As of this morning, it appears that all of the videos on the well-liked Angry Video Game Nerd webseries have been removed from YouTube. Text on the landing page cites severe violations of YouTube terms of service, which seems to indicate that this wasn't a voluntary move on Rolfe's part.
Chatter on NeoGAF and Facebook point at the copyright complaints related to games Rolfe talked about as the reason for the shutdown.
With a movie in production, things were looking great for James Rolfe, the man behind AVGN. His brand of ranting—where he plays through and excoriates the bad old games of yesteryear—won him millions of fans over the six years he and his crew have been doing AVGN. The backlog of AVGN videos can still be seen on Rolfe's Cinemasscre site. But, with more than more 900,000 subscribers and over 400 million views on YouTube, being exiled from the video service is a major blow to AVGN's visibility and revenue.
Kotaku has reached out to Rolfe and YouTube for comment and will update this story if they respond.
Update: It looks like the Cinemassacre channel page—where Angry Video Game Nerd videos live— is back up on YouTube. Here's what the page looked like when it was down this morning.
And now: