UPDATE: 09/29/2025
Last week we told you about YouTube erroneously removing a video essay from content creator Volt4Holt’s channel. It was a two-hour-long discussion of the gruelingly difficult and upsetting horror game Welcome to the Game II. We encouraged our readers to tag YouTube telling them to reinstate the video. Good news! YouTube has done that.
The channel posted the following on its community page over the weekend:
THE VIDEO IS BACK UP! You guys work fast! We made noise and got the video back after only three or four days of the takedown! I was preparing to wait for weeks.
Congrats to Vote4Holt. And now I encourage everyone to watch that selfsame video because they can.
Original post: September 25, 2025.
As we can tell you here at Nerdist, making sure you adhere to YouTube’s standards, practices, and community guidelines is paramount to the ability to make videos. YouTube has dinged us over the years for various violations, often for music rights or using too much of a clip of copyrighted material or what have you. Sometimes it’s something easy we can address, other times it’s a mistake on YouTube’s part. As most people know, you can appeal a decision if YouTube demonetizes or removes your video. But not a lot of people know that if you lose that appeal, even if you are 100% in the right, there’s very little you can do.
This happened this week to YouTube creator Vote4Holt, a channel with mystery and horror “let’s plays” and a handful of incredibly thorough, deeply entertaining video essays. Earlier this year, Vote4Holt released a two hour essay about the gruelingly tense horror game Welcome to the Game II. The game is notoriously difficult (Markiplier famously noped out of it after dozens of hours) which the video discusses. Vote4Holt also talks about the real-life controversy surrounding the game. The video, entitled, “The Most Immersive Horror Game Ever Made,” blew up to over two million views. Just this week, the channel reached 100k subscribers. And late Wednesday night, YouTube totally removed it.
I’ll let Vote4Holt explain the situation below.
Now look. YouTube is an enormous company and its user base is in the sh*t-zillions. I fully understand the need to automate some level of content management and flagging harmful material. However, the fact that, even if a creator is totally in the right and YouTube did not follow its own rules or made a judgement in error, recourse does not exist is simply wrong. The video was already self-censored and self-demonetized. Not only that, the creator had fought and won an appeal for the same material previously.
It’s just a YouTube video about a video game. But it’s legitimately one of the best videos of its kind I’ve ever seen. This is a four months of work gone in an instant. Is Welcome to the Game II upsetting and horrifying? Of course. That’s the point of the essay. But nothing in the video violates the terms as explained. No one deserves to have their hard work tossed out like this.
So, if you’re reading this and have social media, please share Vote4Holt’s above video and tag YouTube. And do yourself a favor and give some love to the channel’s other excellent horror game essays. I’ll point you in the direction of “How a 2006 Horror Game Scared the Hell out of me,” a video about the abandonware masterpiece Scratches.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.