According to Billet themselves, they heard nothing about compensation or payback until about 3 hours after the original GN video went live… Which Billet hadnt even replied to before Linus made his post saying they’ve already made the deal on compensation.
I mean, it sounds like this was known-ish and Billet had been reaching out to them repeatedly. It is not at all strange that a cock-up of this magnitude would have been solved some time in the two or three weeks since LTX.
Which is why it is even more wild that only the published video got LMG to respond to an industry contact asking for their shit back.
If I was a smaller brand I’d avoid to send shit to LMG now. This was a massive fuck up and would never happen with ASUS or Noctua.
The thing is: You basically can’t. LMG is still a massive tech media outlet with insane reach. If you ignore them then you are actively hurting your company.
And that especially goes for the tiny outlets like Billet where they are already looking at low volume boutique products. I doubt anyone would have expected that LMG would have made what seems like a focused effort to fuck the company over at every step. But even if the outcome had been “Uhm… I guess it works? Not sure why you would want it, but it works” that is MASSIVE advertisement. And the various enthusiasts who do want a product like this will then know it exists and so forth.
People very much overestimate just how little power smaller companies have.
If they fuck you anyway why send the products at all? Better save the money and the company and just keep with smaller YouTubers no?
Because smaller youtubers have almost no reach. Especially because, Dipshit Tech Tips is right: This is not something that anyone should buy. But the custom loop community are delightful sickos who don’t let that stop them. But they are very much a small percentage of any audience.
Getting it to a specialized channel like jaystwocents would increase the number of eyes on it who might ACTUALLY buy one. But folk there likely also are already ride or die with EK or whichever company they like.
And what LMG did is pretty much unheard of. The usual response to this would be, even if it was a mediocre cooler, “In our testing, the thermals were in this range which is comparable to these other products. We would probably go with the AIO or even the stock cooler but, depending on your workload and aesthetics, this could be a good buy”. Rather than “We are too stupid to follow basic instructions, maliciously threw away the card they gave us, and are now going to shit on this company for weeks on end”.
And… the dirty open secret of water cooling is that even AIOs are probably overkill for most consumer builds. That is WHY outlets like j2c tend to do the complete torture tests and then talk about how no gaming workload will ever be anything like that.
I DO think outlets are going to be increasingly wary of working with LMG since one of their recurring bits is “Linus hates company X and rants about it for a month”. But the benefit of having Jake hold it up in front of a camera and maybe convince a few other people they should spend money are still probably going to be worth it.
Like, I am usually a strong supporter of Hanlon’s Razor. But one of the Billet folk must have shat in Linus’s cornflakes at some point. Because everything about this feels like a hit piece. They actively refused to use the GPU that was provided along with the block to test it. They actively butchered the install and compatibility. And then Linus spent multiple WAN shows blatantly shitting on the company. And when they finally were forced to send payment for the block they stole and sold: They didn’t even include the GPU.
The reality is that even if it WAS a mediocre cooler, it would likely perform better than most reasonably priced AIOs with halfway competent building. And from a quick glance: I still have no idea how you would properly install that. But it is a chunk of copper with pipes for liquid. As long as your radiator works, you are going to get REALLY good thermals on both the CPU and GPU.