Seems making YouTube videos is exhausting, with the internet’s most famous gamer PewDiePie announcing he’s “taking a break” in 2020 because of burnout.
“I’m feeling very tired,” PewDiePie (aka Felix Kjellberg) told fans during his latest Pew News video, posted on December 14.
In March he became an inadvertent poster boy for the far right when the alleged Christchurch shooter live-streamed a massacre in a mosque while urging viewers to “subscribe to PewDiePie”.
While he’s known for his video game commentary, PewDiePie has been the subject of recurring controversies including allegations of anti-Semitism and racism.
During a 2017 live gaming stream, he used the n-word against another player.
Kjellberg apologised, saying he “didn’t mean that in a bad way” but the Washington Post claimed he was “out of excuses”.
The same year, Disney cancelled a multimillion-dollar deal with the star after he posted a January 11 video that included two men laughing as they held a banner that read ‘Death to all Jews’.
Kjellberg made nine other videos that made anti-Semitic comments or used Nazi imagery, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the news.
“Although Felix has created a following by being provocative and irreverent, he clearly went too far in this case and the resulting videos are inappropriate,” said a statement from a spokeswoman for Maker Studios, which is owned by Disney.
Read the article by Kate Halfpenny in The New Daily.