Jonathan Jafari, best known by his internet nickname as JonTron, is an American comedian, reviewer, and a YouTube star. JonTron's fired outrage is the result of his controversial comments and tweets last March 13 debate with the professional streamer Steven Bonnell. JonTron repeatedly showed and focused on his concern about declining the populations of white people in the U.S.
Playtonic Games, the developer of Yooka-Laylee, has decided to remove JonTron from producing voice roles from the game title. This decision is said to be final after he made a series of comments supporting racist as well as anti-immigrant viewpoints. As reported by Time, Jafari told Bonnell once that he could be open to the idea regarding immigration, stating that if immigrants "assimilated, they would enter the gene pool, eventually."
“We recently became aware of comments made by voice artist JonTron after development on Yooka-Laylee had been completed,” said Playtonic Games in a statement released to GamesIndustry.biz. In addition to that, the Yooka-Laylee developer also said that despite JonTron's recent personal viewpoints, they have made the settlement to finally remove JonTron’s inclusion in the game via a future content update.
The game title Yooka-Laylee is set for its release on April 11. And in addition to removing JonTron from the whole game, the studio distanced itself from the internet personality and expressed its support of diversity. According to Polygon, the studio said in its statement today that would like to make it clear that they do neither endorse nor support JonTron’s personal viewpoints and he actually does not represent Playtonic as a whole.
After JonTron's comments and tweets were publicized, the YouTube star lost thousands of subscribers from his personal channel account, JonTronShow. However, he still manages more than 3.1 million followers on the said YouTube user. Like many other popular YouTube channels, he has an option to buy YouTube subscribers to compensate the lost followers on YouTube. JonTron attempted to clarify his side in a brief video. “I said lots of stuff that could be misconstrued in all sorts of ways,” the sensational star said, offering no apologies.
