Activision has complied with TimTheTatman’s request to have his skin removed from the game in solidarity with streamer Nickmercs.
Share this story
See our ethics statement.
Activision has removed another streamer’s skin (from a game, not their body). TimTheTatman, a prominent Call of Duty streamer, asked to have his operator bundle removed from Call of Duty in support of his friend Nickmercs, whose skin was pulled last week after he made homophobic comments. “At Tim’s request, we have removed the TimTheTatman operator bundle from the Modern Warfare II and the Warzone store,” wrote Activision spokesperson Neil Wood in an email to The Verge.
TimTheTatman, who named Nickmercs as a long-time friend, tweeted that it “felt wrong” for him to still have a skin in the games when Nickmercs didn’t and requested that Activision remove his skin too. “In support of my friend, please remove the TimTheTatman bundle,” he tweeted. Another FPS streamer, Dr Disrespect, also expressed his solidarity with Nickmercs by uninstalling Call of Duty during a recent stream.
(It is notable that Dr Disrespect, who was once temporarily banned from Twitch for streaming from a public bathroom before being permanently banned for mysterious reasons, is developing his own extraction shooter that would likely be in competition with Call of Duty: Warzone.)
All this has happened after Nickmercs made a comment that invoked a homophobic dogwhistle that bigoted people have repeated for a very long time: that anything LGBTQ+ related is harmful to and should be kept from children.
After the skin was removed, Nickmercs apologized to people whose feelings might have been hurt but affirmed that he was not apologizing for, nor taking down, the offending tweet. In a tweet on Friday, he said he “had no hate in his heart” and thanked the people supporting him. (Some of his supporters have left comments on social media referring to LGBTQ+ people, including this reporter, as groomers and pedophiles for pointing out exactly how Nickmercs’ seemingly innocuous words, “leave little children alone,” have been twisted into a homophobic dogwhistle.)
It seems possible that Activision might forgo making skins based on real people in the future. It’s a lesson the Blizzard side of the company has learned several times before, removing a World of Warcraft NPC based on a former employee accused of sexual harassment, renaming an Overwatch character, and removing a skin developed for an Overwatch League player accused of sexual assault.
