The Digital Homicide Fiasco

Waffles731
The Digital Homicide Fiasco

I don't know if you've heard of any of this so lets start from the beginning.

Back in 2014, a game developer known as Digital Homicide Studios released a terrible game about zombies called The Slaughtering Grounds on Steam. Now, as any Steam user knows, there are a lot of terrible games that get uploaded everyday. What really kicked this whole fiasco off was that after it was released with the price of 9.99 and it was reviewed by the rather well known games journalist Jim Sterling.

The Digital Homicide Fiasco

Now let's get one things straight: The Slaughtering Grounds should not have been released AT ALL. Lets get down to why.

1. First, it had stolen assets; it was discovered that the blood texture was take RIGHT FROM GOOGLE IMAGES.

The Digital Homicide Fiasco

When I said right from Google Images, yeah it was right from one of the first few results and they didn't even remove all the white background as you can see.

2. The assets it did use, it just used a standard unity pack. These guys literally bought assets from the Unity store and used them in the game when Unity assets are meant as placeholders.

3. In several ways it was less technologically advanced than the original Doom. You know how in the original Doom if you have one weapon and you come across ammo for another weapon in your inventory, you get ammo for that other weapon? Well, despite being released in 2014, a full twenty-one years after the original Doom, The Slaughtering grounds devs couldn't code in multiple ammo types. You only got ammo for the weapon in your hand.

Another way it was less technologically advanced than Doom is the fact that in Doom there were proper level ends. In The Slaughtering Grounds, the level was over after fifteen minutes and it didn't matter if you killed all the enemies in three minutes, meaning you had no objective for twelve minutes. You had to wait twelve real life minutes for the next level.

There are actually a ton more problems with it but we gotta move on or we'll be here all day. So when Jim Sterling reviewed it, Digital Homicide decided to send a copyright strike against him to take his video down at least temporarily, but you actually had to start legal action after a certain amount of time or the video was re-uploaded and it ended up getting put back.

Jim Sterling was threatened with legal action a month or so after but nothing came of it. Digital Homicide kept releasing terrible shovelware and Sterling kept calling them out when in March of this year, they launched A TEN MILLION DOLLAR LAWSUIT AGAINST Jim Sterling, though Digital Homicide openly admitted to not having enough money for a good enough attorney and turned to crowd-sourcing which for their various acts of douchbaggery (a lot of which I've had to skip) and the fact that they really never released anything but shovel-ware it failed.

Now anyone following his videos thought it had come, the big showdown.

The Digital Homicide Fiasco

Only it turns out it Digital Homicide hadn't finished picking legal fights. On the seventh of September (yeah, this month) Digital Homicide decided to ask for a subpoena for the real life info of 100 Steam users who left negative reviews for the product on the review page of the game. Why, BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO SUE A HUNDRED GAMERS WHO WERE DISSATISFIED WITH THEIR PRODUCT FOR 18 MILLION DOLLARS.

The Digital Homicide Fiasco

Valve who owns Steam decided to give them the boot and removed all their games from Steam.

Valve is a 2.5 billion dollar tech company who has a better employee to profit ratio than any other tech company in the world including Google and Apple.

So now without the money to hire a lawyer Digital Homicide decided to also sue a 2.5 BILLION DOLLAR TECH COMPANY AS WELL who can afford AN ARMY OF LAWYERS. So it seems like a game development company has finally gone completely berserk and is devoid of all reason.

Any thoughts?

The Digital Homicide Fiasco
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