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Valve Bans Developer From Steam After It Sues Customers Over Bad Reviews (arstechnica.com)
From an ArsTechnica report: A game developer has been banned from Steam after users claimed that it had attempted to sue 100 users of the platform for $18 million -- for the crime of leaving bad reviews. Digital Homicide, which has released dozens of small games mostly available for a couple of quid each, had its titles removed from Valve's popular digital distribution platform on Friday night. Its boss, James Romine, was granted a subpoena by a court in Arizona apparently allowing him to demand the release of "identification and associated data" of anonymous Steam users. The lawsuit listed in turn the misdemeanours of dozens of John/Jane Does, which include counts of "harassment," "stalking," and "cyber-bullying." In a brief e-mail sent to Vice's Motherboard at the end of last week, Valve's marketing veep Doug Lombardi confirmed that "Valve has stopped doing business with Digital Homicide for being hostile to Steam customers."
quid is definitely not teenie language, the term has been around for a **very** long time, several hundred years. It refers to english currency, 1 pound sterling to be exact.
This same company is suing Jim Sterling (a video game reviewer) for giving them bad reviews. It's been very public and with what they've done with Sterling, this seems exactly in their character. And what's really bad is this company got Jim Sterlings eye because they mostly just sell what's called "asset flips", where they buy some art assets off of the Unity asset store, and then just sell the demo for them on Steam for $10 a pop. They're scum.
Digital Homicide is known for this type of shit. I have lost count of the times Jim Sterling has brought them up whenever they were screwing around again.
It would be nice to see Valve/Steam finally getting up to some quality management and start kicking out the assholes and doucebags. Digital Homicide is a very good start.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
So all the outrage over "ethics in gaming journalism " [lolllz] doesn't apply here because it's not about a woman?
Actually, this is also about "ethics in gaming journalism": Jim Sterling has some. He's been sued, banned, and dis-invited by a variety of publishers because he actually gives bad reviews. He's willing to lose pre-release reviewer copies from a publisher if that's what it takes to call a shit game shit.
Jim Sterling and Total Biscuit are the only video game reviewers I trust these days - I assume everyone else self-censors bad review to keep a "good relationship" with publishers, as the preponderance of evidence is that they do. Jim Sterling likes to review bad games, and TB has moved to only giving air time to good games, so they're complementary.
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