 "Indie developer tries to sue 100 Steam users for bad reviews; Valve kicks developer out of Steam")
What do you do when someone consistently criticises your games? What about when hundreds of people start doing that on the world’s largest gaming platform? Do you:
- Sit down with your team and figure out what’s wrong?
- Sue the critics and Steam for libel, slander, assault and more.
If you’re indie developer, Digital Homicide , you’ve picked the latter option. Brothers James and Robert Romine have decided that rather than work on improving the quality of their games, they’d sue Valve and at least 100 reviewers on Steam for over $18.7 million in damages for, essentially, posting negative reviews of their games.
Valve
, which operates digital distribution platform Steam
, has responded by pulling all of Digital Homicide’s games off Steam, claiming that Digital Homicide’s actions are hostile to Steam. In their defence, Digital Homicide claims that Valve failed to suitably moderate reviews on Steam. Digital Homicide also claim that they need a “safe environment” for doing business and that Valve is showing a “reckless disregard” for the Steam community, reports Engadget
.
Valve decided to pull all of Digital Homicide’s games from Steam following a subpoena from the developer that demanded that Valve divulge the identities of 100 Steam reviewers. Admittedly, some of the reviews are uncalled for and death threats and the like are not always funny. Digital Homicide’s stance is doing more harm than good, however.
Prior to this, the Romine brothers filed a lawsuit against YouTuber Jim Sterling for $10.7 million in damages. Jim Sterling makes a living out of criticising games, but the Romine brothers believe that Sterling has been calling them out unfairly. They also claim that Sterling and his supporters are harassing them. Digital Homicide indulged in their own form of harassment, filing multiple DMCA notices against Sterling over a period of months. Some of Sterling’s videos were pulled from YouTube, but he eventually won out and all the “offending” videos are still out. You can find the details of that sordid tale here . While there might be some truth to Digital Homicide’s claims, the fact that they have been accused of shady business practices in the past and the fact that their games have been universally panned are not points in their favour.
Following reports of the lawsuit, the company has also come under fire from other indie developers for their handling of the situation. If things weren’t bad enough for Digital Homicide, they apparently have no money to fight the lawsuit and have launched a crowd-funding campaign for the same.