I'm starting to think they really are going for no publicity is bad publicity...
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Don't worry Ekaros, people still hate you more then even Digital Homicide
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After some half asleep, amateur, lazy googling, I can't figure out what they're trying to sue these people for.
But since it's Dhom I'm guessing they left a negative review or something like that.
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That's unclear so far. As far as I can tell from the court documents (linked in the OP's source link), this is groundwork to get the personal details they need before they file the actual lawsuit with actual charges.
Funnily enough, one of the documents is a screencap from a Rush Delta Z giveaway on this site with no direct relation to anything Digital Homicide.
The rest of the evidence provided to the court so far consists mostly of people pointing out their company name changes and/or using bad language.
The company name changes and stuff that follows are proven facts - as far as I know, courts in general throw out cases if the thing you're suing for is the consequence of your own actions.
The bad language - eh, I doubt that carries much weight either.
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I'm guessing it's all the death threats they received from people upset at wasting money on unbelievably crappy games.
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Perhaps the next step from them is to change the name to Digital Suicide
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Well it may be actually funny coz according to EU law steam cannot give your personal details without court warrant, despite the fact that DH will obviously fail those cases just imagine how much money you will make in court if valve will actually leak your personal european data :)
PS. Has Digital ever even won any case or is this just a questionable advertising policy ?
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According to US law too. And the funny thing is that if none of the 100 sued people are actually US residents, even if they find a judge to make Valve send the data over, they could do nothing.
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Huh that's what i tought. Well I have no more words for those guys. They have really 'original' user policy I must admit :)
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Valve isn't going to hand over data for American users either. Hell, if they had a professional attorney, said attorney could be slapped with sanctions for this. Lucky for them, they're representing themselves. Valve can (and will) have the whole thing ended with a simple motion to tell digital suicide to go fuck themselves. ok, technically it's a Rule 26c motion, but that's just the technical term for telling the other party to go fuck itself
oh, and generally the losing party of such a motion has to pay all the costs. So DH just fucked themselves royally
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They screwed themselves even more if you consider that Valve tried at one point to remove Digital Homicide from Steam and just got soft after they begged them on their knees to refrain from doing so. One can assume that after this case faily miserably that their buisness relation will be terminated.
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This is what I'm also thinking. If I was Valve I certainly wouldn't want my business involved in drama of this sort - developers taking this kind of action against Steam customers can only damage the reputation of the platform, and I doubt Digital Homicide generate enough revenue to be worth much more than the bad publicity they already cause. I wouldn't be surprised if DH get dropped quicker than CS:GO gambling.
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Maybe we start seeing their cards sold for 2 cents instead of 3. i.e. their cut is removed
XD
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I have opinions on what they should do with their trading cards, but I fear they might be legally actionable.
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Impressive O.o That was a lot faster than I sssumed. But again, this was not unexpected. A truly brilliant move from Digital Homicide .....
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That game capture makes my eyes bleed, btw i dont understand how you can make that type of games, oh yes for the money, one night with redbull and game done. For me games are some type of art, you just cant make art like this.
Never knew about DH and their games.
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Their games were mostly just a handful of Unity assets compiled into a bug-ridden mess. They clearly didn't spend even one night on some of their most notorious releases, which were just re-releases of previous titles with a few assets flipped or even just a change of camera angle.
They mostly made money by pushing their junk out cheap enough that people felt they could make a profit from the trading cards. Sadly there is a lot of such trash on Steam - DH only drew attention to themselves because of their bizarre reactions to mostly justified criticism.
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As per the court documents (again follow the link in OP's source), the subpoena has been granted.
So Valve will have to either disclose the details, or provide proper arguments not to do so.
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They have 'subpoenaed Valve in order to get these people’s personal information' , good luck in fighting with Valve lawyers :)
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You never know.
If Valve's lawyers work like the rest of the company, they'll just pass on the user's details and cross their fingers shit sorts itself out.
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Nah, that's not gonna work, Valve loves monnies to much to risk massive lawsuit against it due to personal data leak :)
But ye, as you said, you never know and everything is possible in our weird world.
PS. Just for fun I've actually went through all the attachements they have as proof and damn it made me laugh. It's like when me and my sister were kids, we used to fight each other, you know, like a kids do, slightly hit each other, say something stupid and then my younger sister were usually run to our parents crying about stuppidest thingh. That's in a nutshell DH behaviour in my opinion :)
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Valve's legal team is impressive enough that this will only end badly for DH. Valve may be merciful, but this isn't the first time DH pulled some shit. We may see them (DH) blackballed from Steam (and maybe even other distribution platforms) for this.
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well, that's the thing.
It's not really a personal data leak if it's by court order.
In that case not handing over the data becomes obstruction of justice if you don't provide a valid reason do to so, where "Valid reason|" depends on jurisdiction, and "I don't believe whoever is asking for this has valid grounds for a lawsuit" doesn't qualify as a valid reason in all parts of the world.
If Valve wants to play it safe in their own interests, they'll comply with the court, and from them on watch from the sidelines how DigiHom wreck themselves even further on the baseless lawsuits.
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It would not be a personal data leak as if a court orders them to hand over the info they must comply or they could face trouble themselves.
The thing that Valve would most likely do is use there lawyers to delay it and other means to cost them more money to keep fighting though in this case since DH is acting as there own lawyers it might be easier to get them to give up.
I am not sure why any judge worth a damn would grant such info based on bad reviews as this could open the flood gates for bigger issues.I do not see how any of the reviews arise to slander or the likes but eh.
Also all Valve has to prove is these are baseless lawsuits and so on and then they do not have to hand anything over just because something is granted does not mean the info will just be handed over as Valve can fight back with showing proof as to why they will not hand said info over.Wich i am sure Valve will fight it as it will be bad on there end to just hand it over without a fight even with a court order.
Still in the end if Valve has no personal info they will have nothing to hand over other then an I.P. which proves little of ownership of said account.
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Please try to read all before cut a fragment of longer discussion. I've posted earlier about "steam cannot give your personal details without court warrant" which I just called like this personal data leak in this comment later on to basicly short things out. Cheers ! :)
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Well excuse me fine sir for over looking it.You seem to want to make it clear you posted it and your the only one allowed to post such things and opinion.Try and not be the internet police also ...cheers!
P.S. a warrant is different from a subpoena
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Sure thing pal, anyway it seems that things are looking fine and Valve doesn't approve extremely retarded DH user policy and along with any subpoenas towards them hehe :)
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Anyone who wants to read the documents can get them here
1) this clearly is not written by any competent lawyer.
2) reading this is a clear example of why you should always involve an attorney
3) lucky for these numbnuts, courts (in the US) are very forgiving of people who represent themselves, and will give them repeated opportunities to correct deficiencies; if this had been drafted by an attorney, it'd get thrown out within minutes
4) there are a handful of allegations that may actually be actionable in court, particularly libel. With sufficient adjustments, and a lenient judge, they may actually be able to push through
One instance in particular stands out note that I haven't read the whole thing, just parts of it. According to the allegation, one youtube review (which I am unable to access) stated that they stole a font. DI provides a link where the font in question was obtained.
In Arizona, the elements of a defamation claim are:
a false statement concerning the plaintiff;
the statement was defamatory;
the statement was published to a third party;
the requisite fault on the part of the defendant; and
the plaintiff was damaged as a result of the statement.- We have a false statement "DI stole the font".
- To be “defamatory,” a statement must be false and bring the defamed person into disrepute, contempt, or ridicule, or impeach her honesty, integrity, virtue, or reputation.
There's a pretty good chance that the review will meet this definition - The statement was published on youtube
- the requisite fault for private persons is negligence; without going into detail, yeah, this is negligence
- Plaintiff's damage is debatable, and it's up to DI to prove they actually suffered damage
DI has a real possibility of winning a defamation suit against John Doe 1.
In order for DI's discovery request from Valve to be granted, DI only needs to show that they can win the case, not that they are likely to win. The above shows that, at least with regards to John Doe 1, they're able to provide enough detail to show they could win.
Yeah, even with Valve's expensive lawyers, there's a good chance Valve will be compelled to provide John Doe 1's personal information.
Note: it's been brought to my attention that John Doe 1 lives in Canada. Can't be sued.
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wow, don't review games if you live in the country of the developer, is the takeaway for me in that..
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In the U.S. you can sue for anything, as long as you can afford the filing fee (varies by state, where I live it's $36)
doesn't mean you have a chance of winning, and if there's no chance, the case can be dismissed right away. and a plaintiff who keeps filing suits that don't have merit can get in trouble for it
In this case, it's not the reviews that's the problem, it's that someone stated that John Romine did something illegal (stealing a font). That's defamation.
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make shit game, pay $100, get greenlit with promises of keys and get profit$
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So Steam, what are you waiting for? Just end your "business" relation with DH. It's not like you'd need those pennies.
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You have a good point. I think Gaben will probably get fed up with the negative publicity soon since now his company has to get involved.
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Indeed. Especially as Digital Homicide mostly does this because they go after "There is no such thing as bad publicity", as
Ekaros suggested above. They have not much to lose in that scenario, but Steam certainly has.
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Unless the press cracks down own them, they would most likely sell anything that makes a single cent worth of profit for them. Yes, I truly believe Valve is this desperate to squeeze out every last drop of its own platform, despite the hundreds of millions of profit they make yearly.
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You mean the company that gave out an OS they developed in-house to OEMs who didn't have to pay an arm and leg for it? The one that sent out 300 beta machines (one of which is currently hooked up to my TV) and later sent an updated controller... with no intention of recalling them?
They're not that obsessed with minor costs. They are, however, fairly concerned with image.
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OS they developed
not like they made Linux themselves
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You're right. They didn't.They did dump tons of hours into it to get it usable, get Linux tuning on it, and whatnot. They worked with devs from across the board (including directly helping with driver development) with little more than a hope that it would be viable. They dumped man hours into porting their games to Linux on a gamble. It didn't pay off how they expected, but the gamble did get more people playing and making games on Linux.
They're too big-picture (no pun intended) to care about the pennies.
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In some ways Valve still behaves like a small entrepreneurial start-up. Still focused on big ideas and is willing to fund them, which is good, but completely neglecting the nuts and bolts of a solid business ... customer service and improving the stability of its core platform, which is obviously bad. Gabe needs to get the balance right. Sometimes it's okay to care about the pennies.
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It was mostly in reply to talgaby's suggesting Valve will take the cheap approach if possible.
They're willing to burn money if they think it's going to be interesting.
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I agree with your assessment. Just pointing out that I think they are big enough where they should start to optimize their spending.
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I didn't see this initially, but…
I am not sure using the SteamOS as an example to demonstrate Valve's not-cheapness is a good idea. It is a Debian Linux with a Valve logo on it that is supposed to be stripped of all unneeded components and with a driver support rivalling Windows.
Over three years have passed since its announcement. Right now this OS with the supposedly huge amount of man-hours in it managed to get to the point in three years where it doesn't suck ass compared to Windows, it just simply sucks compared to Windows as a gaming platform.
Now, either Valve didn't really put man hours in it and just let their three interns code it in their free time, which would explain why it is still in practically a niché distro only a few heard about and even less dared to try to run it—and why Valve never put any effort into marketing it—or the men whose hours were dumped into it for three years so far don't really know what they are doing. Which, looking at how Steam is the only online platform I know that requires a weekly downtime every week to even operate (and still has outages frequently), would fit into the pattern.
In the meantime, Sony and MicroSoft said back in the late 90s that they want to make a gaming console and they made a gaming console from scratch in that time frame. In Sony's case, including the hardware architecture.
So, yeah, SteamOS can be a good example. Of how to do something as half-assed as possible.
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I dunno; Alienware and Syber sold out of their machines shortly after launch.
As for how few tried to run it... you're majorly underestimating the number of people who downloaded it. Almost 600 issues opened over these 3 years and not all of them were by a small handful of people.
SteamOS has been developed by about a dozen devs.
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If you mean Steam machines, all signs point to them being a massive commercial failure. This article put together the little data we know:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/its-time-to-declare-valves-steam-machines-doa/
So it was like Battleborn: yes, the pre-orders sold well, then it stopped and never went anywhere.
And if they are developing an entire operating system with a dozen people, then they are not taking it at all seriously.
600 tickets is not much, sadly. I think you can see more issues raised in Archi's ASF forum alone. 200 tickets/year on an OS complexity software means it has little to no feedback; the guys I am working with, who are creating an emulator for a custom OS, complain about the lack of feedback with 1000 tickets a year from direct customers, since it is difficult to find all bugs without those…
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500,000 units with no advertising isn't a failure. It was a test in the market. Because of it and the previous attempt to bring Steam to Linux (which rumor has it, was initially for getting it ready for SteamOS and not just to bring it to the platform), there are twice the number of games available for SteamOS than there are for the Xbox One.
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500,00 units made. And not a single one was manufactured since then. If they would actually sell, they would be in production. And Valve wouldn't try so hard to not talk about them any more. Face it: Steam machines were a dead end and in a year nobody will remember them. It is like the NVidia shield. Which was like the Nokia N-Gage (which, by the way, was swept under the rug and written off as a commercial failure with 3 million sold…). They sold some units, had a few people using them, but in the end, a few years after their release, nobody is even remembering they existed.
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Seems that you underestimated Steam. ;)
Imho it was pretty much inevitable that Digital Homicide would do no more business on Steam. I just wonder what those brothers expected, if not this.
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I had a peak at the court documents and they list Steam usernames rather than SteamIDs. Good luck with that :3
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I dunno why they bother with this if it wasn't for haters or Jim Fucking Sterling Son they would have no fucking sales of their shit AT ALL, must just be mad at being found out and not getting to be shady cunts behind the scenes where nobody would notice but sadly somebody noticed now they are hurt in the rectum.
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I think they make more money off of cards farmed from keys they give away for free than from actual sales
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Oh yeah forgot about that printing free money very very very very very very slowly
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getting 3 cents every time someone uses idlemaster is still more profitable than waiting for some idiot to buy one of their games corrupted files
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It must just be a combination of broken ego and tiny man-parts. There's no way this is easier than just making a good game.
In related news, I've found replacements for Digital Homicide's current developers: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/typing-with-brain-monkeys
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It is kind of sad. They have to know that their games are really bad but they just MUST sue the guy who is telling the 100% truth about it. There isn't a slight chance that they could get anything from this unless one counts the laughs of people and the publicity.
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Actually, they're -certain- their games are good. That's the issue. They're like people who try cooking, get all of the ingredients, and still screw it up, but insist it tastes fine because the ingredients are there. They simply have no palate.
DH has no sense of taste. They're tonedeaf.
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They're nothing but scum. Pushing bad games with stolen and unmodified assets, screwing steam users and suing reviewers.
That's all I can say. Let the image below say the rest.
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I wonder if this was the plan all along? That "game" is a ripoff as documented by Sterling. Valve should just remove it from their platform.
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They're just digging themselves a hole. There is no way they'll win in court so the court bills will probably make them go bankrupt.
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court fees are actually pretty low, so if you're representing yourself (as they are) it's totally manageable. Unless you lose a motion to compel discovery, because your request is completely bonkers... then you have to pay the other side's attorney fees
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The Romine brothers need to have a legal guardian appointed who would smack them with rolled up newspapers like dogs and shout NO NO BAD ROMINO NO LAWSUIT.
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I know this is an old post, but I just read it and lol'd. Consider yourself whitelisted~
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And in short, to me DigiHom's behavior makes as much sense as this GIF
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This can't win because then there would be no games developed or reviewed since everyone would want to grab the easy money.
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OMG, I traded TF2 items with this dude once. Can't remember his name. Bizarre stuff. It could have been an impersonator, but I don't know why anyone would claim to be that insane unless they were really that dude.
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You can't make up this stuff. DH is the gift that keeps on gifting. Maybe those guys have a future in comedy because it's certainly not as game developer. And pissing off Lord Gaben is probably not a smart idea when their main income is probably the card system.
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"Digital Homicide are going after Steam users as well as Jim Sterling.
Well that escalated quickly.
If you cast your mind back, you may remember Jim Sterling’s back and forth with Digital Homicide after he did a first impressions video on their title Slaughtering Grounds.
Since then, the Romine brothers – who constitute the developer team at Digital Homicide – have launched a lawsuit against Sterling (legal name James Stanton), stating that he has “falsely accused [Digital Homicide] and caused damage” to the tune of $10 million dollars.
The brothers were using crowdfunding for legal fees initially, but that avenue had to be abandoned when “harassers” began “donating amounts specifically to cause charges rather than donations and charge backs to cause financial fees,” according to Kotaku. They have since decided to represent themselves.
This week, Digital Homicide has taken things up a notch.
According to these court documents provided by Sid Alpha who talks more about this in the video above, the brothers are also suing 100 Steam users and have subpoenaed Valve in order to get these people’s personal information.
James Romine is now after $18 million dollars in this personal injury suit.
Over on the NeGAF thread, there’s a lot of head scratching going on as everyone tries to figure out what it is Digital Homicide hope to accomplish.
Have you got any thoughts on this bizarre case? As always, chime in below."
@Source
Well now that's the joke of the day.
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