Game Jolt

**Summary**

Game Jolt is a gaming-centric social media platform where all Formula Fanboy games were published between 2018 and 2021. During these years, Jamie Wilsher had a good relationship with the gaming website, its staff, and even its owners and creators, David DeCarmine and Yaprak DeCarmine, who interacted with the Formula Fanboy Game Jolt account frequently. Game Jolt acknowledged Formula Fanboy to an official capacity several times, including on their official Twitter page, on their official YouTube page, on their official page on Game Jolt, and by verifying the Formula Fanboy account with an account checkmark, indicating the account as an important pillar of the website's community and culture. This was done in part because the Formula Fanboy Game Jolt account was responsible for creating and running the Super Mario community fan page on Game Jolt, which became large and popular, and was also verified with a checkmark, as well as being featured on the front page of Game Jolt. In addition to moderating and promoting the community, there were also interactive activities posted to it regularly, such as daily polls where users would vote on Mario-themed questions. Formula Fanboy as a brand, as well as Jamie Wilsher, have publicly distanced from the Game Jolt platform.

**Fallout**

In mid 2021, several Game Jolt staff members quietly unfollowed and unfriended the Formula Fanboy Game Jolt account. Shortly after, the Formula Fanboy Game Jolt account was unverified, as well as having access revoked to the Super Mario community on Game Jolt. The community was given to a notable TikTok creator going by the handle @superlitmario, who from his initial response, implied that he was not even aware he was being given ownership of the community at the involuntary expense of its original owner. As a formality, superlitmario added the Formula Fanboy account back to the community as a collaborator, however, the account was soon after shadow-banned, and in late 2022, removed from the list of collaborators altogether. The owner and runner of the account, Jamie Wilsher, tried to reach out to Game Jolt staff members several times for comment, conflict resolution, or even a straightforward answer as to why any of this happened. The reason given in an email from Game Jolt being "moderation inactivity" made little to no sense considering that the audit log of the community showed active moderation from the Formula Fanboy Game Jolt account, and Jamie Wilsher claims to have received no warning from Game Jolt prior to the event. To this day, Game Jolt staff have neglected to acknowledge the situation beyond a few staff members vaguely throwing shade at the Formula Fanboy Game Jolt account in comments sections of various posts, the most notable interaction being a comment thread between Jamie Wilsher and memeber of Game Jolt staff, Fernando, also known as YLivay. The thread is notable as it shows a member of the Game Jolt staff implying "the many many things dear formula fanboy here conveniently forgot", but failing to subsequently back up this statement with any actual events. The thread went as follows:

Post by Jamie Wilsher: "oh great, looks like they deleted the polls and stuff from the mario community. didn't even archive them; just straight up deleted years of history, memories and hard work. really awesome thanks gj"

Comment by YLivay: "none of the posts were removed. they were moved to the general channel and are publicly visible. I don't moderate this community so I don't know for sure, but my guess is the polls channel was not being actively moderated or even used - which is straight up harmful for the community.

why do you keep posting false information? are you feigning ignorance or are you actually ignorant?"

Reply comment by CircuitTH: "what false information"

Reply comment by Jamie Wilsher: "First of all, nothing I said here is false information.

The channels were deleted; this is a fact.

Game Jolt has a feature with communities to archive unused channels that could have been used and was not; this is a fact.

The posts themselves were not deleted but it would be a blatant lie to argue that they can be coherently viewed in a similar way ever again, considering Game Jolt still lacks a user search feature or anything of the sort.

"Why do you keep posting false information?" implies I've posted 'false information' in the past so, eh, I decided to scroll down my posts for a solid 5 minutes to look for it. Didn't find anything. In the very few posts I've made within the past 5 months, one of them said "Ketchup Octopus", one of them was an ad for a Casting Call Club post, and the only two that mentioned Game Jolt didn't even have any information beyond that I was leaving the site because I, you know, after having my own community and verification taken from me for virtually no reason with no warning or negotiation beforehand- do not feel welcome here. Which I can assure you, is not false info, Fern.

If I am misinterpreting something here, be free to tell me. But I'm not sure how me sharing my frustration about how relentlessly shitty Game Jolt and their decisions have been is in any way ignorant or false."

Reply comment by Oxintoma32Dev: "\*Fernando stopped working because he cant answer anything against this reply\*"

Reply comment by YLivay: "nah, i was about to send a more detailed reply calling out the many many things dear formula fanboy here conveniently forgot, but in the end I decided this would be extremely petty of me.

I'm going to let the people with healthy critical thinking do their own math - and those who won't I don't want to associate with anyways :)

Anyways, have a great day y'all, imma unsub from this comment thread."

Reply comment by Jamie Wilsher: ""oh i was gonna reply with all of these supposed great arguments i have but decided not to that would be petty :(("

ah yes. very convincing. thank you fern very cool

make petty comment with slanderous accusations, provide no evidence, and then leave. :)

gee and they wonder why I left this godawful site"

Reply comment by CircuitTH: "and to top it all off, they unsubbed from this comment thread.

probably to evade losing."

Reply comment by FuntimeWeb: "why do you keep posting baseless slanderous accusations fernando? are you feigning ignorance or are you actually ignorant?"

The Super Mario community on Game Jolt still uses banner and icon art created by Jamie Wilsher as of 2023.

**Aftermath**

In late 2022, the Formula Fanboy Game Jolt account was updated. The username was changed to "don't follow me. read my bio.", and the user bio was changed to a lengthy summary of events regarding the Game Jolt fallout. It reads as follows:

"Hey. My name is Jamie and, if you're thinking about following me, please don't.

I used to use this site a lot in my formative teenage years between 2018 and summer of 2021. I created and ran the Super Mario community and was a verified user. I had made friends with many members of the staff, or at least, I thought I had. I felt very welcome and safe here. Over time, some members of the staff such as CROS, who used to talk to me somewhat regularly, stopped responding to my messages.

Then, one day, with no warning whatsoever, I was unverified, my community was taken from me, and every staff member unfollowed, unfriended or just stopped talking to me altogether.

Anytime somebody posted about this or even mentioned my name in what was once my community, it was instantly deleted.

I tried so many times to reach out via message or email and figure out what was going on. Nobody would talk to me. To this day, GJ has not talked with me about this. The new owner of the Super Mario community, a famous tiktoker, was nice and added me back as a collaborator. But it was a formality at best. [EDIT: I've now found out that I am apparently shadowbanned from posting to the community; any post I make will go through on my end but nobody else will see it. Nice touch guys.]

The email I recieved claimed this was because of "inactivity" but that definitely wasn't it, since not only was I actively posting and moderating the community which can be proved via the audit logs, but the new owner has been inactive for about seven months as of me writing this.

This was very clearly personally targetted towards me. This was further evidenced when posts I made started getting taken down, and a few staff members started making vague, completely baseless slanderous accusations against me in the comments of my posts. I got put in a time out for literally the first time in my entire time on the site, and then received an e-mail falsely claiming that I had been put in "multiple time outs" and this was my last warning before being banned altogether. A former member of Game Jolt staff who I won't name for privacy reasons told me he had similar issues, and said the reason they did all this might literally be because something as small as me criticizing the UI changes that the site was making.

I was a really hardcore advocate for Game Jolt. Game Jolt felt more like a home to me than my actual real life home (which as you can imagine, wasn't going very well). I promoted this website at my damn school. I spent countless nights and days creating content that arguably really helped to boost GJ. Needless to say, I felt extremely betrayed and fell into a deep depression because of this. But I think what hurt the most is that I thought CROS, Thoro, and other members of the Game Jolt staff were my friends. They had talked to me, personally. They'd helped me with my troubles and dangled this concept of being boosted into stardom in front of my face, just for it to all be ripped away. I idolized these people; I looked up to them. And they all abandoned me.

This had a pretty negative effect on my teenage mental state.

The only actual adult in the entire situation who bothered to even ask if I was okay was the aforementioned unnamed former staff member.

I would advise you not to use this site. It's a horrible place for creators. Even beyond the fact that Game Jolt's format is a lot more like a social media platform than a marketplace (which they themselves have updated their mission statement to say), but also the fact that they can and will backstab you and remove you from your own creation at any time they please. Like when they decided pretty much overnight that NSFW content suddenly wasn't allowed and, with no grace period, took all of them down from the site- completely disregarding the livelihoods of the creators. Their bot also took down games that weren't NSFW and some that weren't even games and were just devlog pages, and I know this because one of the pages that was taken down for "sexual violence" was a devlog page for a Game Jolt fan game I was making.

I wasn't the only community owner that this happened to. Game Jolt was an important period of my life but I cannot use the site anymore due to these deeply traumatic events being forever tied to it for me. If you'd like to see the games I've made, please follow my Itch page. That's where I post my new releases. Thanks everyone, and thank you to all the friends I made on here. The Game Jolt community will always be special to me, but I can't use this site anymore. I can't. It's too painful. I made a lot of memories and met a lot of important people from this site. And for that, I can't thank Game Jolt enough. I wish things had gone differently.

-Formula Fanboy"

No developments regarding the situation between Formula Fanboy and Game Jolt have happened since.