The founders of the Midnight Society video-game studio held an urgent meeting in late June about a post on X.

Just months before their first title Deadrop was to debut, a tweet accused popular YouTuber and company co-founder Guy Beahm, a social-media influencer known as Dr Disrespect, of sexting a minor.

"There was shock and disappointment,” Robert Bowling, one of four co-founders, said in an interview. The studio, which employs 55 developers, had raised US$24mil to finance Deadrop amid a downturn in the games industry. Joining the online meeting, Beahm admitted he had messaged the minor. Three days later he was gone.

"My emotions shifted very quickly to, ‘How can I make sure all the incredible work that’s been done on Deadrop is not lost?’” Bowling recalled.

In their first interview since the controversy, Bowling and co-founder Quinn DelHoyo, an alumnus of Microsoft Corp’s Halo studio and Epic Games, said Deadrop, a free-to-play title, is on schedule for release in the fourth quarter of 2024. They also discussed the risks that come with relying on popular online personalities for promotion.

The game riffs on a genre popularised by the shooter title Escape From Tarkov, in which players collect loot and gun down enemies to survive. Unlike other such games, Deadrop has a vertical playing field, not horizontal. DelHoyo and Bowling were thrilled to design theirs without top-down mandates or the slow bureaucracy of a bigger game company.

Beahm was brought onto the project to exploit his 4.5 million YouTube subscribers. A former employee of the Call of Duty studio Sledgehammer Games, he was also known for his strong opinions on first-person shooters. When the allegations surfaced and were later confirmed by Bloomberg, fans questioned Deadrop’s fate.

"His job as an influencer was to bring eyeballs and community to it,” Bowling said. And once the game launched, he’d play it for fans.

That never happened. Midnight Society, founded in 2021 and led by co-founder and chief executive officer Sumit Gupta, parted ways with Beahm. He didn’t respond to requests for comment sent by email.

"We knew it was the right decision after talking everything over with all four of us,” DelHoyo said. "We made agreements on what our principles were and are as a studio, and his actions don’t align with our principles.”

The company announced the decision shortly after Beahm livestreamed himself playing Elden Ring on YouTube. Beahm closed by saying to fans, "Just completely remove myself from the scene - it’s what I need to do.”

The next day, Bloomberg and the Verge reported Beahm had sent sexually explicit messages to a minor through Twitch’s direct chat, which led to his ban from the Amazon.com Inc.-owned platform in 2020. He later confirmed the allegations on X, while insisting no laws were broken.

"Nothing illegal happened, no pictures were shared, no crimes were committed, I never even met the individual,” he wrote. "I went through a lengthy arbitration regarding a civil dispute with Twitch and that case was resolved by a settlement.”

Bowling is still bullish on working with influencers - "having some initial marketing in the beginning we wouldn’t have otherwise definitely helped.” He also says it was the founders’ pedigree in gaming that drew investments from Bitkraft and Polychain Capital, not Beahm’s pull.

Midnight Society has been collecting feedback from its core gamer audience for months ahead of Deadrop’s release.

Bowling has been telling them that Midnight Society is "guaranteed to make a game you will like.” Now, he said, "our job is to make sure that translates to a larger audience.”

 - Bloomberg