Apex Legends streamer and four-time tournament champion Richard “KingRichard” Nelson has been accused of refusing to pay for a motion design work he contracted and used on his Twitch channel at the end of 2018.
Designer Gabe “G4K” said he was hired with his team to work on KingRichard’s Twitch rebrand and had his work approved. But he said Richard never paid for the work. He said Richard used all his work for a week before taking everything down and replacing it for another design without paying for the full service. Gabe published a video today explaining his side of the story.
Gabe said KingRichard contacted him for the rebrand of his channel. “They wanted a lot,” he said. “But after a few calls, changes, and stuff, we ended up with a deal.”
He said Richard had “super clear ideas about the logo” and that in the end it was approved. Gabe and his team then started working on “sub alerts, donations, bits, ‘starting soon’, the intro itself” for the channel, and that everything shown was approved “a few times.”
KingRichard paid 10 percent of the project’s total cost in advance, as agreed, he said. But a few days later, Richard’s manager allegedly came with “a cute wall of text” that Gabe summarized as “we don’t like it anymore, so we’re not going to pay” the rest of the value. He said he attempted to contact the manager a few times after that to get paid and also tried to contact Richard himself, who allegedly replied “I don’t have time to deal with this type of issue. Take care.”
Gabe said he and his team spent a lot of time working on the project for Richard. “I don’t know you, maybe you’re a nice guy. But artists need respect, mostly in this field.”
KingRichard said live on stream that after Gabe’s video, “it’s a lot more to it than me just paying him now. I’m definitely not paying anything after someone literally defames my character.” He confirmed that he really wanted to rebrand his entire channel, and his brother, who’s his manager, found Gabe’s company.
He said he didn’t believe Gabe’s company could do what he wanted because “they didn’t have anything in their portfolio” that matched what he was trying to do. Months after Richard hired the team, he said nothing about the project was right. “Everything from the original project had been changed because they couldn’t do it. It wasn’t because I decided to go a different route,” Richard said.
He said because of that he decided to “wash his hands from the project” and move on. He reportedly left his deposit with them but didn’t want to move on with it. Richard says he’s not using any assets that Gabe’s company worked on. “I’m not a scammer. I didn’t get anything from this project,” Richard said. He also explained that the period when he used the assets was when they “were still working together on trying to come up with a solution to get the project to where it was.”
Update April 2 at 1:13 pm CT: Added information about KingRichard’s side of the story.
