Reading through the QSMP Workplace Abuse Document compiled by @hopefghniki, as most of my knowledge came from the older documents and deep dives made in 2024 and the months after the admins going public, and I have to say; good *lord* its worse than I thought.
I know a lot of people don't care enough to read through the whole thing when they already know the gist of it (in which case boooooo you (unless you don't support QSMP anyways cos you know it's bad in which case MWAH, i get it people are busy)) but I'm still seeing a lot of misconceptions, a lot of which come from the wording done by Quackity Studios in their clean up PR statements, + how Quackity and other CCs word it themselves.
And thus, here's me breaking down some of the misconceptions I have seen, some of which I believed myself at the start:
(Please note, I'm not a professional or a journalist. This post is half regular person wording things for other regular people who were also regularly confused by corpo-speak and half me writing things down as it helps me remember it lmao)
Weren't staff just volunteers?
Yes! But also no. Basically they had this trial system before you got paid (yeah, red flags immediately, you get it now?) where for one week they did the work unpaid until they were either accepted and paid or weren't excepted and were fired. Volunteers, officially and on the "we're hiring!!!" things posted on twitter, only existed for that trial and were a temporary stage before employment.
OR!!! That's what was *supposed* to happen, basically QSMP Studios staff kept making up excuses to extend that one week deadline, claiming stuff like "your behavior is strange, we're just gonna keep an extra eye on you for a while before we make a decision" and then it dragged on and on with people being stuck in the volunteer phase for months in some cases. which is unpaid labor. which is scummy af. think unpaid internships, but with even less safety nets in place.
Weren't the Staff paid and Volunteers unpaid, because well, they're just volunteers?
Ok so basically people had official jobs and what they were being paid for (at abysmally low rates, mind you) and then were also asked to do other not-their-job things, so "artist" staff and "person who did art for qsmp" are not the same thing, translators drew art unpaid, roleplayers did translating unpaid, etc etc.
List of QSMP Staff/Volunteer wages:
Paid Staff: 150€ (171 USD) per month - Keep in mind that the server was open and had people working on it pretty much 24/7 over a year, someone who was a paid staff member throughout almost the entirety of the servers runtime, a year, would have been paid 1800 euro ($2056 USD) for months of being on call pretty much 24/7 which surmounts to an hourly (on-call or working) rate of about 24 cents. These were the paid ones.
Roleplayers/Actors: Unpaid
Builders: $5 USD per hour
Commission pay for art done by non-artist staff: Unpaid
Developers (Unknown what is meant by "developers", could be backend, webdev, modding etc): Some were reported to have been paid as little as 1 Euro ($1 USD) per hour
Twitter Account Admins: Unpaid
Web Developer: Between $5-22 USD per hour
Video Translation: $1 per minute of edited video, (The minumum wage per minute in my country is 5 times that btw, I was gonna give the USA one as an example but its abysmal, but they were paid less than that anyways so ugh)
Video Translation done by non-translator staff: Unpaid
3D Modeling (Commission pricing examples from one Model Artist):
Small model - ~5-10$
Player-size - ~15-20$
Large - ~30-60$
Unusual sizing - 60$+
Rush Fee - 15$+
This is lower than commercial pricing.
Writing: $200-400 USD per month - writers were just as on-call 24/7 as other staff types, last minute changes happened frequently, needing changes a days or even hours before going live. Hourly rate calculates to about 40 cents per hour.
Staff were paid from Quackity's personal Paypal account, rather than an official business transaction. Paypal transaction fees were not covered by QSMP Studios / Quackity.
(Side note, one (maybe more) of the QSMP actors were underage, and unpaid due to being an actor so yeah unpaid child labor.)
(Side side note, the "NDA" they had to sign was the first result of typing "NDA" into google lmao)
It's just minecraft, they're getting paid to pay minecraft, they're lucky!
Staff were uber overworked, on call 24/7, and made to do sooo many things outside of their official designated/paid jobs. The idea of an admin with a specific job is nebulous at best. That was what you were on paper, in reality admins did a bit of everything. Actors did art, writers did translation, builders did writing, it was all over the place. Remember the jokes about admins being online for 13+ hours a day? It was funny at the time, "they're being paid to play minecraft, wouldn't be online all the time?" In reality they had no choice.
The staff have been paid now!
I have seen zero evidence of this being the case, the closest Ive seen is a he-said-she-said of posts saying that Quackity told Philza and Tubbo who mentioned it on stream. I have seen zero clips of them saying this, but even if they have, it needs to come from Quackity.
All of this is proven with all the necessary quotes and citations and evidence in the document linked above.
I am truly sorry to all of the victims of Quackity and Quackity Studios' abuse, you guys deserve the world, every happy memory I have from QSMP is all thanks to you and you deserve more than compensation for the work you did to make it great.
ok yap over :P
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