Phasmophobia dev apologises and belatedly bans Discord admin after mishandling messy nude pics scandal

pcgamer.com:

Phasmophobia is probably the best ghost game ever made, retains a considerable playerbase, and this year has been dealing with a community scandal that, over the last week, blew up. The furore centres around an administrator for the game's Discord, who goes by the handle of Charcoal Salamander, who is accused of both offering to share nude photographs with another community member, and making racist comments.

The controversy began in January when Charcoal was accused of sexually harassing another community member on the 25th. Developer Kinetic Games suspended them while investigating, before accepting Charcoal's evidence on 30 January with other admins spending «around two weeks» before concluding Charcoal «never did anything wrong nor did he harass people.» Charcoal was subsequently reinstated to their position.

Things subsequently went quiet until August 15, when the studio received a further email about the allegations. As it did not contain any additional evidence, and had previously been 'resolved', lead developer DK decided the studio would not investigate itself.

On 27 August, things began to happen. The allegations began to re-acquire traction within Phasmophobia communities on places like Discord and reddit, while a new account on the latter began messaging Kinetic Games' lead artist Corey 'CJ 'Dixon about them (CJ from hereon in).

Charcoal is accused of using racist language on at least two occasions, with video of scrolling screencaps showing them talking about «squinting» in the context of Chinese people, before going on to tell a racist joke about Japanese people. The second accusation is that Charcoal received nude pictures from someone else, and offered to share them with a friend in DMs. There's no