Phasmophobia devs accused of ‘hosting a sex pest’ on its Discord server

Kinetic Games – the indie team behind massive ghost hunting sim Phasmophobia – have been accused of “hosting a sex pest” on their official Discord server.

In a series of posts shared on Twitter, Dandy @6.2 – who clarifies that she is “not a victim in this area” but “speaks on behalf of a friend who IS a victim who otherwise felt that she had no voice” – posts a number of incriminating messages which suggest that despite being reported, the alleged “sex pest” known as Charcoal Salamander had not yet been stripped of his “administrator” role on the server.

“So who else knew that the developers of Phasmophobia were harboring a sex pest in their official discord by keeping him admin and refusing to take any claims against him seriously because I do now,” Dandy @6.2 tweeted.

“I won’t say much about this on behalf of the friend who is STILL dealing with the fallout of all of this, but I’m actually going to ask people not to play Phasmophobia again, even with the latest update which will be out soon. It’s rotten to the core.”

The Twitter thread – which started on September 28 – included correspondence with lead Phasmophobia artist cjdxn, who seemed reluctant to take action without more evidence. The allegations against admin Charcoal Salamander include sharing other people’s nudes on the Discord channel and making racist jokes.

Eventually, when the posts went viral and the pressure mounted, Charcoal Salamander was stripped of his admin role and banned from the server.

“Recently, we received news from one of our Discord admins regarding the sharing of sensitive images and racist comments. After evaluating the evidence, we have completely removed this admin from the Discord team and he will not be joining. “, cjdxn later said in a statement released on October 1.

“However, some of my words were ill-chosen and hasty. So I would like to apologise. As seen in the shared DMs, I explicitly say ‘I don’t agree’ with said acts, and I does not condone racism or image sharing. I have never supported or will never support the sharing of private photos, and I’m so sorry that what I said could have been interpreted differently.

“However, parts of my DMs regarding the issue were taken out of context and paint a slightly skewed picture of what I was trying to express,” they added. “My comment of ‘this looks like two friends in DMs’ wasn’t about the image sharing at all, but rather a response to their conversation before the offer to share the image.

“I can now see how easily this could have been linked and again my choice of words should have been more sensitive with such a sensitive topic.

“I will not let a situation like this happen in the future and I wholeheartedly apologize for any role I played in this situation.”

Kinetic Games recently released an updated development roadmap for its chilling ghost hunting sim Phasmophobia, with the game’s custom difficulty feature now slated to release this month with plenty more on the way.

As Kinetic explained at the time, the team has now revised its Early Access roadmap for 2022 and beyond to “more accurately represent what we achieved this year and what we plan to do. in the future” after a longer-than-expected development period for Phasmophobia’s VR redesign, which finally arrived in April.