Indeed, because Valve, by continuing to sell their games, is enabling them.
All Digital Homicide does is pump out game after game after game utilizing pre-packaged assets that they purchase, cobbled together haphazardly and masquerading as a game. And none of them are any good because they don't seem to know what they are doing. Nor does there seem to be any incentive to improve them because it's just a scheme to milk as much money as possible out of each title and then simply move on to the next one. They also use their previous 'work' in giveaways and so forth to try and garner as many votes as possible for whatever current projects they may have in the Greenlight system, and the cycle simply repeats ad infinitum. It's despicable and Valve needs to open their eyes to this. And so does this website by allowing their featured giveaways to continue here...
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Digital Homicide certainly explains the piss poor site design
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Ever since it started, Bundle Blitz has felt like a poorly disguised excuse to grab email addresses while giving out as little as possible while their giveaways are 'broken' and claiming to be new and such. This new bit of information doesn't surprise me at all.
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Who knows, perhaps they payed for the licenses of the pictures? :P
But I simply have no idea for what those guys from Digital Homicide use their brains for.
Publishing shitty games for a few cents that get only sold in $1 bundles, making a horrible looking website with bundles that no one will ever buy. I mean how are they earning money? They won't get rich that way.. perhaps they only want to flood the steam library with nightmares :/
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btw, if you want concrete proof rather than a jim sterling tweet
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Turns out that digging through steam DB actually creates even more evidence:
https://steamdb.info/app/392870/history/
Which is also one of the games that Bundle Blitz has been handing out.
How many heads does this hydra have at this point? 3 are confirmed (Digital Homicide, ECC, Micro Strategic Game Designs and while Bundle Blitz is not 100% confirmed, it does seem like its within the realm of extremely likely).
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https://youtu.be/0ZUGyqgk1sc?t=8m44s <-- this part
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Turns out that Jim Sterling wrote an article on the subject. You can find it here:
http://www.thejimquisition.com/2015/09/digital-homicide-and-the-case-of-the-sockpuppet-developers/
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I'll repeat from this thread: http://www.steamgifts.com/go/comment/Ah4feMb
Oh my... So this site is somehow tied to Digital Homicide ?
Who are now officially Criminal Scum(tm) due to trying to hijack another company to publish this very Galactic Hitman thing ? (It might have been an accident, but I won't believe that until it can be proven)
No seriously, poking around on the steam discussion page for this game, I found this entertaining read: http://steamcommunity.com/app/392050/discussions/0/517142253865823114/
"
"
http://www.thejimquisition.com/2015/09/digital-homicide-and-the-case-of-the-sockpuppet-developers/
Galactic Hitman Developer changed from ECC Games to Every Click Counts Games: https://archive.is/0Gwxz (Trying to avoid a lawsuit from ECC Games huh?)
And more! The artwork they used, potentially stolen: http://laslolf.deviantart.com/... Thanks to this guy: https://archive.is/I5K9p
Edit: Someone says the artwork could have been bought via shutterstock.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/...
https://archive.is/ce7Oj
"
For the sake of discussion, let's call the real ECC Games "ECC games", and call Digital Homicide "Every Click Counts" as that's what they changed their name to in a pitiful (and hopefully futile) attempt
Also for good measure:
Both the "Bundle blitz" and "Digital Homicide" names are used on this site, under different accounts. If they are one and the same, they're violating the rules here as well. NOTE though: Tat is one of the points that is NOT definitively proven yet.
What's suspected to be their current round of projects is published under a wider range of games:
runtimegamenetwork
Victory Games (And yes, the one title there is mostly the Hammer 2 Unity asset pack, which other scum also try to get greenlit as their own game).
Micro Strategy Designs (Also Attrocious: Nuclear Domination)
And more. It looks like they're going for maximum 2 Greenlights per shell acount.
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Micro Strategy Design is more or less confirmed to be Digital Homicide:
https://steamdb.info/app/392870/history/
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By the way, does anyone have any information about the developers featured in the Bundle Blitz bundle?
Micro Strategy Design is Digital Homicide, but as for the other ones, very little seem to be known.
The developer of MAS - Mini Attack Submarine, SimpleButFunGames, claim that their game is sold somewhere else. Where exactly? I did a quick google search and could not find anything about the game, apart from Bundle Blitz. The game looks like an asset flip.
Victory Games is a suspected Digital Homicide studio. Not confirmed though, and I can't find anything about them. Their game The Extra Large Testicle and seems like an asset flip (see Nanabanana post above)
Runtimenetwork is a suspected Digital Homicide studio. Not confirmed though
jergco123 has two games. Both games seem to be asset flips. One of them has a logo that's just nabbed from a clipart site. The other one look quite familiar to the one for Extra Large Testicle.
machinfinitygames777 has one game. Its logo looks very similar in design to that of Grimmehzs Journey (as in unrelated picture with text that does not really fit). Game is a clear asset flip.
TheMAC has one game.
All of these have their profiles set to private, which is not all that strange, but outside of their greenlight pages, and bundle blitz, there seem to be next to nothing about them on the internet (other than Jim Sterling making fun of the game that TheMAC made).
edit
Actually, someone did a bit of digging:
Operation: Vile Strike shares sound effects with The Slaughtering Ground and models with Devil's Share. Source (Yeah, not a great source, but it would seem to indicate that machinfinitygames777 is another name for Digital Homicide.
The same user spotted a similar thing with Assault on Orion 7
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Asset sharing would probably be illegal. There is nothing that stops other developers from having bought the same assets, of course, and there are certain assets that I've spotted in several games (same town in Wonky Pigeon! and Predator simulator). But things just fit together a bit too well in the case of the many-headed Digital Homicide beast when it comes to the games featured in this bundle
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While we are at it, remember Muxwell? He made Earth: Year 2066, a game that was removed from steam due to it not working properly.
http://www.dotabuff.com/players/103351882
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=465142762
Why is the DOTAbuff profile relevant? Check what names he has used, now check what steam profile it's linked to.
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Could be this another tentacle of Digital Homicide and they even could be linked to Muxwell?
Looking at the comments on Muxwell's game Jurassic Domination: Dinosaur T-Rex, I found someone called Psycho Robot Studios (http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198235826252) who is using a logo very similar to Every Click Counts one, he is also developing a game called Beep Boop Bot (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=469796511) which looks like an asset flip fest, even the cover artwork is in the lines of DH and co.
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That Beep Boop Bot might be asset flipping (I didn't verify yet) but from the trailers it looks too much like a functioning game to make me believe it's Digital Homicide
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I'm pretty sure they totally paid for this cover art
http://laslolf.deviantart.com/art/Daddy-D-382624242
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The picture was found on Shutterstock, so it's not impossible, or even all that unlikely, that they payed for it. Now if the person who uploaded it to Shutterstock is the same person as the one who created it, well that question has yet to be answered.
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It is. "EDIT; I've put this piece, along with several others, on shutterstock. To everyone who wrote me about this art or any other being used somewhere - thank you!
I realize now that I made a mistake not announcing that some of my work can be found there and bought, which led to a lot of notes and warnings xD"
But a commercial licence on Shutterstock is much more expensive that a regular one (around 800% more costly), and I don't really see why they would pay the extra when they really don't care about their games. They even stretched the picture to the limit, murdering all the work the artist did.
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Wanted to mention Attrition: Nuclear Domination as well (store page, not Greenlight).
Developer is listed as "Micro Strategic Game Designs", small variation on the "Micro Strategy Designs" used for the Coastal Carnage greenlight.
While we're at it, we should also add the Publisher " Game Portal Publishing" on the to-watch list.
That one shows up on the Every Click Counts Games store pages (Devils Share, Galactic Hitman). Maybe they'll use that name for other "Developer" shells as well.
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Ah, did not notice the difference in name there (Micro Strategic Game Design/Micro Strategy Design). It's not the first time Digital Homicide has done that though, previously they released their games under different variants of the Digital Homicide name, so if you clicked on the developer name on steam, you would only see one game. I guess that was an early warning sign of things to come.
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A new one for the Unknown list.
-> So far, it's on par with DH's usual style.
What keeps it unconfirmed:
Finding the game's website (https://www.dirtyfightergame.com/download), that is a dodgy mess that requires a login. Don't find a company name anywhere. So I got a login using a burner email. Guess I'll see what new kinds of spam I get :)
After getting a login, found that whoever's behind this can't make their minds up on their company name. That's either called ZB Products, or Zero Brain LLC (Their Privacy Policy page shows both), a "Bill Buckner" (https://www.facebook.com/people/Bill-Buckner/100009710738397), or Dirty Fighter Game (http://thedirtyfightergame.blogspot.nl/, steam greenlight page).
It takes effort to be that inconsistent with your own name. Can;'t prove if that's deliberate or if it ties back to DH in any way though.
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I wonder if Valve will let a game that has a game mode where the women fight without any clothes on onto their storefront.
But yeah, Dirty Fighter looks like straight up asset theft rather than a simple asset flip. I think DH are "smart" enough to avoid that at this point in time (they've fixed their issues with stolen assets in the past). So this might well be a brand new "developer".
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Lol, I figured let's do a reverse image search on 1 of the greenlight games featured on bundleblitz under the "new on greenlight" header (assault on orion 7) just for the fun of it, and of course one of the first hits shows that it's a stock image
I could understand the logic behind it if it was 2005, but shouldn't a dev in this day and age realize it takes literally 2 seconds to expose them?
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I wonder if this gives any profit.
All these Greenlight registrations, releasing horrible games for free.
Most games so far have trading cards, every card, emoticon and wallpaper that sells they get some money from it.
I wonder if it's worth the effort.
Maybe they are trying to win the worst company competition...
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You might have noticed the new bundle site, Bundle Blitz, which is a rather amateurish looking site. It's been handing out copies of Galactic Hitman, a game that was recently released by ECC games.
Well, it turns out that ECC games, or more specifically ECC games on Steam is in fact Digital Homicide, and the "real" ECC games is less than happy about it. Source
Just out of curiosity I tried to see if I could find the sources for the images on the Bundle Blitz website (to see if they were stolen). The ones on the sides are just generic stock photos. The one further down I can only find on one other website, but I would be surprised if it's not just another stock photo as well, I just can't find where they got it from.
edit
Jim Sterling wrote an article on the subject.
It was requested that I put links to the greenlight pages. Here goes:
Confirmed Digital Homicide:
Costal Carnage
From developers strongly suspected to be digital homicide:
Starship: Nova Strike
Assault on Orion 7 (Shares assets with other digital homicide releases)
E.L.T: The Extra Large testicle
Games that I suspect to be from Digital homicide:
Operation: Vile Strike (Shares assets with other digital homicide releases)
Hover Tank Attack
Grimmehzs Journey
Unknown (no evidence one way or the other)
MAS - Mini attack Submarine
Bombing Run: Heavy Fire
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