Ross Scott

I hope he doesn't get mobbed by ignorance. Even though he founded Machinima.com, he's a good guy, into machinima at heart, hasn't been involved with the company for many years.

They more accurately express the emotional states involved too. Mine most accurately reflects a combination of the top picture and the dwarf on the left towards the bottom. The time from December to late August was perhaps the most sustained stressful period of my entire life. I've had worse times, but not ones that lasted unabated for 8 months. After it was over Magda said my face even began to start looking better. They're portrait art on cards from Magic The Gathering. I've always been amazed by the art quality on many of them, I tried to pick ones that fit the tone of the events.

Yeah you and me both. Especially since Valve made their policy official in 2013:http://www.valvesoftware.com/videopolicy.html The cool thing with them is there IS no contract, just an informal agreement and guidelines to follow. If they went evil puppetmaster for some reason later on, I could always just leave. Maybe I just don't know what I'm doing, but almost every time in the past I've tried to use that for something I thought was gone, there would be errors and it wouldn't work. Regardless, people are welcome to fact check this stuff. The blip.tv takedown happened in mid-May after I informed them of it.

LEAVING MACHINIMA Hey everyone, this is a post I wasn't sure if I was going to make, but I've decided to risk it as I still keep getting questions from viewers. They were dying down for a while, but recently I was informed that Machinima.com has been using some of the old Civil Protection footage in their official Xbox One App, and this testimony has stirred things up again, so that's sparked a lot more questions at me. So I want to clear up, hopefully once and for all, everything that went down between Machinima.com and myself last year. THE STORY SO FAR I'm still not at liberty to reveal everything that's happened, but what I mentioned in my last Escape From Machinima post is only a portion of it. To do a quick recap on that, Machinima.com attempted to change their contract terms with me, stalled me for months after my pay dropped about 80%, until I eventually quit after seeing their new contract offer, which had terms in it I could never agree to. I thought that would be the end of the story when I wrote that post, but nope, it kept going. UNPLEASANT DISCOVERIES After I left Machinima and planned to start distributing my videos on Blip.tv in addition to Youtube, I decided to check out of curiosity if anyone had put any duplicates up of my videos on there. It turns out someone HAD, Machinima.com's Blip.tv channel had been uploading copies of my videos there. While them publishing my videos elsewhere was allowed based on my contract terms, Machinima.com never informed me they were doing this, never gave me any statistics on views for blip.tv (and still haven't), and never paid me anything for views on Blip.tv, but they WERE collecting advertising revenue on them, for years. All in all, at least 15 of my videos were posted from periods ranging from early 2010 to late 2011 and were up on blip.tv's channel under Machinima's name and they were collecting income on it without paying me up through 2013. Without revealing anything that's in it, I can say that this activity was a clear, repeated violation of my contract with Machinima, and in the event something like this happened, most of the rights on many of my videos would return to me. To make matters worse, this was actually on top of violations I discovered earlier in the year where Machinima simply never paid me for two videos dating back from 2009 and 2010. At the time, I passed that off as an oversight, but since the blip.tv violations appeared much more deliberate, it made me start doubting that. STAY QUIET AND BURY EVIDENCE After discovering all this, I contacted Machinima.com, informing them of what I discovered and expressed that since their actions repeatedly violated my contract, I was claiming the rights back on my videos. My message was relayed to their legal department, but I didn't get any answer for weeks from them, despite my messaging Machinima every few days trying to get some sort of update. During this time however, my videos on blip.tv, then later ALL of their videos on blip.tv were taken down (more on this later). MACHINIMA'S RESPONSE In June, I was finally given a response from the legal department, which claimed Machinima.com owned all my videos under the US Copyright Act based on a contract from 2011. The problem with this response was I NEVER SIGNED a contract with them from 2011. In fact, I specifically rejected their new contract offer from 2011 because I felt it would take many of my rights away. My contract with them was from 2009 and had some rights protections written into it. I informed them of this, then after a few more emails, their legal department asserted that they did indeed own the rights to my videos based on my 2007 contract. They might have had a valid point, except my 2009 completely replaced my 2007 one. After some more emails, I confirmed that they had actually lost the signed 2009 contract entirely. By their request, I then sent them an unsigned copy of my 2009 contract that I had on hand. At which point, they still did not change their claims about owning all my videos, nor did they address my questions concerning their breach of my contract. They DID ask if I had a signed copy I could produce for them, even though they had (or used to have) the only one in existence. LEGAL WORDS At this point, I was incredibly frustrated and discouraged with how the situation was being handled and I decided to get some legal assistance. I received a few replies and one fan in particular was able to provide an invaluable amount of pro bono assistance for me. I ended up sending a 15 page letter to Machinima detailing everything that had happened to me from them and stated that I would be pursuing legal action against them if my rights weren't restored. I am not at liberty to discuss what happened afterward, but I will say I can live with the outcome. I've more or less been avoiding any involvement with Machinima.com since. NPR! After all this went down, I was also contacted by NPR as they were doing a piece on Machinima.com. I gave them a 20 minute interview about it, they used one isolated sentence from it, but that's the nature of modern media. Also their statement about my situation with Machinima.com isn't entirely accurate, but it's close enough for anyone who's not a lawyer. But hey, I got to be on the radio! QUESTIONABLE ACTIONS Back to the Blip.tv thing, that's worth discussing a little further, because that didn't just affect me. Machinima.com uploaded thousands of videos to their blip.tv channel from around 2010-2011, maybe late 2009 and early 2012, I don't remember. I can't fact check any of the dates, since they took down all the videos they had on blip.tv after I brought it to their attention. I am assuming this is because I'm not the only one they did not pay for this. I still have no way of verifying how much money was due, as I was never given any statistics regarding the views on blip.tv. However, I was able to create a screenshot cache of the majority of videos they did have on their channel before they took it down which I am including below: BLIP SCREENSHOT CACHE (15MB ZIP) Many of these videos I know were published on different contract terms than mine, so every video on that list is not necessarily a violation of Machinima.com's contract with their creators. However, I've confirmed that a few directors have told me that some other videos listed above were a violation of their contract, similar to mine. I would not be surprised at all if Machinima.com performed hundreds of violations this way, withholding money from dozens of directors. These directors still may not have been paid, I have no way of knowing. If you or someone you know were a machinima director between 2010 and 2011 and submitted content to Machinima.com, I encourage you to look through the list of videos provided in that link. If your content is in there, Machinima.com may owe you some money. If you've already been paid for these videos, you have me to thank for that. If you haven't, it's worth asking about. Honestly, this particular item strikes me as potential lawsuit material, although I have no desire to get involved with that unless I have no other choice as those are time consuming and expensive. Even for the situation with my own videos, I always viewed a lawsuit as an absolute last resort. Not because I lacked evidence, but because of all the time, work, and money involved. I'm actually not a vindictive person by nature, but when my back is against the wall, I'll of course fight for my own survival and videos. PRESENT THOUGHTS I've seen debates from people for and against Machinima.com as a business before and some misinformation spread around as well. I can not speak for how Machinima.com conducts business as a whole, since I'm not privy to that information, I can only attest to my personal experience with them; and in my experience with them over this past year, they have outright lied to me on occasion, they withheld a substantial amount of money from me, they violated my contract numerous times over a period of years, they made false claims of ownership over the rights to my videos, and they did not honor protections in my contract until after I stated I would take legal action against them if necessary. There are a few other things I'm not at liberty to discuss, but as a whole, I personally consider this all highly unethical. I don't see any way to defend those actions from an ethical perspective. In the last post I made on this topic, I said I wanted to see Machinima off as friends. After what happened since, I think that's no longer possible. I still will assert that there are a few good individual people who work at the company (one of whom has by them), but none of them made the decisions that affected me in such negative ways this past year. I really just want the company out of my life permanently and hope I never have to deal with them again. TO OTHER DIRECTORS My personal advice to anyone considering joining them is don't do it. Based on my experience with them this past year, it's hard for me to imagine any other network conducting business in a worse way than they did with me. I encourage people to send this post to anyone you see who tries to defend Machinima.com's way of business. I've seen the argument many times that creators "should have read the contract," well, my retort to that is it doesn't MATTER if you read the contract if the party who wrote it refuses to honor the terms listed in it. If you personally are having difficulty with the company, my advice to you is to seek some sort of legal aid. I feel in my case, my situation would never have been resolved satisfactorily without the legal assistance I received. I would NOT advise trying to reason with the company yourself if they are acting in a manner that seems unfair to you. It is difficult for me to imagine anything working in your favor that way. CONCLUSION? Anyway, this post wasn't especially funny, sorry about that. It's hard for me to come up with wise-ass comments when there's a possible threat of legal action against me if my jokes are a little too good. So what I've written above isn't a joke, this all happened like I described it. In all honesty, it's probably a stupid idea for me to make this post since I have no way of knowing how or if Machinima.com will react to this, but what I've said here is the truth and remaining silent about it while I see their actions continue to affect other people has been like a weight I've been carrying around inside me for a while now. It's been downright cathartic being able to type this. Again, I hope this is where it ends and is the last post I end up making on the topic. More videos without any legal drama coming soon! - - - ADHD VERSION: Machinima.com tried to claim all of Ross's videos based on a contract he never signed. They also lost his signed contract. They also withheld money from him, over a period of years. Machinima has withheld money from other directors, and maybe still is withholding. Machinima breached and did not honor parts of their contract with Ross. Ross was on NPR. Machinima.com is not Ross's favorite company in the world. LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

I actually didn't know who he was, I still don't really, I'm not really into most Let's Plays. That was DasBoSchitt's initiative, I only wrote the ending part. I'm less aware of the general LP landscape really, but we will actually feature LP's on GG if they are EXCEPTIONAL and solid gold material. For example, I posted this one a while ago: http://gorillagong.com/video/view/241

Well I have mixed messages today. The first is Das Bo Schitt has helped us make a great promo for Gorilla Gong. We were hoping for a quick shout out, but he went above and beyond and created an all out machinima promo, and a quality one at that. Check it out here! The bad news is the promo worked a little too well as Das Bo Schitt is so popular it's choking the GG server a bit, and this site also. If you have trouble loading things (here or Gorilla Gong), just hit refresh and it may load properly. Sorry about the screw up, but hey, more videos! LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

Hey, another update: We're removing the 250k view limitation for posting new machinima, though we still plan to prioritize machinima with less views. The reasoning behind this is we want to make sure we're not in a position where we run out of material. Once we get more submission in, this will likely become a non-issue.

Yeah, there's a story behind this, I was originally going to make a post on it this month, but I got busy with all the other entries. I still need to get some advice to find out what I can and can't say publicly.

I too agree not blaming anything on malice that can be interpreted as incompetence (I think Westwood and Bullfrog both fell under this category). However, I also think it's clear that the people who do make controversial decisions at EA don't care at ALL about gaming, just profit margins. So in essence you have incompetence combined with people who don't care about the consequences of their actions other than any immediate financial ramifications. Well I'm mostly focusing on low-res games right now, because I don't have enough faith in my system to do real-time recording at higher resolutions. I think the main thing I need is a SSD for that, once I have one I plan to expand into later games as well. You're absolutely right though in that I view these games as something to be played (or avoided) rather than a nostalgia trip. The underlying theme about RGD is I really have to have something to say in order to cover a game, rather than cover it for its own sake. If a game seems unremarkable in every way AND I can't think of any tangential topic to tie in with it, I doubt I would cover it.

I think it's more about the people making business decisions wanting what they perceive to be as safe bets as possible. So once a game's mechanics get too complicated or get too tricky for everyone to understand, it may make them nervous, thinking the game will be more of a great niche status. Most of what EA and many other large game companies do is consistent with them caring much more about short term profits, above everything else, especially game quality. Most of this list seems consistent with being short sighted assholes in the name of trying to turn more money as fast as possible, even if it comes at cost to the game, developers, etc. I unfortunately have difficulty calling most of this evil, just a horrible precedent for the industry. Whether any of that is evil or not would be dependent on more specifics, like if they intentionally lied to the development teams as to their intentions, created false hopes, broke promises, etc. I don't have access to that information, so I would say it's entirely possible they've been run by greedy assholes who don't realize what they're doing. That's actually the only version I played prior to review.

Blip.tv link I was hoping to have more time in between this episode and the last one, but there was some time sensitive information in this one. I thought it would be a fun idea to make a birthday episode, but "fun" ended up turning into spending all day Wednesday and Thursday on this, along with doing an all nighter continuing from last night to work, making this the busiest birthday I've ever had. Regardless, I'm pretty happy with how this one came out. It's actually sort of a dual review; the first half of the video I'm reviewing Zany Golf, the second half I'm reviewing Electronic Arts. Feel free to guess which one I give a better rating. This game easily has the most haunting music out of all the games I've covered so far, I still can't get the "fans" stage music out of my head. Watch this one if you dare. LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

It looks like somebody may have beaten you to it on the translations, he PM'd me on Youtube, I've included a link to his translation in the YT description. You may want to doublecheck what he put up however. EDIT: Well it's definitely progress, but I'm noticing several grammatical errors, I'll replace it once a higher quality translation is done.

Awesome, I may wait on reading it until it's completed though. I should have thought to ask you, it slipped my mind. My guess is there will be a translation before too long. My guess is the manual will only SORT OF explain what's happening in the game, but I'm still interested in it. Well actually meant the opposite, NOT counting the Napoleon games. Napoleon was a large stabilizing force in France and his reign was pretty much after the French Revolution. I was thinking more of the Reign of Terror, where they were killing nobility left and right.

This one was kind of a special exception since Eternam really stands out for me, the next ones will be shorter. Besides, just looking at popularity, none of this show is close to Freeman's Mind, so it's more of an experiment anyway.

Blip.tv link Well believe it or not, I was hoping to have this video done mid-Sunday instead of right before Christmas. I'm afraid this video isn't really related to Christmas, it's just a coincidence with the timing. This episode turned out especially long, but that's because there was a lot I wanted to cover about this game. This game is damn unique, I haven't seen anything like it since. While it has enough problems with it that I wouldn't actually recommend it to anyone, if you've ever been disappointed how formulaic many games can get, this is the clear other end of the spectrum and is more memorable for me than the vast majority of other games I've played. I knew when I started RGD I'd definitely want to cover this game. The Voyager satellite has a plate with engravings on it to give a representation of humanity to potential alien life. I think if we gave a copy of Eternam to aliens, they would learn everything they need to know about humanity. LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

Ugh, I was out all day running errands, thanks for notifying me though, it's fixed now. Otto's additional sound effects when Freeman was getting wedged against the gear is one of the few parts I was still able to laugh at in editing. Most of the time I burn out my ability to tell what's funny anymore the more I work with it. As for the elevator music, I was happy with an excuse to use another game soundtrack.

Blip.tv link (download will be up later) Here's the latest Freeman's Mind. I think this episode may set the record for the number of times Freeman has gone in and out of the water. There were sections of this level I didn't even remember, but I've actually only played through Half-Life twice before, and it was many years ago. From this point on, all I really remember up until Xen are swimming near a nuclear reactor, revolving teleporters, more scientists, and the teleportation chamber. I guess if you haven't played the game that's a bit of a spoiler, but I think the secret on that may be out by now. I don't know if I'll get to another Freeman's Mind this month or not, but I have at least two more Game Dungeon episodes planned, so more videos are coming! LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

No, it will be a couple days, because I wasn't ready because I didn't know when Otto was going to reply, so I had to reschedule with TGWTG. The thing is, it's not delays that screw me, it's the communication blackouts that do when I'm expecting something. When that happens, I don't know whether to expect the next item in a day or 3 weeks. That's also why I CAN usually guarantee RGD, since I can handle all the editing on that myself.

I resurrected an old system that was missing a power supply, Magda's making it sound like I'm spending big, we're still living quite frugally.

I just wanted to let people know I was originally planning on releasing the next Freeman's Mind today, the dialogue is done, but I'm still waiting on getting an audio track back, so I'll just keep working on the next video instead, which will be another Game Dungeon episode. If I finish it before I get the next FM audio track, I may release it out of order than I originally planned. Either way, I can safely say to expect at least 3 videos this month, maybe an additional one if I'm lucky. As a warning though, I don't have any Christmas videos planned, I wasn't really ready for one, but hopefully I can have something like that next year. Also it looks like signing up on the forums has been broken for a little bit, we're working to get that fixed ASAP. Anyway, more stuff coming! LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS