Do we like Markiplier?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Years of big charity streams, a visible stand with LGBTQ+ causes and no harmful words found, with only a minor AI squabble on the ledger.
Mark Fischbach was born in Honolulu in 1989 to a German-American military officer father and a mother of Korean descent. After his parents divorced the family settled in Cincinnati, where he studied biomedical engineering. In 2012 he started uploading comedy sketches to YouTube as Markiplier, then found his feet with horror games like Amnesia and Five Nights at Freddy's.
Gaming videos turned into a proper entertainment business: a William Morris Endeavor deal by 2016, interactive comedy projects like A Heist with Markiplier and In Space with Markiplier, podcasts and the Cloak clothing brand. The big swing was Iron Lung, a game adaptation he wrote, directed, financed, distributed himself and starred in. It reportedly cost about US$3 million and took US$18.19 million in its opening weekend in North America.
On the harm test, we came up clean. Searches for anything he has said or done against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, health or the climate turned up nothing, and no sign of him working with people who push that stuff. The record is thin in places, so say so, but what is there points the right way.
What is there is solid. In January 2017 he launched a GoFundMe for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ civil rights group, and it passed US$128,000 from roughly 6,150 donors in about 20 hours. He wrote “Today we stand by our LGBTQ+ friends to ensure equality for everyone.” In 2023 a fan asked about chest binders for trans people during a Cloak livestream, and he said he would look into it straight away.
The one blemish we could find is small. In 2025 fans got cross over his comments about ChatGPT, an AI-generated stock photo used as a Dead Space 3 thumbnail and his subreddit's AI rules. In a livestream he said the thumbnail was a bought stock image the editor hadn't realised was AI, and that moderators had received threats. That is a creative-industry argument, not harm to people.
Nothing new on him lately that changes the picture. Iron Lung is the latest chapter, and in March he told Vice that creators don't need studio permission, adding “People still want to go to the theater.” A lot of YouTubers talk about giving back, but he has done it year after year at scale.