Yeah, I've finally seen the aftermath of the whole Jim Sterling v. Digital Homicide debacle since the embarrassment of an interview from a year and a half ago, including a couple of other talks about the court case itself and how it was (rightfully) thrown out of court. To be honest, it wasn't on my mind until this point.
I used to feel bad for the company and the one developer struggling to make a living making games, being clearly in over their head through the mess they cobbled together. I used to firmly believe that they were just a really incompetent one-man team who just couldn't handle criticism in any regard. I think the past year and a half confirms this.
I used to think Jim Sterling was somewhat of a bully, going after poorer quality games on Steam in some effort to shame single person efforts, seemingly with little purpose beyond bringing a light on them in an effort to attack people's efforts... (in a rather unfunny, nonconstructive, and non-entertaining manner, to be honest).
But at this point, I've really taken a 180 on the whole thing.
Jim still does his rounds at chasing these poorer quality games around, but the narrative seems clearer (to the point of being obvious). It's not really a red light flagging that these games are bad, but that Steam and by extension Valve had a broken system that allowed this lack of quality control to begin with, and allowed these games to be sold for large sums of money ($20-$50 for something I could have made in a game jam). Personally, I'm more a believer in letting the market and word-of-mouth decide what games are "quality" and letting truly bad games sink by making no money at all, but Greenlight alone allowed almost the exact opposite to happen, preventing decent to mediocre titles from even showing up on shelves, and letting the "community" vote to allow true trash to take its place.
Given, this isn't the full picture, and I have much less knowledge of the situation than Jim does, but it brings me to talking about James...
James Romine, founder of Digital Homicide, is just an anomaly. He loses all respect from me for the lawsuit he's posed against Jim Sterling, and yet I envy the bubble he's managed to live in up until this point. Part of me had wondered what the implications would be if a developer could sue a critic for perceived damages done, but reality checks in when the whole case gets thrown out of court, again, and again, and again.
And his company, Digital Homicide, really has stood up to its name with the sheer amount of trash they've put onto Steam, and the dramatic epic that has led him to waste time and money to chase after random Steam users, to ultimately getting reprimanded by Valve and his entire library of "games" removed permanently. Proudly, I still hold a copy of "The Slaughtering Grounds", as a reminder to never have a tantrum as epic as James.
He kind of comes across as someone that REALLY doesn't know how to let go of something, which is because, well... there's a reason the judge had to keep throwing the case out.
I guess I have to admit I was wrong, though I still stand by the points I held initially. I cringe at reading the old posts, but I stand by my point: a critic's review has a damning effect on someone's career. In the games industry, it could just mean the end of the career overall.
But in the end, I suppose, when a game is at the level of Slaughtering Grounds, it isn't the review that made it a bad product. It was the bad product that made it a bad product: the review only served to point it out.
