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Valve Bans Developer From Steam After It Sues Customers Over Bad Reviews (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on from the justice-league dept.

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."

4 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. My favorite from TFA... by HBI · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Romine's GoFundMe account, set up to fund the suit, has made just $425 of his $75,000 goal, even though he claims he "received a pile of feces in the mail" and that he had had messages saying things like "Your wife is a whore," and "I hope you die in a fiery car crash.""

    Romine is a guy who does not get teh net.

    --
    HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
    1. Re:My favorite from TFA... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Re:WTF is a quid? by naris · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:WTF is a quid? by belthize · · Score: 5, Funny

    Agreed, it is fairly hard to understand foreign languages like Great Britainniash..

    To clarify a couple of quid is around 500 Albanian Leks