PC Master Race

I must say, the Billet Labs part nailed me to the floor.

For someone who has to do with prototypes and early development products, such a blunder would have cost me my current job and would have barred me from any other in my field

Left ltt a while ago. Been noticing he's not paying his staff respectfully while showing off his custom home. Then you get into the errors that have been show just shows I got out in time.

Billet Lab's statement (Update 3)

You, the PC community, are amazing. We'd like to thank you for your support, it means more than you can imagine.

Steve at Gamers Nexus has publicly shown his integrity, at the huge risk of backlash, and we have nothing but respect for him for how he's handled himself, both publicly and when speaking directly to us.

...

Regarding LTT, we are simply going to state the relevant facts:

On 10th August, we were told by LTT via email that the block had been sold at auction. There was no apology.

We replied on 10th August within 30 minutes, telling LTT that this wasn't okay, and that this was a £XXXX prototype, and we asked if they planned to reimburse us at all.

We received no reply and no offer of payment until 2 hours after the Gamers Nexus video went live on 14th August, at which point Linus himself emailed us directly.

The exact monetary value of the prototype was offered as reimbursement. We have not received, nor have we asked for any other form of compensation.

...

About the future of Billet Labs: We don't plan to mourn our missing block, we're already hard at work making another one to use for PC case development, as well as other media and marketing opportunities. Yes it sucks that the prototype has gone, it's slowed us but has absolutely not stopped us. We have pre-orders for it, and plan to push ahead with our first production run as soon as we can.

We also have some exciting new products on our website that are available to buy now - we thank everyone who has bought them so far, and we can't wait to see what you do with them.

We're happy to answer any questions, but we won't be commenting on LTT or the specifics of the email exchanges – we're going to concentrate on making cool stuff, and innovative products (the Monoblock being just one of these).

...

We hope LTT implements the necessary changes to stop a situation like this happening again.

Peace out ✌

Felix and Dean

Billet Labs

In the "Statement from Linus" are LMG critising GN's journalism for not reaching out before posting the video?

Seems like a good thing to do but would LMG have gotten enough context regarding the prototype water block? Seems even now they think that review was fair while knowingly using the wrong GPU. Fair for who?

Linus posted a response on the LTT forums.

Been an LTT viewer since back in the Langley house days. As people, Linus and I are very similar (obviously based on his on camera personality, I of course have no idea what he's like behind closed doors) and I can absolutely see how these mistakes were made. It's incredibly disappointing to see that he's not learning from them.

I've seen the asterisk corrections and the pinned comment corrections increase lately, but after watching GN's video I realized that for every one I noticed there was a video where I hadn't noticed. These corrections absolutely need to be resolved in production. I don't care if it's a crappy voice over where it's incredibly obvious that it was dubbed in after, it just needs to be audibly corrected.

I get that they're not always going to be caught before they go out the door, I've made egregious errors on stuff that I've looked over and other people have looked over many times to have it immediately called out on someone's first glance. The videos with corrections need to be and should have been IMMEDIATELY privated, corrected, and have had a post stating the previous error and the new correction, at least for the big stuff. Small errors (like Linus mistakenly saying Ti on the 4070) I think is fine to be left in (with the asterisk or comment correction), as there wasn't really any substantial change in the content. I do realize that this has man hour costs, but it's absolutely imperative that their content is reliable if they're trying to enter the testing market. For issues like the Billet labs monoblock, they should be taken down and have the entire thing reshot. With that situation however, it should've never made it to subscribers.

The issue of selling the billet labs monoblock is absolutely massive and inexcusable. There were so many places( where this could've and SHOULD HAVE been caught. The block should've NEVER been inventoried as their own, as it well, wasn't. I'm guessing their inventory doesn't have a distinction between their own stuff and stuff they've been lent (it all should be inventoried so it's accounted for). Linus almost would've had to know about it being auctioned off, especially after making the (frankly kinda arrogant) distinction of saying it wasn't "sold" but rather "auctioned". It should've been caught there, it should've been caught by whoever sent the email to Billet confirming that they were going to return it, and it should've been caught by the inventory. I don't blame whoever sent the email to be very clear, I'm saying that communication within the company needs to improve. This is very clearly an issue in viewer trust. It's very hard to "trust me bro" when issues brought to his attention are not being taken seriously because it'd affect their bottom line rather than somebody else's.

Honestly, Linus should follow GN's lead and not do sponsors, merch messages, ads, anything for the WAN show this week. He needs to address it and address the plan for producing better content. I know his intentions are good. I know how easy it is to make horrible mistakes with good intentions by being completely ignorant in the situation.

POST "what do we do now" VIDEO: Realistically it looks like every concern that I raised here was addressed in the video that went out ~1 hour ago. I'm glad they made this video as well as the decision not to include sponsors (or the lack of ability for this video, but dbrand would've we all know that). Linus confirms that it was a knee jerk reaction to make the comment on the forums, as well as confirming my suspicions that nobody had seen the comment before he made it.

I hope we see improvements that continue and are upheld. I'm hopeful that they've properly used this as a learning opportunity, and will take time in the future to step back and see what's new to learn.

Edit after reading Madison's post:

Yikes. I'm now unsubscribed from all of their content.

Will be curious to hear Linus’ response, the Billet labs thing is super weird

Ltt has felt untrustworthy to me for a long time. I watched a smartphone review of theirs years ago, and they had made errors with specs and features. Watching their other (and older) smartphone reviews it felt like they would just copy last year's review, make small changes and call it a new one. Calling old features new year after year, not mentioning key features, getting simple facts wrong. Decided to not trust any information in their videos after that

I honestly fully stand by GN in this and while I think LTT should have had the opportunity to respond to the allegations before the video went live, since this is the proper Journalistic thing to do, it should be considered that ltt has a huge audience and influence in the tech sphere so I can only assume GN didn't want them to get ahead of the curve? It's sad if it has come to this.

I also don't know how exactly ltt could respond to the observations GN made since it's a piece about what happened in videos they posted. They can't really deny what happened. All they could do is lower their head and promise to do better.

There's a lot of people here focussing on the biillit labs thing. While that is pretty bad on it's own, and probably indicative of company or at least communication culture; Linus has not adressed the allegations regarding the sponsorships and the underlying conflict of interest. There's some response to the error handling and sloppiness. But what is lacking is a clear identification and owning of errors as well as the accompanying, hard steps LMG will take to rectify them.

I would've liked to see a post saying" whow, this is a bit much at once, we will publish a full response with x/y plans in [a week]". This (Linus' Forum response) just feels drama-inciting and not like a level-headed response.

Haven't been watching LTT (or GN) for a couple of years, but this made me go to LTT's channel and unsub. Can't believe what Linus has become. Love the thorough look into all this from Steve.

I find Linus to be an odd mix of earnest and smarmy.