Digital Homicide Studios

» see digitalhomicide.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Digital Homicide Studios was two brothers, James and Robert Romine, working out of Yuma, Arizona from 2014. Robert had been selling liquor before this. Their first release was The Slaughtering Grounds, a zombie shooter put on Steam on 31 October 2014 under the name ImminentUprising, built out of Unity asset packs bought off the store rather than made. By September 2016 they had somewhere around sixty games out under various labels, using the same method at speed.

James Stephanie Sterling recorded a video calling The Slaughtering Grounds the new worst game of 2014, which was the sort of thing they did weekly. Digital Homicide replied with a video of its own, then filed a copyright takedown against Sterling's. On 4 March 2016 it became a lawsuit, $10.76 million across nine counts including libel and assault, amended upward to $15 million later. Romine filed it himself and ran it himself. A crowdfunder for the legal costs asked for $75,000 and took in under $500.

On 12 September 2016 he filed again, this time against a hundred anonymous Steam users for $18 million in personal injury, and served Valve with a subpoena demanding the identities behind the accounts. Four days later Valve removed all twenty-one Digital Homicide games and fifteen DLC items from the store. Doug Lombardi said the company had stopped doing business with the studio for being hostile to Steam customers.

That was the end of it. Romine dropped the case against the users in October without prejudice, saying he could no longer fund it and that the delisting had destroyed the studio, which was accurate. The suit against Sterling was dismissed with prejudice on 20 February 2017.

~ the record ~

~ sixty games in two years ~

The method was legal and repeatable. Unity's asset store sells complete environments and ready-made enemy behavior, and nothing stops you from wiring a set of them together and selling the result. Greenlight, Steam's community voting queue, was the door, and by 2015 it was open wide enough that volume worked as a strategy. Sell a hundred copies each of sixty games and you have a business, provided nobody looks closely at any one of them.

Reviewers looking closely was the operating risk in that model, and Digital Homicide is the one studio from the period that treated a review as an injury to be litigated rather than a cost of doing business.

~ the hundred names ~

Suing critics is old. Subpoenaing a storefront for the legal identities of a hundred of its own customers over forum posts and review text is where this stopped being a game-industry story. Valve had spent years refusing to police what its developers said about each other, and the moment the demand landed on the customers, the company acted in four days and used the only real tool it had, which is the delete key on an entire catalog.

It also settled a question that the Greenlight era kept raising, which is what happens when a developer's conduct rather than a game's quality is the problem. Nothing in the store rules covered it. Valve did it anyway and explained it in one sentence afterward.

~ from a distance ~

I have never bought an asset-flip shooter and I was not in the Steam forums in 2016, at thirty-two and busy with other things, so this whole affair reached me the way it reached most people outside it, as a story rather than an experience. What makes it worth a grave is not the games, which nobody has defended. It is that a studio can be killed by exactly one decision, made in an afternoon, by a company that was under no obligation to make it.

digitalhomicide.com is now parked on a domain broker's page. The games are gone from Steam and were never anywhere else.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »