Participants bemoan terrible Beast Games conditions; Lack of food or medical care

James Stephen "Jimmy" Donaldson's Beast Games have come under fire for inappropriate living conditions. Participants have complained about a lack of proper diet, garments as well as living conditions. With a barrage of contestants, there were a total of 2,000, participants felt the Beast Games were not properly managed and the staff was ill-equipped to do so. Mr. Beast's spokesperson said it is a learning experience after blaming the Crowdstrike outage as well as extreme weather conditions for several of the complaints.

Mr. Beast is one of the biggest YouTubers on the planet and his videos garner millions of views with regular ease. He has 308 million subscribers on his main YouTube channel. Besides the main channel, Mr. Beast also has other YouTube channels, mostly dubbing of his content in regional languages. Many of these additional channels have also started picking up pace and garnering millions of views. 

His content is deemed family-friendly and Mr. Beast’s games and competitions are fun to watch for the most part. The Beast Games, one of the biggest live games with a massive prize pool ran into controversy late last month after a NYTimes report highlighted contestants’ risk of serious injury and even death. The report by Madison Malone Kircher spoke to over a dozen contestants on the condition of anonymity.

Several participants informed the reporter that they did not receive adequate food or medical care. Some of the participants even suffered from physical challenges with a few leaving the arena on stretchers. There were multiple hospitalizations according to the report further highlighting the conditions during the Beast Games. 

“We were treated horribly,” a contestant said in the report. “They took on this challenge of 2,000 competitors. They should have known they needed an enormous crew to handle this correctly.”

Contestants found it difficult to get enough food with some even complaining they went over 20 hours without food. Without any watches or clocks, it was difficult for them to keep track of time, although they estimated they were fed twice a day. Even though the agreement mentioned dietary restrictions would be taken care of, some contestants reported receiving food they were allergic to. 

Contestants had provided staff with a Ziploc bag with five days' worth of clean undergarments. However, they faced trouble in receiving the undergarments on time during the event. A group of women who were menstruating during the event placed a request to receive their undergarments more frequently. However, the request was reportedly denied as it was ‘not a medical emergency’. 

It is important to note here that contestants were free to leave the Beast Games at any point during the show. However, most, if not all stayed back to compete despite the unfavorable circumstances. The massive prize pool for the Beast Games was a lucrative enough target for participants, many of whom had student loans or other monetary obligations in life. Contestants who made it past the first challenge were given toiletry kits and sleeping bags and slept on the stadium’s turf floor as per the NY report.

A spokesperson for Mr. Beast said the extreme weather conditions as well as the Microsoft Crowdstrike IT outage had a big impact on the operations during the Beast Games. 

“[The Shoot] was unfortunately complicated by the CrowdStrike incident, extreme weather and other unexpected logistical and communications issues.” The spokesperson told The Verge MrBeast had started a formal review and had “taken steps to ensure that we learn from this experience.”

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The Beast Games featured over 1,000 contestants and has a $5 million prize pool. In collaboration with MGM Studios, Mr. Beast’s Beast Games continues the trend of mega prize pools given away to the winners. The Beast Games will release in December this year and is one of the biggest projects by the YouTuber. An average Mr. Beast video requires almost $3.5 million to produce a and Beast Games is a production that is much bigger than the average Mr. Beast video.

A spokesperson for Mr. Beast told NYTimes that almost all of the participants who received an invite to Toronto for the next production have accepted the invitation. 

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