Digital Homicide sues Jim Sterling for $10,000,000

Jim Sterling, notable computer game critic and raconteur, is being sued by computer game developer Digital Homicide. For real!

http://kotaku.com/angered-game-developer-sues-game-critic-jim-sterling-fo-1765484317

It seems that while Jim Sterling never tires of laughing at Digital Homicide's inability to produce an interesting game, Digital Homicide has tired of Jim Sterling finding their games a bit crappy, and has decided the best way to solve the problem is by suing Mr. Sterling for $10,000,000 - what they believe their games would have profited by had Jim not been laughing at them.

Which poses the age old question of when does criticism become silenceable. Do we want to feel like we're getting honest reviews or should we commend people who 'stand-up' to the 'small guy'?

If you don't like either Digital Homicide nor Jim Sterling then you might be grabbing for your popcorn, but those legal types like these kind of cases, because they can create precedents…

This is old news. I've mentioned it in a post about Elder Scrolls a week ago:

joxer said:

20 years of bugs.
If only there was a journalist brave enough to write about it. But I guess they are all scared especially after Jim Sterling got sued the other day.

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Never planned to write anything more but since a thread is made...

Sterling has some specific taste and I don't agree with him on everything. But the thing is, he's another rare person who warns people on DLC scams and other modern bullshit EA, Ubi and recently Konami throw at their audience.

In case of Digital Homicide, Sterling basically warned people on sorry state of their games. Instead of listening and learning from it and trying to patch or make a better product, DH continued with "uwebolling" and now are suing Sterling like he's the cause their games are so bad noone wants to buy them.

Things Jim Sterling says in his videos, at least those I've watched, do not meet my taste in every case (some things he likes that I hate and vice versa) but he is not one of those paid reviewers who glorify a crap product.
In this case, where a developer who wants to sell garbage sues a reviewer who dared to say that the emperor is naked, I'm 100% on that reviewer's side.

Yeah, like I said before, this looks like frivolous nonsense to me. They tried crowd funding to hire a lawyer, but the public just made tiny donations and then immediately reversed them, incurring charges for DH instead of raising money. Now they're representing themselves - not a good idea. I expect this to be thrown out of court.

joxer said:

This is old news. I've mentioned it in a post about Elder Scrolls a week ago

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Yes, I found out about it last week, but it looked like a joke thing at first and then Easter came along, and since it's 1st of April I thought it'd make a good "is this an April 1st thing?" "No, this is actually real" post. I tend to agree with everything you say on the subject.

Ripper said:

Yeah, like I said before, this looks like frivolous nonsense to me. They tried crowd funding to hire a lawyer, but the public just made tiny donations and then immediately reversed them, incurring charges for DH instead of raising money. Now they're representing themselves - not a good idea. I expect this to be thrown out of court.

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It certainly looked frivolous to begin with, but, as Jim Sterling would say, it is actually a thing that's happening, and when lawyers get their teeth into something they are neither cheap nor humourfull people. Sterling has said nothing on the matter for a very long time now, suggesting the matter is fully serious. I'm assuming like you that the court will consider it a waste of time, but you never know, lawyers have egos too, especially when a share of $10mill is at stake.

Now thats funny… I was suspecting an aprill's fool joke, but this is real. I remember that the orginal video JS made about their crappy fps game offered few laughs, but the way the devs keep responding to his criticism is downright hilarious. Any sensible developper would have just moved on.

Digital homice's motto btw is: "games is made with love." So maybe this explains their emotional response.

I don't think they are proper developers, in the normal sense. Since Steam abandoned any notion of quality control, there's been hundreds of chancers uploading the most unbelievable garbage in the hope of snagging a few bucks. Some of them take the most basic make-your-own-game kits, slightly modify the tutorial levels that come free with it, and release it on Steam as a proper game. It doesn't surprise me that such characters would try something like this, probably in the hopes that Jim will just pay them a few bucks to go away, and save the legal fees.

On the bright side, it caused me to look at a few of Jim's videos, and I like him, so he might have acquired at least one new viewer out of it.

lackblogger said:

Which poses the age old question of when does criticism become silenceable. Do we want to feel like we're getting honest reviews or should we commend people who 'stand-up' to the 'small guy'?

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The key word there is "honest." If your review says you don't like Skyrim because it formats your hard drive then that's a flat out lie and you can get sued for it. Or if your review says you don't like Skyrim for perfectly legitimate reasons but it turns out that you're being paid by a competitor and you don't mention that or otherwise make it obvious, that could be trouble.

The funny thing is Jim has a history of corruption himself, which he hid at his former employer (Destructoid) for 2 years. He also has a history of exorting certain types of reviews, even having his friends threaten people with "videos with over 100k views". Further, all the "corruption" he battles against is very low hanging obvious fruit, like Digital Homicide. Don't misunderstand me, they aren't good guys either. They are incompetent devs, they have censored their communities, they're only relevant at all because of Jim, otherwise they'd keep rotting on a random forgotten corner of Steam somewhere. But Jim is nowhere near the noble paragon of Early Access police he portrays himself as and flat out won't pursue actual corruption because he's in on it.

This entire conflict is just a conflict between 2 bad guys. The only real winner is us because either way someone who deserves it loses.

So you're saying that JS deserves to lose over $ 10,000,00 because of some silly video he made? Digital Homicide's lawsuit is utter bollocks. JS may not be a saint, but DH's claim is just irrational.

Oddly noone mentioned DH decided to sue everyone who posted negative review on their games on Steam. Dunno how I missed to add that into BS thread.

Then Valve decided what's enough is enough and removed all DH games from Steam catalogue.

And now, because of "financial difficulties", DH is dropping the case against buyers who thumbed their games down.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...s-drops-case-following-financial-difficulties

Their ways are common crowdfunded ways. If that reviewer kept focusing on them, it looks more like harassment than information and a way to generate traffic,clicks and revenues.

No crowdfunded dev should be prevented from making money the same way other crowdfunded devs do.

Of course, their effort wont be met, that is the same institution of justice that claims to protect from crowdfunded theft, though.

Welcome to reality. When you put something out in public, you will get criticism, and people who don't like you. In this case, DH made bare frameworks off of Unity and Unity-store assets and sold them as "games". When they turned out to be terrible, people gave DH bad reviews, and got sued for their trouble. Valve kicked the idiots off of Steam because they really don't want morons selling stuff there, and now the company is dead, fred. Lesson: Don't sue people for expressing a bad opinion of you, especially when you know full well that you deserve it.

The only case they would have is if Jim Sterling tried to extort them for money via bad video reviews. And a recorded phone call or publicly posted email would solve that issue really quickly.