Digital Homicide demands safe space in Steam

Remember when developers could take criticism?

A short while back, a developer studio by the name of Digital Homicide decided they were going to sue some 100 Steam users for giving negative reviews. Holy mother of God, that is gold. It’s crazy. For making a bunch of mediocre, if not outright bad, games, DH decided to sue their audience, people who might actually buy the next few games, all because things didn’t turn out like they hoped.

Now, suing a bunch of anonymous people is kind of difficult, so they took it up a notch, and filed a subpoena against valve for the identities of their critics. Now, when you attempt to sue your audience for 18 million dollars, it doesn’t look good on your company…And it especially doesn’t look good on your host. As a result, Valve (who noticed this same situation) decided they no longer wanted to do business with DH, and deleted every game under their development from the Steam Store.

Furthermore, the front page of DH is sadly also exactly what you would expect. Right away, you see that they are giving their account of the situation. According to them, “The lawsuit recently filed is solely in regards to individuals where no resolution was able to be obtained from Steam to provide a safe environment for us to conduct business.”

Safe from who? Random Anons? Trust me, if Ubisoft’s employees are fine after their multitude of AAA disasters, surely you’ll be fine from a bunch of Internet trolls. You don’t need a safe space. You need to act like adults and treat your host and your audience with respect, whether or not the audience is willing to give it back in return. And if all that wasn’t enough, they plan to sue Valve. I’m sorry, DH, but you have gone insane.

If it seems as though I’m more cynical than I am in previous articles, I am. I am furious. This is not how you treat your audience or your host, and this is not how you respond to criticism. This is the most immature reaction to criticism I have ever seen. Now, is each review they are suing for a well thought-out, masterpiece of criticism? Well, of course not. As most of them are the average angry troll comments full of “Kill yourself” and the like, which is immature in itself, but it’s not worth 18 million dollars in damages.

It’s clear that after this fiasco, Digital Homicide will not have an audience again. You don’t pull a stunt like this and keep going. Their medium of sales is through the Internet, and you have to develop a thick skin in order to survive the torrent of trolls you see every day just casually passing by. It doesn’t matter in the end how ridiculous the criticism is. None of it matters. What matters is that you learn from criticism and keep moving forward. You could have learned something from this experience, but instead you break out the lawyers and demand a safe space. There should not be safe spaces on the Internet. People who practically live on the Internet can tell you that this isn’t the place for it. Grow a thicker skin or turn off the screen.

***Disclaimer***
This is a personal opinion of the writer, and it doesn’t necessarily represent the other writers’ (nor The Gaming Ground’s) opinions.

***Disclosure***
I am not a fan of Digital Homicide, nor have I played their games before.

Credit:
Robin Ek – Editor
Zack Reese