Devloper Sues Customers For Bad Reviews

[Mr Snrub]

Anyone who frequents Youtube or Steam will be well aware of Digital Homicide. If you aren't, they're a shovelware company with a habit of issuing copyright takedowns against people who say bad things about their games. Well now it seems they've gone on step further and are trying to sue customers who've left bad reviews on Steam

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37407051

I can't imagine their case getting very far, but it does set a worrying trend. If you're asking people for money for your product then they have every right to criticise it. Don't know how the US system works but is this the type of lawsuit that could succeed in any way?

[TommoAE86]

That's ridiculous, I do like the bit "any legal experts willing to advise please contact us" sounds like they are just chancing their arm. Would be a dangerous road doing that, although Hello Games might be watching closely

[conkerman]

Haha.

They really are delusional.

Find the recording of the Jim Sterling call if you can. It's amazing in its awkwardness. I hope Jim laughs them out of court.

[mizx]

I can't see it getting very far at all, I doubt they can afford any decent representation anyway.

There may something in do Valve have a process to deal with reviews that are actually libellous. Just like this site they have a responsibility for what is posted on it, the users aren't going to police this. I don't imagine there are many Steam reviews with provable libel in them, Jim is too intelligent to have said anything that was.

Obviously we can't see this excuse for a game developer's reviews now, I'm guessing it was the same vein as the others things and DOS attacks that happened. Jim told his fans not to do this, but there does seem to be an element online that will just jump on the Metacritic bombing etc. whether they even knew about the game beforehand or not. You need to own it on Steam to review, but you can refund, which doesn't stop bombing.

Maybe they can do something more about that, but it's going to be a drop in the ocean for the big guys. It could be an issue for a small dev who actually produce good games, and suffered a targeted attack for some reason, but that would be very rare. I think they made non-Steam sourced keys reviews not visible by default, which was the wrong way to go about that, sure it helps with G2A etc, but what about legit key stores and review code?

Hopefully this makes Valve get of their arses and do something to stop a lot of this st getting on Steam in the first place.

Edited by mizx on Wednesday 21st September 11:00

[mizx]

TommoAE86 said:

Would be a dangerous road doing that, although Hello Games might be watching closely

NMS looks on dodgy ground if you judged it by our Sale of Goods, thy still have THAT E3 trailer on the Steam page. I don't know what US laws on this would be. The sticker over the online play logo on some of the boxed copies was really egregious.

[TommoAE86]

It would be nice if steam could have less rubbish on it. There was a blog or video that talked about that and after a few successes in indie games everyone is now doing it and it's becoming saturated with crap like the mobile game market. I quite like the reviews and really hope they don't start sanitizing them. I almost bought the revised carmagheddon until I read in multiple reviews saying "get the older one, the handling is worse than terrible". I could've ended up with another version of the crew (where ubisoft in their infinite wisdom let the guy that did watchdogs' car handling ruin another one!)