bbh4zGHylY0.webm
Wed, 12/26 07:17PM 29:23
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
digital homicide, games, steam, sterling, jim sterling, people, lawsuit, green light, sue, valve, jim,
called, homicides, developer, greenlight, users, clone, harassing, digital, review
00:00
Anybody who's been watching my channel for a while knows that I have taken it upon
myself to bitch about the games and practices of Digital Homicide aka the two person
game development studio run by brothers James and Robert romaine in a vain attempt to
siphon some views and subscribers off their notoriety as some of the worst people on the
indie gaming circuit.
00:17
I've covered
00:18
the bulk of the games in their library all shit. I've got four or five more games of theirs in
reserve that I can still cover on a rainy day with nothing to do. And I've tried in my incredibly
small capacity to be a little signal boost further underhanded tactics and business practices.
But between Digital Homicide, suing 100 people and getting kicked off steam. There's been
a lot of news about them recently news that I've been holding off covering because I wanted
to wait for the dust to settle before talking about it. And because I've been focusing on
giving Duke Nukem Forever, just for my own benefit. I began mapping out the long list of
transgressions and bile Digital Homicide has been responsible for and now that their story
has more or less come to an end. I've decided to turn that list into a script and that script
into a video so this video is a full recap to the best of my knowledge of digital homicides.
01:04
I look back at the full tapestry that is there
01:06
monumental failure Feel free to fill in any details that I missing in the comments. This is the
full extent of what I know and was able to learn about them and just an FYI this video's
footage is nothing but just me playing some Digital Homicide games with no context
because Screw it. They're not worth the effort.
01:22
Digital homicides career began around
01:24
August to September 2014, when they published an extremely half baked and incomplete
nll called forsaken uprising and an outright horrendous shooter called the slaughtering
ground on Steam Jim Sterling, a games journalist who rolls around steam playing any to bit
indie game you can find for first impressions videos playing the Slaughtering Grounds and
made a 10 minute video in which he basically fumbled around trying to figure out how the
how the game works because it's so horrendously designed the day after Sterling
slaughtering grants video went up Digital Homicide to repost it said video with text late over
it where they bitched about how Sterling was reviewing the game despite not understanding
thing one about how it worked repeatedly called him a fucking idiot coined the term I'm Jim
fucking Sterling son and complained that he should have used developer forums to report
bugs and flaws rather than tell the public about them in a review. So not only did they
completely missed the point that Sterling's video was not every view but first impressions
let's play they also seem to think that review should only ever be positive and any
complaints should only be sent to the developer instead of letting the public know about
them kind of ironic when you consider all of their games had litanies of bugs and design
problems that went completely unpatched almost like they ignored criticism anyway but
that skipping ahead a little bit the back and forth continued with Sterling reposting their
video laughing about the sheer ludicrousness of it all and Digital Homicide reposting is
repost, bitching about how internet critics are leeches until they just flat out issued a
copyright takedown on Sterling's video. Digital Homicide claims that Sterling violated Fair
02:55
of how the law works.
02:56
they vowed to take Sterling to court Sterling called their left by filing a counterclaim. Digital
Homicide took no action and the video went back up. I just think it's worth remembering
that the very first time somebody criticize them digital homicides, first reaction was to
harass them. And their second reaction was to threaten legal action. This turned out not to
be a one time mistake from an amateur developer, but
03:18
the first instance of a recurring pattern
03:20
of a developer lashing out at anybody who crossed them and refusing to accept criticism of
their products after cranking out several Steam Greenlight games, all of which Jim Sterling
mocked because he does that to Digital Homicide returned with temper tantrum, deadly
profits and medieval mercs each game worse than the last each game with barely any
actual original programming and each built entirely out of pre made assets that you can
purchase from the Unity storefront. In addition to covering each of these games, Jim
Sterling did an episode of his journalism show the gym position
03:49
where he called
03:50
out Digital Homicide and other low effort developers for doing what he termed asset
flipping is building a game entirely out of pre made levels and models and barely putting
05:38
on to steam something like five times to
05:40
continually reset the games negative votes temper tantrum to by the way is the exact same
game is temper tantrum one only now the levels are city themed instead of I bleaching
bright rooms we found pre made themed but as soon turned out the Digital Homicide had in
fact been very busy this whole time. It just took a while for their latest scheme to unravel
them came across two innocuous Steam games called double share and galactic Hitman,
both of which were riddled with bugs and appeared to be half finished. Especially galactic
Hitman. Once it was discovered. Enemies couldn't shoot you if you docked. These games
were produced by ECC games. And after Jim covered them. He got an email from a Polish
07:12
but Steam users do not take kindly to being ripped off
07:16
and given how unprecedentedly horrible their games were trying to slip them on to steam
unnoticed did not sit well with anybody in the user base. Jim Sterling naturally blue the story
Why don't pin the company became an even greater laughing stock than it already was.
And Digital Homicide grew in raged as Jim's coverage of Digital Homicide ramped up,
James Romain gave him a phone call.
07:37
Jim had written an article on his
07:39
website the gym acquisition. com where he accused Digital Homicide of stealing a games
cover art from DVR when the image was actually purchased from shutter stock. Jim found
out and quickly corrected the article with an apology but the road mines live in Arizona
where you can apparently still sue somebody for defamation over an article that's been
corrected. Sensing an opening to hit Sterling where it hurts, James told Sterling. They had
acquired a lawyer and we're preparing to sue Jim for defamation. He said they'd submit the
papers
09:25
yeah, they you know,
09:26
that's just how logic works. Sterling hasn't said much about the case for fear of digging
himself a bigger hole. So facts about the case are scarce. We do know that the case has
been going on for about six months. But it's point with no significant developments or
actions from the road mines and we know that Sterling file to have the case dismissed but
his motion was denied.
09:45
We can also infer that
10:06
So yeah, the guys who threatened to sue Jim Sterling over a fair use violation
10:10
because his criticisms weren't fair are representing themselves in court, I would almost pay
to see that play out. Interestingly, some acquaintances of mine on Steam, who are well
versed in legal matters said that most lawyers keep a nest egg that they can use for cases
where their client can't pay them until the case is complete. And the fact that their lawyer
apparently demanded
10:30
to be paid before starting the case means that he probably knew that case was doomed
from the outset. Now, all of this isn't to say that Digital Homicide didn't have a point. Yes,
Jim Sterling's negative coverage undoubtedly cost them sales. Yes, Jim could have stopped
talking about them at any time.
10:45
But by the time this lawsuit was filed, Digital Homicide had not only been harassing Jim
Sterling for months, but they had released 11 games on Steam, all of which had
overwhelmingly bad reviews from the community. Not from Jim not from Jim's fans was the
consensus of the normal independent people
11:03
who had played their games and do for them to be crap.
11:05
11:18
insight into how they treated their games and their customers,
11:21
even when digital homicides somehow managed to luck out and make a game that people
like they couldn't be bothered to patch the problems that
11:28
the games fans complained about. They either didn't care about the game because it had
already turned a profit and dust wasn't worth any more effort.
11:35
Their heads
11:36
are large so far up there as they didn't believe there were bugs in the first place
11:39
or they're so bad at actual programming
11:41
that they didn't know how to fix the bugs even if they
11:44
wanted to with behavior and a catalog of this level of shitty this there's not really anybody
12:07
the lawsuit against Jim Sterling was
12:09
by far
12:10
the most media coverage that Digital Homicide had gotten.
12:13
And the some effect that it had was to fill steam and YouTube with
12:16
legions of people who were determined to fill Jim's void and make sure these people didn't
get away with making more crap so what their reputation even worse and more widespread
than ever before their games began selling even worse. So what's a lawsuit pending against
Jim Sterling no money with which to actually pursue the lawsuit and their games selling
worse than ever before due to making gigantic bowel cancer late and asses of themselves
Digital Homicide manage to dramatically increase the volume of games that they were
producing.
12:45
I did a review of
12:46
12:49
live on May 19, 2016.
12:52
At the time of that video went up Digital
12:54
Homicide had 11 games on Steam and 24 additional completed games attempting to pass
through Steam Greenlight.
13:00
More games produced in under two years, then multiple indie Deb's combined to produce in
their lifetimes. Within two weeks of that video going live. They had five new games on
Steam and a plethora
13:12
of new games on Steam Greenlight. One tactic that they used to crank up their production
was they began rescaling some of their old titles and essentially reselling the same game
under different names. In my Digital Homicide library review I covered a game of theirs
called Krog wars. A shitty Space Invaders clone with a glitch
13:29
that often failed to load the next level, leaving you stuck on a blank screen. The game was
literally on playable after Krog wars got on this team they released Wyatt dirt
13:39
which was the exact same game as Craig was only with the spaceships replaced with
cowboys Wyatt Earp to which was the exact same game as white dirt one only with the
14:02
and so Digital Homicide began absolutely spamming Krog wars clones onto greenlight,
14:06
feeling they had struck a gold mine of easy revenue Digital Homicide runs a page on the
indie gaming site edge.io
14:13
where you
14:14
can purchase most of the games that studio has created
14:16
and if you go to their page you will find 33 zero 30 clones of grog wars. Not Digital Homicide
attempted to sell on Steve as completely separate games you'll find Krog wars to Wyatt
Derby to withering kingdoms three sinister spiders five Sarah to the rescue three Daisy
sweet times three Mike the astronauts brief article explores subs to Pete's pumpkin
apocalypse is three Merle wizard extraordinary a game called not in my crapper formerly
called as holes and to assault on czar ters games all the same weapons. All the same levels
the same one game copied and pasted 30 times with different names and rescanned to
look like different titles this little schema there's got soul food Chris Lee out of hand that
Valve had to actually step in and police it's damn storefront for a change valve blacklisted
22 of digital homicides games from Steam Greenlight, preventing them from releasing any
of them by marking them incompatible with Greenlight. And even after valve took this
unprecedented action. They still snuck another drug wars clone on to steal a few months
later
15:23
a petulant child who got caught with us enter the cookie jar only the punches hand back in
the second the adults were looking and escaping and diamond how utterly ineffective valve
is even when it decides to do something to clean up steam
15:37
so the other games on there it's your account are clones as well. Many attacks the Marina
and hovering hella death both appear to be clones of starship Nova strike and grim as his
journey appears to be a direct clone of assault on a Ryan seven despite neither of them
even getting released a fun little fact about their itchy Oh page. When you purchase one of
the games on there, it's your account, you don't actually get a copy of the game. You get it
for the game that you can redeem on Steam if the game gets green light and actually
makes it onto the storm. In other words, Digital Homicide was using it to account to sell
games that might well never have gotten released. Probably in a desperate boy to bribe
people into green lighting their games
16:15
I mean, who on God's Earth would be stupid enough to buy a game before it's even
released.
16:22
Digital Homicide trucked on after that basically by utilizing every bloke and exploit that
exists on the Steam Store. They got game after game through the green light voting system.
by promising each game would have trading cards that users can sell for a profit. I was
stunned to learn that when a steam user sells the trading cards of a game, the creator of
that game gets a kickback so Digital Homicide gets paid every time somebody sells the
cards they get for buying their games. This led to them discovering it abusing a trick that's
becoming popular
16:51
ton of the games away for free and collect royalties off the sales of the trading cards from
the people that you gave the games to you give copies of the game away for free the users
you game the game to sell the cards and you get
17:02
paid for giving away free copies essentially you no longer even need a game to sell to make
money off of it on Steam and this is not an exploit that's unique to Digital Homicide
anybody can do it Digital Homicide continue down this way for a while
17:16
continuing to crank out games at a stunning rate and if the near total lack of completed
mechanics in the decimation
17:22
of all Earth is any indication actively somehow getting worse This continued on until
operation clean light happened for those of you who have no idea what green light is it's
17:34
valves half assed response to customers demanding quality control on Steam games that
are complete our poster with a trailer screenshots and a description to green light and users
vote on whether the game goes on to steam or not deserved, or otherwise, greenlight has
become a notorious shithole of horrible games, with good games getting tragically buried
under mountains of shifting completely overlooked you've got users who have bought
anything with trading cards, users who upload things ironically saying
17:59
Wouldn't it be fine if that was real sea grass simulator for a prime example. Teenage and
18:04
users who up vote anything with internet names. Because for
18:07
20 logs, I desperately want to be like the cool
18:10
kids and the rise of steam groups like yellow army that actively bribe users with free steam
keys for other games in exchange for up votes for any developers that do business with
them. This has nothing to do with Digital Homicide. But it gives some important context to
what would prove to be their downfall. several large groups of steam years decided that
they'd had enough of green light being a festering cesspool of shit and decided that they
were going to start doing their part to clean up green light and prevent these awful games
from getting on this team. These groups which I like to call the green light, Crusaders
essentially gather together and encourage people to actually go through a green light down
vote the shit that shouldn't be on Steam and up but the good games that struggle for
relevance.
18:48
I myself am a member of a group called Digital homicides, poop gaming,
18:52
they essentially act as get out the vote campaigns, encouraging users to actually
participate in green light and do their part to keep games they actually want on Steam. In
other words, they don't do anything that's even remotely suspicious, a moral or against any
rules. They're just participating in the Steam Community and an active manner it didn't take
Digital Homicide long to realize these green light Crusaders were cutting into their profits by
stopping their games getting onto the storefront through legitimate votes.
19:19
19:24
Did that Joker voice carry through or not? Anyway,
19:27
the leading members of digital homicides, poop gaming
19:29
published an announcement that Digital Homicide had directly contacted the most prolific
members of multiple greenlight Crusader groups, they said, in no uncertain terms that they
were drawing up new legal papers, and that if we didn't lay off their games on greenlight,
we were going to get served. And these messages were sent
19:45
several
19:46
weeks before the lawsuits actually went through. These green light groups were undeterred
since they hadn't done jack against Jim Sterling for months and continued negatively
reviewing digital homicides games and voting against them on green light. So in September
2016, Digital Homicide filed a personal injury lawsuit against 100 Steam users. 11 of the
defendants were named and the other 89 spots were intentionally left empty with john doe's
to be named later. The suit was for a grand total of $18 million. The damages were listed as
emotional distress, financial distress, public humiliation caused by harassment, stalking,
cyber bullying, conspiracy to commit civil rights violations, formation of hate groups,
20:27
and the part that really just makes me face palm. continual criminal property damage for
over a year. Digital Homicide is attempting to sue 100 people who talk smack about them
and comment threads and reviewed their games poorly by claiming that the green light
Crusaders are hate groups and that negative reviews are defamation lights and constitute
21:22
it is indefensible that people do in fact post such crude a hateful messages online. And such
attacks are never justified even against somebody as violence, Digital Homicide.
21:31
But once you
21:32
actually sift through the court papers that digital homicides submitted,
21:35
their true motivations become crystal clear.
21:38
Pretty much every piece of evidence that they included in their own lawsuit is a screenshot
of either a negative review or a member of the green light Crusaders, raising awareness of
their underhanded and cheap tactics and policies in comments, sections, shit that's well
documented and verifiable. By the way, they're still taking a fence when people accuse
them of asset flipping. Despite being this easy to research and firm actions speak louder
than words. And though they
22:03
claim they're suing over the harassment,
22:13
Digital Homicide make construe the
22:15
negative reviews as harassment,
22:16
but they are in actuality trying to sue people for reviewing their games poorly something
that is protected by the right to free speech the lawsuit also dictates that if a defendant is
unable to pay
22:27
or lives outside the United States and this can't be sued then they demand said defended
Steam account be permanently closed and they lose all their games and purchases as
recompense a lot of people are pointing to this little detail and speculating that the claims
of destruction of property are bullshit and they're just out for simple revenge with this whole
scheme. Me personally I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. It's difficult to gauge
exactly how crazy a crazy person is. Let's be serious for a minute here can you imagine the
kind of horrifying precedent this case would set if it went forward and they want
22:59
if digital how much
23:00
I can sue people for leaving negative reviews what's to stop 20th Century Fox from suing
every review outlet that slammed fans for stick at last the millions of dollars in ticket sales
what's the stop Deep Silver from suing everybody who negatively reviewed right to hell
23:16
franchise before they even got off the ground this lawsuit If successful, what effectively
destroy consumer awareness as media would be forced to sing the praises of anything and
everything or risk of being sued Believe it or not, it actually gets better see YouTube user
Lord Crocker squirrel made a video called review the developer digital homicides seven
where he and some other youtubers took a very detailed look at Digital homicides lawsuit
against the 100 the lawsuit is so poorly written that the remaining 89 defendants could
encompass anybody who does ever has or ever will work in the games industry or profit off
video games including YouTube content creators and also encompasses the entirety of
steam user base wow I mean Josh wow
24:06
luckily we're being spared that shit storm spectacle
24:09
because this story it turns out has a happy ending See, you can actually sue somebody
unless
24:14
you have their names to issue subpoenas. So
24:17
Digital Homicide was granted a subpoena to valve for the personal information
24:21
of the 11 named people at their lawsuit. I don't know how true this is. But I've read on TV
Tropes
25:02
It's safe to say that Digital Homicide did not take this development. Well
25:05
as a long angry rant soon appeared on their homepage
25:08
threatening to sue valve for an exhaustive list of a legit breaches of contract.
25:13
The long and short of it is that Digital Homicide thinks about be trade them by letting the
people who are posting bad reviews and mean comments go on punished but then kicking
them off steam when they tried to defend themselves completely. Failing to understand that
there's a big gap between leaving a mean comment about someone and suing a person for
more
25:31
money than they will ever see in their lives.
25:34
Valve being a massively rich company with an army of lawyers staring down to dumb as is
25:45
Digital Homicide officially filed to dismiss the lawsuit against the 100, which the judge
granted without prejudice, meaning that Digital Homicide can file the lawsuit later without
running into double jeopardy. In the papers issuing the request. They cite that the damages
and did them by Valve and the Steam users have left them too broke to actually afford
sending out any of the paperwork required to pursue the lawsuit. Members of the green
light. Crusaders are suspicious of that story, and the more legally versed among them
speculate that the judge was unwilling to give their own minds the direct personal
information of the people they're intending to victimize, since they didn't have a lawyer to
act as a buffer for them. But whatever the official story is, they can't afford the lawsuit
anymore. In the follow up interview with tech Raptor, they also declared that Digital
Homicide gaming studios is officially closed out of business. And as one final dig at the
industry they miserably failed in they declared that they were re entering the workforce as if
to imply that game development isn't a real job. They also went off on a completely
nonsensical rant that they believe most of the harassment was done at the behest of some
mysterious unknown competitor on Steve's indie scene who wanted to drive them out of
business and steal their customers because they can't really blame Jim Sterling for their
problems
26:54
anymore. And God forbid, people just don't like their games very much. Even now, at the
end of the line with all cards laid on the table, they refuse to even consider the motion that
maybe just maybe they were bad at their jobs, or people didn't like their games, because
their games were crap. Know, everything has to be a conspiracy, specifically targeting them
and wanting them out of the way for some mysterious unknown reason. know everything is
a conspiracy. Everybody wants these two random, Yahoo's out of business for sinister
purposes. We've done nothing wrong and all these people are harassing us for no reason.
Unbelievable. It's because of this deeply delusional behavior
27:35
that I doubt we've seen or heard the last of Digital Homicide. Plus, despite occasional
rumors that they were filing to dismiss the case as well. The lawsuit against him, Sterling is
still ongoing, but for now, they're out of business and can't hurt anybody anymore.
27:53
A developer who lashed out at anybody who criticize their work threatened and then sued
anybody
27:59
who crossed them repeatedly participating in some of the most
28:02
vile anti consumer behavior I've ever seen from a video
28:04
game developer and played
28:06
the victim throughout the entire ordeal myself, I think they might have genuine mental
problems, or at the very least some form of ego mania. You can't spout shit this crazy for
this long and constantly preach that somebody is out to get you and everybody doesn't like
you is in on it without having a few genuine bats in the belfry. But let's not
28:26
lose sight of what this whole ordeal was about. a developer made a lot of shooting games
they really put zero effort into
28:32
and try to silence the greatest call them out on their bullshit
28:39
until they were consumed by their own flames.
28:43
The only good to
28:44
come out of this whole mess is that giant red warning side and two other indie developers. If
you
28:48
make a bad game and get better views, either fix it or suck it up and move on. You are one
that people are many and the will of the people always wins out. You are not in entitled to
success in any line of work. And game development is no different. So don't try to silence
critics. Don't try to scam people or come up with ways to game the system. If you want to be
successful in this life. You have to work for it. Digital Homicide. Goodbye and good riddance.