo games.

— Sean Vanaman (@vanaman) September 10, 2017

He's worse than a closeted racist: he's a propagator of despicable garbage that does real damage to the culture around this industry.

— Sean Vanaman (@vanaman) September 10, 2017

Vanaman also put pressure on his fellow developers to cut off PewDiePie; a move that could be a death-blow. Kjellberg, like many play-through YouTubers, has always operated in a muddy legal area, publishing copyrighted content on his channel. As Vanaman tweets, developers have traditionally only let this happen because it works as advertising for their games.

Furthermore, we're complicit: I'm sure we've made money off of the 5.7M views that video has and that's something for us to think about.

— Sean Vanaman (@vanaman) September 10, 2017

The question is, given PewDiePie's massive base of viewers (57 million and counting), will developers be willing to switch off this free advertising stream?

It seems likely that the only way PewDiePie will see real ramifications is if his fans start switching off. And if Twitter is any indication, the tide might be turning against him once and for all.

Photo: YouTube.com/PewDiePie