Death threats are a distressingly common occurrence in the games industry. But it's not every day that a developer threatens to kill Valve co-foun༺der Gabe Newell and consequently on the d🅠ay of its release.
There is, of course, more to🌜 the story. Say you've worked on a video game for years. You crafted a project from nothing, you almost secured a publishing deal but managed to fight your way through Steam Greenlight and Early Access . Now, after a few more hiccups, 💦you're ready to push the big button marked "publish" and watch your hard work appear on the front page of the Steam Store.
And it does. But it still says "Early Access" in the banner, which might turn off some potential customers. What would you do, having this momen▨t of glory tainted after months of struggle? Paranautical Activity co-creator Mike Maulbeck got mad on the internet. He tweeted several criticisms about Steam's developer policies and its hold on the PC gaming market, which is a f🅺air thing to do. Then he goofed: "I am going to kill gabe newell. He is going to die."
Maulbeck ruined his game's chances for success (he said he sold 12 copies on non-Steam platforms like Humble Bundle and Desura as of yesterday, when he was "selling more than that a minute on Steam") by making an adolescent public response to professional difficulties. He's . Before we tell him to "QQ moar" and accept the consequences for his poor judgement, we should take a hard look at the adolescent way much of this industry makes, sells, and thinks about𝓡 games.
It's not like we need to abandon the idea of explosions and over-the-top violence as fun spectacles: if Jerry Bruckheimer and Bugs Bunny can do it, why not us? But as long as this multi-billion-dollar industry leans so heavily on the stuff we liked as teenagers, this kind of culture clash between professionalism and hormone-soaked exuberance is inevitable. And no mat🐓ter the context, death threats are never ok.
I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've ♏previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.
