Chase Hutchinson didn’t expect much to happen after he reviewed the Beast Games for IGN. The gaming and entertainment website had been looking for someone to review Amazon’s largest reality show and the freelance writer had experience reviewing large and controversial reality shows in the past. Since Amazon didn’t give out any screeners before the shoe premiered, Hutchinson had to watch along with everyone else. And he didn’t like it very much, giving the show a score of two out of 10.
“It’s largely dull and without much of anything to get invested in, relying on constantly shouting at us about the stakes while frenetic editing slices everything to pieces.” Hutchinson wrote in his review.
According to Hutchinson, he didn’t expect his Beast Game review to be contentious. Hutchinson said that on the IGN website, readers’ comments were mostly “positive” when the article was dropped. “I had thought the review was tough but fair, and was honest about what was being offered from my perspective, and I think people appreciated that.”
But when Hutchinson headed to the toxic cesspool of Elon’s Twitter, he noticed a shift in the vibes. IGN’s tweet had over 700 comments with commenters posting remarks like “IGN does the worst reviews” and “lol did you watch it with your eyes closed?” The hate reached a fever point when Donaldson himself replied to a viewer who also disagreed with the low score. “Sad one person who doesn’t like me can just label something a thousand people poured their lives into a 2/10 when it’s clearly not,” Donaldson wrote.
Donaldson has notoriously struggled with taking criticism publicly from reviewers. When he joined food reviewer Keith Lee’s taste test of his line of Feastables chocolate, he gets physically more distressed as the video goes on. In another video, Minecraft creator TommyInIt gave the now-defunct Beast Burger a 6.5 out of 10, and a perturbed Donaldson asked him to justify his score.
“I have nothing against the people who worked and put time onto this, I just don’t think it’s very good,” Hutchinson said. The writer also received a fair bit of harassment online, including a commenter threatening to “dox and beat the (poop emoji) out of you.” The episodes of the Beast Games are going to drop weekly until February. And Hutchinson, for his part, has no plans to review the rest of the series.
“MrBeast did not himself write this but whenever there’s a big creator that puts something out there like this and responds ‘Oh, well, they’re just being mean to me’ that’s kind of directing their audience towards someone,” Hutchinson said. “I’m happy to have people respond substantively to things, but it’s when it becomes this sort of person they’re attacking me That’s where it becomes a little alarming to see.”
