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Zhyrr's Story9/5/2020 Hey dear followers. Today will not be a fun and spectacular update screenshot or new render of a commission.
However this tweet will point out a rather extraneous event which took place at @BBBStudioslnc. I will be trying to explain as much as possible, but due to not trying to break the NDA I can not disclose everything. The first and foremost fact I want to address is that the management team of BBB is lacking so much transparency that the members do not know what they are going to make. Content creators get royalties, a percentage of the total revenue of a map.At first this looks like a great system, but we never knew anything for certain, they turned it into a type of lottery. Just because the management team says you'll get X amount, does not mean they will give you X amount. I found out about this a while back, but it's even worse than what I thought it was. The managers told me stuff like 'We will make you rich', but I guess they reversed the 'we' and 'you' in that sentence. Maps on which I have worked my ass off have suddenly been cancelled simply asked them some things, 'Do I still get paid? 'No', 'Why not, I have worked hard on it' -You have been kicked from the team and your account will be blocked by staff-? An honest management team will always answer you with respect and facts. Not with a defensive stance when you question their credibility, and kicking you out the team after being pan of it for over a year. They have been hiding payment data, and instead showing only MY part of the earnings, completely shielding off any sense of credibility they still had left. They simply forwarded me to their lawyer instead of negotiating this like normal serious businesspeople. Another example I got from a source which will remain anonymous, a map which scored top 10 on the marketplace made only X amount of money according to the management team at BBB, while the number 11 spot made 10 times more than X. I can not share the exact numbers so you would just have to believe me on this one. This is will mainly focus on the 'existing' lawyer and accountant BBB claims to have. The given names do exist in the town where the office is located at But after a week of waiting on the accountant and lawyer, one can say that this is rather strange. For my last example I will use imaginary numbers (Percentages are correct). As I said we work with royalties. On one project I had a royalty of 30% and made 150$ whereas someone with 15% made 50$. That does not sound right at all, does it? Another funny thing is that the royalties were decided by, first one manager and after a "surprise meeting" right before publishing the map it was almost always decreased. Not only for me, but for everyone I have spoken to. Guess you couldn't afford to pay me but could afford to host a real life event, 3000$ office computers and a fish tank, and then brag about it? Go f*** yourselves, you pathetic backstabbers. My last thing would be a statement of the COO made through discord: 'yes and do you think we could honestly be scamming people when we have an accountant and lawyer going over our payrolls, plus being a new business, there is a very huge chance we and everybody we ever paid will get audited by the government this year. Those odds make it damn near impossible to get away with any wrong doing even if we wanted to, but obviously we don't. Will add a screenshot of her saying it in the comments. Based on what Tina says here, I can not be possibly get scammed by them. Let me remind you that any royalty has not been set in a contract. I have asked for a legal document for over two weeks now where the royalty of each map are stated. Never received anything and reminded them plenty of times. So BBB... I hope that I have informed any freelancers who are working or are going to work at BBB to stay away from these manipulative, scamming "businesspeople" A truth speech is a hate speech for the people that hate the truth. N, T, T - Zhyrr (Casper)
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Ski's Story7/23/2020 I used to work for BBB. I joined as a skin designer in December 2018 and left in less than a year. I did not realise how badly I got scammed until this year, I left purely because of their terrible discord server... To simplify it, we were given treats like dogs...Then came the pyramid scheme. What you did for them define their treatment of you. Builders who were long time friends were glorified. Builders were the best. Skinners were treated okay, but not too well. The 3d modelers were treated awfully… I in total made 4 skin packs for BBB. I received payments for the first, and a second payment for the second and third. The ‘decided’ not to pay me after I left and never wrote as to why. They refused and claimed they do not receive anything stating how much the packs earn in total, but somehow managed to work out how much I earned still. Additionally telling an autistic teen to contact your lawyer is pretty awful Tina. I did not leave them professionally. Working for BBB has worsened my depression to a point I still struggle now.
- Ski
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Kirigiri's Story7/23/2020 I was recruited by Limefrost from block by block studios in December of 2018. At the time I was extremely new to skin commissions and I was very naive when it came to them. I’d just got out of school that year and so I was pretty broke and so I would’ve jumped at any commission opportunity blindly. When I began to work with block by block I was told I’d be given a percentage of the income that came from the skins (I think it was around 10%). The first pack I made for block by block was Steam-punk dream and as of 27/02/2020 it is still up on the marketplace, the second pack I made for block by block studios was a pack called spring is here which is also still up on the marketplace, I made these skin-packs 2 years ago and I’ve not received any income from the skins. When I first joined block by block I had no idea how much skin-packs went for on the marketplace so I wasn’t able to tell if this was a good deal or not. It’s been 2 years since I left block by block and I’ve not received anything for the skins I made. - Kirigiri
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Assassin's Story7/23/2020 Hello. Today I’d like to reveal to you all some very sketchy and fraudulent things that have been going on behind the curtains of @BBBStudiosInc’s. I’ve been in this team for the better part of a year after I joined them just a few days after they were partnered. I will first give the backstory and the context then reveal the vicious thing they’ve done with proof. As with almost any team one first joins, the first impressions were quite nice, it was a very active team, with just as active members, and very neatly, their payment model was profit shares for everyone who worked on a product, with 30% going to their management team This generous payment system influenced me to prioritize them over other teams, as it did with many other members, but when the first payments were paid out on July 15th, many creators were confused by the low amount they got compared to what they were promised. It’s worth mentioning that before the payouts were paid out, they had released a document in announcements that, because products made very little after 2 months, payouts of money made after 2 months the product goes live will not be sent. This document was never signed by either party but they still followed through with it without any member’s approval. This was also never mentioned in any past contracts. Another thing, profit shares were casually decided on Discord and never set in stone until the payout day, but knowing their share was locked at 30%, we never really cared all that much, although it did give the reports from kicked members telling us they got way less from their counterpart creators for the same products more sense. One of my first projects that I worked on, Lucky Block Skyblock, was quite a success. Nyle (BBB’s Owner) and I were the only ones who initially worked on this map, he made the spawn island and I did the rest of development including any textures, and so my share was 50%. Due to some bugs that were tied to the main mechanics, we decided to make an update starting from scratch, and so a builder and a texture artist were put on this project, and on Nov 5th, the update was pushed and the 2 month rule was renewed for another 2 months. Following this, we saw a huge boost in rating numbers when it got on sale, which lead to it being on Top Trending for a whole month, which again lead to a big boost in rating numbers. And so I was really excited to get my next payout. For the next 2 months’ payouts, the profits did not match anywhere near what I thought they might make. At first, I thought I had just overestimated how much the marketplace actually earns, even a product that’s the 3rd most rated item in the whole marketplace. But I still wanted to confirm that they were legitimate. If you are a partner and have access to the league tables MS shares, I urge you to take a look at LBSB (Lucky Block Skyblock)’s placement in December and January, then look at the screenshots where they say it made 27K in the month of December. If one of your items made more than this amount during that month and were placed below them, then you can know for yourself that this is a lie. This set alarms all over my head, and after contacting a few other partners, they surely all confirmed that this number is in no way correct. And so I wondered, if they lied about how much this map made, how much else they have been lying about? I contacted some of my close friends that were still in BBB, showed them what I had got on BBB and they provided me with anything BBB had told them about their payments. @Zhyrr_MC, who had his own suspicions of BBB, sent me a screenshot of Zhypo - the manager responsible for deciding the cuts each one creator will get - telling him his %profit and how much the item had made. Then, when Tina - the COO and the person responsible for sending out payments - sent him a sheet of how much he got from each of those maps from 15 Nov-31 Dec. Some simple calculations reveal that these numbers don’t add up, and emerge a 50% loog pattern. Of course Zhyrr did contact them, but they gave a vague response as shown here. Keep in mind most members, including me, took this team for granted. So anything they told us was absolute. You can also compare my and Zhyrr’s payments in accordance with each other and with Zhypo’s sales data. When LBWE was published, my cut was set at 15%, but when you compare my 15% payout to Zhypo’s 30%, you can again see it’s not actually 15%, but 10%. And when you compare it to Zhypo’s message of sales data, you can again see that our payments were actually 5% and 15% (again forming a 50% loss pattern). Also note that the map was released in December, and so the payment should have covered all of its earnings. After me and a few other members left, and BBB realized we were onto them, any message that we sent them was responded by a copy-paste message of a redirection to their lawyer’s email, we sent our complaints and it’s been over a week with no responses. This was my ‘invoice’ for January, that of course did not align with how much they first said I was getting paid for that month, it’s a complete joke, not just because the the amounts don’t add up when compared to the other creators for those items, but also because even when the “Money made after 2 months won’t be paid out because there’s basically no money made after that period” rule is applied, I still wasn’t paid for LBSB (Lucky Block Skyblock) for any amount of days of January. If that doesn’t seem like a big deal to you, I again urge you to look at its ranking in the league tables’s top grossing. I know many might say that’s already a big sum of money and that I shouldn’t be complaining because other teams might offer less, but this is a profit share based team, I did not get paid out instantly upon project completion, nor did I complain about the maps that made very little. BBB modeled themselves as creator friendly and would constantly brag about their good shares which brought in many members who would prioritize them because they thought they would be getting paid more. Instead, BBB would assign the cuts (in Discord DMs as oppose to contracts), then freely change them when the content did great, and if it didn’t do well, they still would not lose any money. - Assassin
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Echo's Story7/23/2020 Thank you @BBBStudios for the time I’ve spent with you all, an amazing company, and even less profitable than a pyramid scheme. I sincerely thank you for continually stealing our money and lying about it.
Thanks for not paying the people you chose to remove, and most of all, thank you Blaze for being such a lovely person, i truly mean it. But only as much as you mean it when you say you're an honest person. You have taught me the way to handle challenges, block by block, as well as letting me know how to treat people that get kicked from a company, cut all contact with them, block by block. With your advice I will now build this huge barrier between me and anything related to this team. Block. by. Block. - Echo
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Mateyosaur's Story7/23/2020 Hi, if you were wondering where I (Mateyosaur) have been the last few weeks, here is an explanation which should hopefully clear things up. You might know about my employment at BBB Studios as a content creator for the Marketplace.
On the 14th of February I was kicked from BBB Studios without notice and immediately robbed of my unpaid work. Upon first joining the team I was also tricked into signing an NDA, while it was illegal for minors to sign it, I was told that my contracts fall under Canadian law, which is where the team is based, but I was later informed that it was not. This blatant lying led to me being taken advantage of, and now backfiring on them. I had a great amount of trust in the managers at the team, as well as the CEO Nyle Lewis and COO Tina Kirkby. Some time ago things started looking a bit sketchy to me, and I was not the only one with these doubts. Putting in hours of work for an income that was below average, contradictory claims from certain individuals seated high within the team, and falsified data that seemed to contradict the rarely given real data. After research my doubts were sadly proven to be true. I was told map Y made Y-amount and placed 7th in the top grossing map of the month, yet I have gotten information from certain individuals from a team (Who I am not going to mention) that their lower ranked map X made more than map Y made. In the contract it was mentioned that I would be paid each month for my work indefinitely, yet this was changed. A “rule” was added after some maps were released where BBB would stop paying us after 2 months due to them barely making anything after that time, this was not changed in the contract and didn’t even require our signatures. Some maps that went on sale after the 2 month period did very well and we were denied our payments and they took all of what it made. This is the most unprofessional and sketchy business I’ve seen. It’s sad that a small group of individuals can drag the value of the team to such depths. Sadly I cannot provide any more information that third parties should know, so take my word if you want. I will end this with a warning. I discourage everyone reading this looking to build up a future or career as a Minecraft content creator to not become a part of this team. My trust has been broken, and my time has been utterly wasted. Watch out people. - @Mateyosaur |