A French content creator and streamer known as J0nathan has permanently lost his YouTube channel over a gameplay video from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival. At the time of the ban he had 190,000 subscribers and more than 3,000 uploads built up over roughly ten years.
What exactly happened
J0nathan says he covered the nudity in the game’s opening scenes with black boxes before publishing. Despite that, YouTube removed the channel for breaching its sex and nudity policy. The company’s response to his appeal was blunt: explicit content intended to be sexually gratifying is not allowed on the platform.
He did tag the video with the “Not Made for Kids” label, but he did not add an age restriction. His reasoning was that the rest of the game plays like a standard horror title in the vein of Resident Evil, and that if YouTube considered the video problematic, it would simply apply an age gate later, the way it usually does.
Why the opening of Hellraiser: Revival is a problem for streamers
Hellraiser: Revival, developed by Saber Interactive (the studio behind Space Marine 2), begins with an explicit sex scene featuring a topless woman and BDSM elements, after which the male character spends a stretch of the game fully naked. The scene is not window dressing – it sets up the story and triggers everything that follows. That makes it practically impossible to skip if you want to cover the game from the start. If you want to follow where this story goes, we collect everything on the game in our Hellraiser coverage.
Before release, Saber Interactive publicly advised creators to label all streams and videos with appropriate age restrictions, sexual theme labels and any other tools each platform offers. The studio also stressed that creators have to follow each platform’s community guidelines themselves, and pointed out that the game has no “streamer mode” – so the context and intent behind your content will matter.
An appeal handled in minutes
J0nathan went through YouTube’s appeal process, but says the whole thing appears to be automated. His first appeal was rejected within a few minutes, and support accounts on social media replied with a generic line saying the case had been reviewed and the decision upheld.
He also points out that uncensored footage of the exact same scene is still live on other YouTube channels, which is why he doubts a human ever looked at his case at all. He received no prior warnings and no strikes before the removal.
What this means for you as a creator
- A “Not Made for Kids” label is not the same thing as an age restriction – if a game contains explicit scenes, the age gate is on you.
- Self-censoring with black boxes does not guarantee the video passes. The policy judges the content and its intent, not just how much skin is visible.
- Enforcement is clearly uneven: identical footage can stay up on one channel and get another deleted.
- If your channel is banned, you are not allowed to run another one. J0nathan has a side channel but is afraid to use it, because touching it could cost him both.
He describes the impact as devastating – the ban wiped out ten years of work and his main source of income. He says he has contacted other creators and the developers themselves, emailing them and tagging them on X in the hope someone could escalate his case to YouTube, but got no response.
FAQ
YouTube removed it for violating its sex and nudity policy, citing the rule that explicit content meant to be sexually gratifying is not allowed on the platform.
J0nathan says he covered the nudity in the game’s opening scenes with black boxes. That was not enough – the channel was still removed, and the ban was upheld on appeal.
No. He added the “Not Made for Kids” label but skipped the age gate, assuming YouTube would apply one later if needed.
The game opens with a sex scene featuring a topless woman and BDSM elements, followed by a stretch where the male character is naked. The scene sets up the story and is the catalyst for the events that follow.
Not safely. YouTube prohibits banned users from operating other channels, so using his existing side channel would risk losing that one too.