‘Dead By Daylight’ Strips TheBurntPeanut’s Content, Apologizes To No Avail

Another week, another controversy about a streamer who is a peanut with eyes and a mouth. This time around, it involves the game Dead by Daylight and its decision to award streamer TheBurntPeanut with all the game's characters and content, suggesting both favoritism but also upsetting fans who dislike the streamer due to his past behavior.

Dead by Daylight followed up the move by saying "WE CAN TAKE THE HEAT! THEY ARE YOURS TO KEEP <3." in his chat after players began to roast the decision. They were not, in fact, his to keep. In the wake of increasing backlash from parts of the game's progressive community, the content was stripped away from TheBurntPeanut and a lengthy apology was issued.

TheBurntPeanut is cited by some , including much of Dead by Daylight's playerbase here, as being toxic and saying offensive things in regard to the LGBTQ community in the past. His consistet level of controversy sparked the apology in question. An excerpt:

"When we talk about DbD's values, we mean respect, transparency, diversity, and creating a space where people from different backgrounds and experiences feel welcome. Diversity is one of DbD's core principles and everyone is welcome to play it. But when we choose to work with a creator, we're putting our name next to theirs, and we want to partner with creators whose words and actions share and support that principle."

This apology seems to have placated few in the community, but also has become a flashpoint for right-wing interlocutors. It caught the fiery Eye of Asmongold and his fans, mocking the developer for "pathetic capitulation," in addition to using extreme anti-LGBTQ language in his post.

But on the other side, the apology still not being taken well, either with anger that this happened in the first place or that the apology itself misses the mark.

Player Sammymjay tweeted, "You also reference your "core values" without defining what those are or how any of this contradicts them? If these values are so important to Dead by Daylight enough to invoke an apology with that included, then surely the community deserves to understand what they mean in practice! Values shouldn't just be a convenient phrase that is used to distance a company from individual conduct it should be something consistently demonstrated, which lacks in this entire situation."

An additional angle is that some developers were directly harassed by community members, not helping their case, but the ultimate result is a complete mess all around. And this is far from the first time that this has happened with TheBurntPeanut, who has sparked similar blowback after games like Fortnite and Marathon worked with him. Why bother with this weird peanut at all? He's a hugely powerful force on Twitch right now, bringing in 40,000 to 70,000 concurrent viewers or more regularly, something that few, if any, other content creators can match.

We'll see what Dead by Daylight does next, but it has stepped on a series of rakes here, and this could have been handled much better.

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This article was originally published on Forbes.com