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Valve boots indie studio off Steam for being hostile to users

This week, it came to light that indie studio Digital Homicide had been granted a subpoena order against Valve in order to obtain the identities of 100 Steam users in order to file an $18 million lawsuit against them over “personal injury” caused by those speaking negatively about the studio and its games. It turns out that Valve isn't a big supporter of this and has instead decided to boot the Studio from Steam entirely.

Digital Homicide is pretty famous for its hostile attitude towards both journalists and Steam users alike, particularly those that criticise the studio's games and business practices. In order to obtain the subpoena, DH developer, James Romine, presented the court with screenshots of Steam users talking negatively about games and accusing the studio of stealing assets.

hgy

Digital Homicide had 18 games on Steam prior to Valve stepping in, all of which have now been removed. Valve gave a statement to the press explaining its decision: “Valve has stopped doing business with Digital Homicide for being hostile to Steam customers.”

This isn't the first high-profile lawsuit Digital Homicide has filed, the studio has been trying to sue journalist Jim Sterling for $15 million for some time now. However, we haven't had much of a progress update on that front for a while.

KitGuru Says: It is situations like this that show why Valve should perhaps play a bigger role when it comes to Steam curation. Sure, review systems and Steam Curators can help warn people away from bad games but there are still numerous shifty developers doing business on Steam right under Valve's nose. 

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21 comments

  1. They deserve this for being a**holes. All those developers with such attitude need to be kicked off the market. This way, we will have cleaner gaming market out of toxic devs and have more people poking the rubbish bins on the streets to find food. Good job Valve.

  2. Customers are dicks. I like the devs that do what they want. Fuck the customers, if they don’t like it they can go eat a dick.

  3. WhateverYouWantItToBe

    Guess you have no idea who Digital Homicide really are? This is far from your typical indie studio. They consistently target anyone that criticises the s**t they put out. Most of which is just Unity games made in a week using Unity store assets and none of the games have anything unique or interesting except one which had a little bit of potential but then they just left that to create more crap.

  4. Hah, get rekt

  5. the only dick here is you. ignorant dolt trying to look cool in the interwebz. pathetic.

  6. the ironic part is, now that steam booted 18 more titles of steam, the only way to get them now is with a previous key or a giftable copy,

    and like all removed games before this.. they trade like gold when their no longer available to get

  7. The difference there is, the devs already got paid for those gifts/keys bought, any increase in their price in terms of trading won’t get them anymore money, it’ll just give more money to the people hoarding the games.

  8. Games trade like gold when they aren’t available only if people want to play the games in general.

  9. Hahaha…Van, you stupid DH fanboy. Made my day you little faggot. You like dicks, dont you?!

  10. Based on their shite games they make, it sounds like their chasing huge money because they are not making enough. One shit company off steam, Ubiliars should be too plus a few more.

  11. no entirly.. Games like The stomping lands ect even though MP is completely dead and there zero reason to play it is trading for retarded amount of ts2/dota2/csgo keys

    There’s a thing with stream users going nuts over having Untenable games in there library’s

  12. Yeah obsessed collectors wants those games , and trust me not to play them … just for collecting purposes

    Which is great since no profit will go to the developrs whatsoever
    Since they already bought those keys from old bundles and what not at the original price, so all the extra profit goes to the user that sold it.

    So yeah devs wont make shit so thats great news 😀

  13. Van, fun fact
    They downloaded a jimsterling video on youtube, edited it with captions filled with 10 year old rage insults and reuploaded it in an account called “Fuckjimsterling”

    They literally blasted anyone who talked bad about them

    I said ” Maybe you shouldn’t have made that youtube video ” Was literally permanently banned on their steam forums for the reason ” Asshole ”
    I was an asshole for saying maybe they shouldnt have done that most retarded action they could have done

    They literally give steam keys to alt accounts that they created to give fake positive feedback.

    Every positive review on any of their game is fake or trolly, all their games are pure garbage.

  14. the developers attitude was very wrong, but the people commenting on their games was so hateful too, if the games are bad there’s no need for so many hate, people won’t buy period.

  15. about fkn time I’d rather spent my entire life with russian csgo players than seeing them selling games

  16. Lol pathetic losers.

  17. They deserve it less for being… disreputable, and a lot more for asset flipping. It’s not good behavior and it’s setting a rather low bar as things like Unity make it very easy to asset flip very quickly for very little effort.

    When a lazy hammer mechanic can make a passable hack and slash in a couple weeks using Unity, a company like this one can make a decent return on investment very quickly with a staff that has a decent understanding of rapidly churning out barely passable scripting modules that they can reuse over and over.

  18. And nothing of value was lost.

  19. Honestly it simply seems the dev got what they were dishing out, two wrongs don’t make a right, but there’s no denying that the dev started all this with their toxic attitude and scam-like strategy on Steam.

  20. I currently make roughly six to eight thousand bucks monthly working from home on the internet. For everybody eager to finish simple online tasks for 2h-5h each day from your sofa at home and make valuable benefit for doing it… Then this work opportunity is for you… FAVE.CO/1Pj8UFH

    sdfs

  21. I have no idea who they are really, never played any of their games. But any company that doesn’t pander to customers and recite the “customer is always right” motto deserves a little bit of praise. Of course, they could always be more tactful though. And being a girl I would hope I like dicks… I have no problem with ‘faggots’ as you call them, but we all have our preferences.