Gamers Nexus alleges LMG has insufficient ethics and integrity

[throwawayManMode]

First Elon with X, then Spez with Reddit, and now Linus with LTT. What's happening to the CEOs these days?

[vong]

ZERO chill from Steve. Yeah. that response from Linus was not good, at all. Imagine these 2 arguing on this week's WAN show. Linus should have let the CEO handle this as he is no longer the CEO and handled this as a personal attack.

[wanderingfool2]

6 minutes ago, harls said:

Linus never said LMG and Billet agreed to a price.  He very well could have been talking that LMG internally agreed to pay and would need to discuss the price.   The fact that Steve feels LMG is bad so he does not have to see if there is a different answer doesn't mean there isn't.  Or it could be that Linus was trying to pull a fast one.  Steve is wrong in his "journalistic" approach.  Linus is wrong in his handling of Billet, we just do not know how wrong.

He pretty much implied that Billet was in agreement (and followed by waves of people who essentially started saying that the Billet thing was already resolved, when in reality it wasn't and it appears as though the GN video is what sparked the response).

 

Here's the relevant quotes from Linus so you can see

  

20 hours ago, LinusTech said:

like the fact that we didn't 'sell' the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication... AND the fact that while we haven't sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype

Notice how Linus ignores the fact that GN used the term "auction" in his video; but more importantly as it relates to your statement; that they agreed to compensate Billet Labs.  But then you have Linus' statement later as well

  

20 hours ago, LinusTech said:

Billet sent us a quote. I don't know or care how they arrived at the value. If they're good, I'm good.

This is the most disgusting thing Linus has ever really said GIVEN that A) Billet only told them the cost of the prototype.  That's not a quote, that's a statement and depending how it's worded a statement of just how badly LMG had already messed up. B) Only talks about compensation for the COST of the prototype; prototypes are worth more than the cost to build it. C) They don't appear to be good, they appear to be accepting the situation that LMG essentially forced on them.

 

So yea @harls LMG effectively said that Billet and LMG agreed to a price.

 

I don't think Steve is wrong with his journalistic approach.  If you think someone is likely to try covering things up or that you already are presenting public statements and concrete facts (like the majority of his video) there isn't a point on reaching out to get someone who will try spin doctoring.

[RasmusDC]

still waiting for Linus to monetize this with a Tshirt like he did with the warrenty failure he did..

 

He can do a .. "asterix" with a note... 

[LinusTechLies]

12 minutes ago, harls said:

I am not defending linus.  LMG clearly fucked up in at least some of these situations.  It is a hit job as Steve admits he feels LMG is wrong so he didn't have to reach out to them to see if they have any evidence to refute the claims.  They would have easily shown him the video of Linus stating the engineer was wrong and should not have made the comments he did.  They also may have had evidence to show that the spin Steve put on things may not be factual.  Or they may not have and we would know that the claims are true.  As is it is a one sided hit piece.  That said where there is smoke there is fire,  we just do not know the extent of it. 

"Some of these situation" did we watch different video's here? Or did I miss something. Everything that was exposed in Steve's video is 100% all Linus and to a extent his media groups fault. There's no other party involved here no other meddling going on.

 

There's no spin here everything Steve said in both his video's was accurate and factually correct. IF LINUS KNEW WHAT WAS GOING ON AND KNEW THE TRUTH HE WOULD HAVE IMMEDIATELY MADE A YOUTUBE VIDEO ABOUT IT.

 

Instead he made a post on a platform with the least amount of traffic filled with blatant lies and hand waving away all the actual criticisms.

 

[Ooooffff8732]

 

GN dropping these 2 vids was like watching a B-27 dropping little boy and fat man on Nagasaki and Hiroshima (aka ltm and linus)

 

[TheEugeneKam]

Just now, fohatadri said:

Well, sorry for not posting for the last 9 years. I don't understand how Linus or LMG apologising to BilletLabs are going to change anything? What is done is done.
It was obvious from the start that LMG would be compensating them NO MATTER WHAT. What is the big fuss here?
The fact that it was actioned off was a complete miscommunication and obviously would not have happened if Linus or more people at LMG knew about it.
People act like Linus specifically came out of his way to "steal it", then sell it and used that money to buy drugs. 

you and me both brother, but it was just shitty to call out someone for doing the same thing that's all.

 

The problem is it's a prototype that has no patents from my understanding and if a competitor purchased it and ever engineered that's a problem and legal issue. Also, the route to take is to not put it on 4090 and complain. In sure they had 4090 in the works, and it gives a cooling comparison with what people would pair this with, like a 240mm rad and states that no one should buy this last-gen thing and see what they have in the future or just scrap the video. 

 

For smaller startups like this, it's the R&D time and time to market that's the problem here, not just the value of the processing time. Think ROG beating steam deck to market because GN auctioned off the prototype that was sent. Its a far larger impact than just the financials of a prototype here. 

 

LTT has an accounting dep, I'm sure they themselves know how to calculate a value of such a blunder and the cascading impact it has on future business. 

 

 

[Ezzy-525]

 

I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed in you.

[_hitman_]

Give both parties some time they will sort it out.

[Cl0udK1ller]

This whole situation is crazy.  So far it does seem like LTT is in the wrong.  Unless they have any reasonable response outside of playing victim this is going to severely ruin their reputation and their data will always be sus going forward.  

 

Also, the fact Linus acted like they already had a plan in place to compensate Billet for auctioning  off their prototype before Steve released his video and than finding out today that was complete bullshit got me really disappointed in Linus.

 

When Steve released this story I was expecting Linus to just come out and take full responsibility and talked about how he will improve his processes in the future.  Turns out I wasn't just wrong but I was way off!  

 

Linus priorities are off.

 

 

[Agall]

7 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

While they may technically be a competitor, GN is doing this to help the tech community overall, LMG has a lot more influence than GN does so LMG having accurate higher quality videos would be a benefit for everyone.

Yes, however, both are businessmen who got to the positions they're in probably because of a certain level of extreme work ethic, innovation, and competition. GNs been around as long as LTT, LTT's channel only being 6 months older but with 8x the subscribers. LTT's tech youtuber model has been financially more successful than GN's, objectively.

 

GN would be stupid to not capitalize on a solid way to publicly spit on their competition. Intel/AMD/Nvidia all do it regularly because this is a competitive marketplace. More people buying GN's merch than LTT's, the better it is for GN.

 

We can all wish that Steve and Linus are DMing each other every night with hearts and kissy emojis, but that's not how business works.

[angelwolf71885]

20 hours ago, LinusTech said:

There won't be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything. Most of what I have to say, I've already said, and I've done so privately.

To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn't go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn't 'sell' the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication... AND the fact that while we haven't sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). There are other issues, but I've told him that I won't be drawn into a public sniping match over this and that I'll be continuing to move forward in good faith as part of 'Team Media'. When/if he's ready to do so again I'll be ready.

To my team (and my CEO's team, but realistically I was at the helm for all of these errors, so I need to own it), I stressed the importance of diligence in our work because there are so many eyes on us. We are going through some growing pains - we've been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it's clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn't built in a day, but that's no excuse for sloppiness.

Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that we're not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it's sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that we've communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeah... What we're doing hasn't been in many years, if ever.. and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn't materially change the recommendation. That doesn't mean these things don't matter. We've set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you haven't seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if you're really looking for it... The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. I'm REALLY excited about what the future will hold.

 

With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which I've already addressed above) is an 'accuracy' issue. It's more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (again... mystery) would have been impossible... and also didn't affect the conclusion of the video... OR SO I THOUGHT...

 

I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldn't make sense to buy... so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didn't really make a difference.

 

Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesn't mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip.  I missed that, but it wasn't because I didn't care about the consumer.. it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and I've watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. It's an astonishingly unforgiving market.

 

Either way, I'm sorry I got the community's priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didn't show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasn't to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because it's an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, y'know, eat).

 

With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I've never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient. 

 

We can test that... with this post. Will the "It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they're taking care of it" reality manage to have the same reach? Let's see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it's been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I'm a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.

 

Thanks for reading this.

The right thing to do would be to get the prototype back pay the auction winner back and ship back the prototype to billet this nonsense of compensating billet isn’t good enough ever 

 

as a viewer since 2017 i used to enjoy the content now it seems more like a money grab so much sponsorship like you wont do anything at your house unless you can get a company to sponsor the product give a heafty discount or free equipment plus you get to make a video about it…oh yah the sloppy videos the last few years amateur hour mistakes in videos LMG is a shell of itself i miss the days of fun whacky tech like mineral oil PC X gamers 1 CPU scrap yard wars over the top expensive tech like $1 Million Dollar PC long distance wifi your trying to be a 1 stop shop and it ain’t working like Gamer Nexus amd Hardware Unboxed handle that stick with the fun and interesting 

[jooroth18]

11 minutes ago, WallacEngineering said:

I'm sure somebody has posted the video already, linuses reaction and response to the GN video was absolutely atrocious and childish which was something I did not see coming at all.

 

If you missed it, GN Just commented on Linus's response about an hour ago at the beginning of his hardware news recap video.

 

It is extremely weird to see Linus behave this way and it kind of makes me question the ethics of the channel even more. This type of response was exactly the opposite of what he should have done.

Its not that weird honestly. Every time there is controversey, linus first reacts with pushback, and then later once given thought and reflection a more well balanced, but still not perfect response. 

 

Linus is an emotions first person, and first acts out of self defense before rational thought. And the haters using derogatory terms dont help.

 

But seeing him repeat these well known and demonstrated mistakes is fustrating and dissapointing, coming from a fan who has been watching for 8+ years.

[cardsfanbj]

20 hours ago, LinusTech said:

There won't be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything. Most of what I have to say, I've already said, and I've done so privately.

Honestly feel like this is the wrong move. This story is blowing up, and your response is buried in the forums or in other private communications? Honestly, how many eyes is a forum post going to be in front of versus a "mea culpa" segment on WAN show?

Either make a dedicated video or put it up as a main topic on WAN show. Call up Steve and invite him on for a discussion. Or maybe even the Billet Labs guys to make this right.

[coopa]

6 minutes ago, Legitsu said:

I'm sorry you feel bad for a two guy garage that got slammed but the product is the product and the product sucked regardless of any problems with the review. The product was nowhere near ready to see the public. Not even close

They used a monoblock for a 3090 Ti on a 4090. They were told this. They were told it was only to be used on the 3090 Ti. Despite this, they wanted to rush the video out so hey let's just try it on a 4090. When it's pointed out that the performance (cooling) results are drastically higher and that they didn't test it correctly, Linus dismisses it as "I'm not gonna spend $100-$500 to retest this, it wouldn't make a difference" when he had no objective proof that this was true. 

 

Putting any value on the benchmark LMG did of the Billet labs monoblock is pointless. Linus tested it wrong, presented those wrong test results as fact to his audience (that the product wasn't worthwhile as it didn't effectively cool), and then doubled down when he pointed out the monoblock was never intended to be used on the GPU he tested it on, by design.

[brometheus64]

25 minutes ago, E2C2 said:

There was also the forgotten mention of a sponsored gpu review from Asus claiming that a 600$ "budget" 4070 is going to perform "great" simply because the card was manufactured by Asus.

 

For me thats one of the worst offenses overall. In almost every review they rightfully talk about the insane prices lately, but if there is some sponsoring money lying arround, a 600usd rebranded 4060TI is suddently a budget card and must be great, because its made by Asus. Like WTF.

[ScoggsUK]

10 minutes ago, starsmine said:

I just want this repeated and stressed so it doesn't get buried for all the readers in here. 

Reaching out for comment is not required and it should not be viewed as such. Its both valid and ethical to not reach out in this context. 

The problem is that their were multiple issues raised in that video. Some I agree didn't require a comment to address beforehand. 

 

However auctioning off of the block and the potential biases within LMG could hardly be called reporting on fact and is more appropriate to conjecture. So I both agree and disagree with you. 

[DerKleine]

3 minutes ago, JoshuaScholar said:

Linus should be telling us that his future videos will be reliable, that was the actual issue.

Funny how he's said nothing about the actual issue.

Based on recent WAN Shows we already know that they are evaluating different processes for making videos more reliable, but that doesn't really change the fact you can't guarantee with absolute certainty that all future videos will be 100% reliable. 

 

Saying "All our future videos will be reliable" is a meaningless statement that is essentially impossible to fulfil unless you don't plan on releasing future videos.

[Gravesnear]

@LinusTech, I'm done. I was fine with the bad data, I've even enjoyed your out of touch hot takes on WAN over the years. I'm not okay with your inability to accept criticism, your deflections, and your loose relationship with the truth. Your response post was a real punch in the gut. I've stuck it out with LMG after past debacles and gaffes, but you have demonstrated that your personal values do not align with mine time and again. I get enough BS in my daily life, I don't need it with my entertainment. I certainly won't support it.

 

I was a floatplane member since the forum days. I wish you and everyone at LMG well, but I'm out.

[Thepyrodex]

1 minute ago, jitteryzeitgeist said:

Ooo I can't wait to hear more bullshit from Linus

What do you want to hear then?

 

I just want to know the truth, I don't care whos right because at the end of the day, they are talking heads on your screen and this thread is full of people angry over a parasocial relationship they have with a MEDIA COMPANY.  

 

LMG has a lot to explain but come on, if you won't even listen then what's the point of caring as much as you do?

[Legitsu]

That people can't understand the sheer arrogance of what Steve and gamer Nexus are doing, it boggles the mind let me phrase it to you this way. The arrogance of assuming that you are the sole person on the entire internet, responsible for holding others accountable for things you think they did wrong while simultaneously benefiting from posting those things

 

 

That's not a conflict of interest? where Steve's journalistic principles I don't see them he can demonetize the video all he wants. He's still going to profit from a massive bump and subscriber and comment and views which is going to affect his channel ranking which is going to affect his bottom line. So don't hand us any crap about demonetizing the video and how it's for the greater good ad nauseam

[Gunpocket]

1 minute ago, Legitsu said:

I'm sorry you feel bad for a two guy garage that got slammed but the product is the product and the product sucked regardless of any problems with the review. The product was nowhere near ready to see the public. Not even close

So freaking what? That doesn't make it right at all. It's clear that it took over a year of research and development (considering their reddit posts are from 10 months old regarding it) and even if it took 3 months, that doesn't make it fair. Not only did Linus go in with judgement before even dealing with the product, he clearly could not have cared less about it (not reading anything regarding it, using a different GPU), didn't want to spend a bit of money to test it properly, and then auctioned it off while still having contact with them. Linus then contacted them personally on Monday (showing that it was in fact due to the GN video, as they had been contacting a different staff member previously on Friday). This shows an incredible lack of professionalism. To say the least. If any of us were in his position, and someone offered us a product to show off and do a little review on, I doubt many of us would go and trash it, lose it, talk crap about it, and just completely disrespect them.

[Inception9269]

As someone that has been watching LTT and its channels over the years since 2013, nothing makes me happier than seeing Linus getting taken down a peg or two.

 

The dude has become a complete joke, and oftentimes is so disconnected from what's going on in the world around him, with him living in his own bubbles. For years now I've been saying that the passion that used to be there is all dried up, and the only thing he cares is to rush out their work for the sake of turning a profit.

 

Like, I am so completely tired of the stupid shit he does in videos now. Almost every project Linus works on in a video gets effectively sabotaged by Linus himself, cause he can't take an extra fucking minute to do it right. Like when it comes to those videos in his house, such as the recent one about setting up his server to use his pool to dump heat. I'm no plumber, but I was pretty livid over how bad that job was done, and know plumbers that would be completely flabbergasted by the shit him and Alex did in that video, all because Linus can't just go (or send someone) to a hardware store to pick up the right pieces for the job. Instead he chooses to waste his time, and the time of his employees, to put together a "solution" that is doomed to fail, that they're just gonna have to break down and redo at a later point.

 

And that's just one example. There have been so many times their projects have ended in either failure or an unconventional victory all because he can't wait one single minute to do something the right way, and just wants to YOLO it for Youtube engagement.

[VisibleXela]

Just now, ScoggsUK said:

However auctioning off of the block... could hardly be called reporting on fact

How, on god's green flat earth, is factually reporting on something that actually factually happened (and LMG has neglected to dispute and, if anything, has confirmed that the story is true) not "reporting on fact?"

[VicBar]

2 minutes ago, _hitman_ said:

Give both parties some time they will sort it out.

Feels like there's no coming back from this for these two...