Evgeniy Obedkov

The XYZ School Scandal: how the post of the deceived students of the course led to the departure of the editorial board of the media direction

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Over the weekend, XYZ School, known for its game-dev courses, found itself in the center of a big scandal. It all started with a collective letter from deceived students who could not get a fully paid course program for almost nine months. The post caused a great resonance, and after the official response of the management, the editorial board of the media direction left the company.

What happened?

  • On June 18, a user post about the GameCode course from XYZ School appeared on DTF. The program was designed to teach how to write code for action games on Unreal Engine, and its authors promised that in five months students would be able to work as programmers.
  • Students note that they simply did not receive the necessary materials. For almost nine months since the start of training, only two training blocks out of the promised eight have been available to users.
  • The company itself has been promoting GameCode all this time as a completely ready—made course – with set deadlines and a full-fledged training program. Its cost on the website is 81 thousand rubles, and now it is available at a discount for 56.7 thousand rubles.

  • According to the students, they have repeatedly tried to get official comments from XYZ. Users wrote to support, administrators and the author of the program to no avail. As a last resort, they decided to move the dialogue to the public field.
  • At the same time, the company regularly shifted deadlines and changed the description of the program on the website. Initially, students had to defend individual diploma projects. However, in December last year it became clear that it means the same project for everyone, which is performed as a homework assignment.
  • The students also studied the user agreement. It follows that XYZ can change, add or remove rules at any time without notice.
  • It turned out that the company is not a school, but only an “online platform for providing users with online access to video courses and master classes.” XYZ is also not responsible for the accuracy of the information in the training materials.
  • The author of the post notes that for all the time the company held a single call with the manager. The claims of users were not taken into account at the same time, and soon after the communication they began to be ignored again.
  • Against the background of the problems described above, an interview with one of the former GameCode course students appeared on XYZ in June. It gives the impression that the course was supposedly completely ready. As the only drawback, the hero of the interview indicated only the prolonged deadlines.
  • In the material published on DTF, there are also opinions of GameCode students who spoke out about the problems. For example, a girl named Lola planned the training based on the terms announced by XYZ School. As a result, she still has not received the promised program.
  • At the time of writing the news, the post has gained over 95 thousand views and more than 4 thousand likes. Thus, it became the most positively evaluated publication on DTF.

Answer XYZ School

  • On June 19, a post from the company’s official account appeared on DTF. It was written by Kirill Fomin, XYZ Development Director. “Our intentions, of course, were not to mislead you, but this does not excuse us — in fact, this is exactly what happened,” he notes, acknowledging the problems voiced by the students.
  • The company stated that the GameCode course will be completed by the end of July, and this deadline will be the final one. The author of the program could have made the course faster, but XYZ allegedly did not want to give people low-quality material.
  • According to Fomin, one of the reasons for the unfinished course was XYZ’s desire to scale the business. This led to problems in the organization and communication with students.
  • “We have grown a lot in two years, now we have 150 employees. Because of this, the company has problems with the organization, and as a result, information about problems with specific courses and students is sometimes lost somewhere along the way and does not reach the company’s management,” Fomin said.
  • The company promised to add new mentors and people checking tasks. This should help the feedback issue. XYZ also decided to add a special form to contact the management.
  • At the same time, Fomin did not say anything about the refund of funds to dissatisfied students. As a result, the publication “drowned” in dislikes, gaining over 1.5 thousand negative ratings.
  • The students were also dissatisfied with Fomin’s official comment. The author of the original post drew a parallel with the response of the manager, who promised to adhere to the deadlines and connect new mentors to the course.

Reaction and departure of the XYZ media team

  • Shortly after the publications on DTF, representatives of the XYZ editorial board spoke about the problem. Among them are Artemy Leonov, editor-in-chief of XYZ Media, and Alexey Lutsay, head of XYZ Media direction. They worked on a project that was not directly related to the courses and was dedicated to the production of game-themed content.
  • They noted that XYZ School and XYZ Media are essentially two different projects. Despite this, both employees apologized to the deceived users. “In any case, as a mercenary, I can’t do anything about it. I had a better opinion about all this,” Lutsay said.
  • Leonov stressed that from a moral and ethical point of view, he could still better understand the issue of courses and related problems. “In general, the company will give an answer, but in the eyes of the public, of course, no organizational cluster can justify such a thing,” he said.
  • On June 20, both Lutsay and Leonov publicly announced their departure from XYZ. “Choosing between material stability and the audience — I choose you,“ said Lutsay.
  • The former employees of the media team have not yet announced where exactly they are leaving. Judging by their posts, there are no concrete plans yet. However, the decision itself is connected with the scandal surrounding the courses and, apparently, was made voluntarily.
  • Lutsay only noted that he would develop his own YouTube channel and continue to work for subscribers. Prior to XYZ, he was also responsible for DTF video direction.

XYZ Media has been around since the beginning of last year. For 1.5 years, the project has grown greatly and is regularly updated with materials about the gaming industry. Now 374 thousand people have subscribed to the publication’s YouTube channel, and, according to SimilarWeb, in May the site had over 570 thousand visits.

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