The story about developer Digital Homicide Studios has always been one of distrust and frustration. Especially among the PC gaming crowd. You see, sometime ago one of their titles, Slaughtering Grounds was reviewed by Jim Sterling. In the end, he called the title a contender for the worst game of 2014 and apparently the company took offense to it. So much that they attempted to sue him due to the “damage” that he caused Digital Homicide. Now this is well-known information and can be searched on any search engine. We’re not here to talk about that.
What I am here to talk about is that recently, Digital Homicide decided to go a bit further and sue up to 100 Steam users and have even subpoenaed Valve to get the person information regarding those users. Mind you, the users did not illegal. Sure, they may have trashed talked and given the company’s games honest reviews. Seems that by having people complain about a negative experience is not allowed anymore and it’s really getting out of hand. This is exactly why reviews exist, to help the consumer make more thought out decisions. This is nothing that would have required a subpoena. For that matter, nothing that would even be grounds for a lawsuit, but there they were. Per Digital Homicide, they were seeking the identities of 100 users for a $18 million dollar personal injury claim. What’s more outlandish is that a judge in Arizona actually granted this, but I’m not even going go into that portion. Thankfully, this was brought to light by YoutTuber “
Thankfully, this was brought to light by YoutTuber “SidAlpha” and has provided the onto the internet, countless discussions about this madness ensured. Many even suggested that Value should stop dealing with Digitial Homicide, completely. Well, that’s exactly what ended up happening.
As of yesterday, Valve has removed the entirely of Digital Homicide’s gaming catalog from Steam. This was confirmed when Polygon.com, reached out to Valve who responded with the following:
“Valve has stopped doing business with Digital Homicide for being hostile to Steam customers.”
.. and the rest of this fucking shovelware … poof … GONE!!!! :D rejoice pic.twitter.com/0P9Nj5LIuA
— lashman (@RobotBrush) September 16, 2016
Honestly, I have no idea what they’re thinking. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t claim to know much about this branch of the law, so this is a bit fuzzy. Yet, I’m still not sure exactly how they expect to go after Valve, much less anyone else in these lawsuits when they don’t have any claims or proof of damages. Valve is within their rights to remove their games from their catalog. It’s no different than if Digital Homicide sold games at a local gaming store, yet they kept harassing the customers to buy their games or if a customer did buy it and received to complain about it. The store owner then has two choices; Ignore the customers or stop selling the product. Valve simply decided that the abuse coming from the company wasn’t worth it and let them go.
We’ll just have sit back, grab some popcorn and see how this plays out. As disgusting as it is.
