It's a common misconception, but Steam actually isn't the only place where you can buy games online, believe it or not;)

Looks like he may want to change his name if he ever plans on having a future in games.

To be fair, I wouldn't have expected less from a guy named Murderbeck. If he isn't saying he wants to murder people on a daily basis, I think he wouldn't be living up to his name sake. *rim shot*

Might as well be. I wouldn't be surprised if upwards of 90% of the revenue for PC games available on Steam comes from Steam.

Although this was Early Access so who knows, maybe they already made a ton of money.

All in all, this guy is blacklisted and the media (this article) is saying that is a valid response to this behavior. I don't know if I agree.

@spraynardtatum: As someone who has had many a problem with flying off the handle on the Internet—on these very fucking forums even—it has nothing to do with not doing anything wrong online. No one is saying you can't make a mistake or do something you later regret. It's about being professional in a work context. Would you want to work with someone who got so angry that you made a mistake that they went on a furious public tirade that ended with them threatening to kill you? I sure as hell wouldn't. If this is his response to having promotional materials mislabeled when it was corrected within an hour, what would his response be to a more serious issue down the line if it came up?

@bisonhero: That wasn't very nice of you.

50 years ago, if somebody went off on a hate filled rant in an interview for a newspaper article, they would be in the same position. Acting a fool in public is bad no matter the medium.

I'm guessing 90% isn't totally off target:)

Nice work burning your entire studio and everyone else with it. Valve have absolutely no reason to do business with someone making death threats against their CEO. I would be surprised if anything by Code Avarice will be distributed on Steam in the future. And maybe you shouldn't call your next employer a "shitty corporation" in your public resignation letter. Grow the hell up.

alright, well as far as the downloads I don't think any other download service has a higher standard than steam, i usually max my 100 mbit line, during sales you may get worse of course, but usually you can better it by switching your location to ukraine.

I don't change my password often enough to bump up against any limitations there, i just rely on steamguard having my back covered.

I'm not the most diligent marketplace user, at least not trading, but the 600 or so items i have in my inventory, which are mostly trading cards have gone without hassle.

i dont think i have a stance on region segregation.

I'm European, so prices are a bit high in steam, I'm not entirely sure who's to blame for that though, sites like GMG help with that issue.

As far as cheaters go, i'm not sure any other anti cheat is better, i heard they banned a bunch of CS:GO players the other day, including some semi-pro's

I honestly very rarely notice cheaters in any fps, be it battlefield or heroes and generals.

as far as DRM goes, steam has never done me wrong, it can drm as much as it wants as long as nothing unjust happens.

Nothing here seems worthy of calling incompetent in my opinion.

What if Twitter recognized tweets written in caps-lock, Tweets with "I'm going... kill", and tweets with excessive profanity and required the user to wait 30 minutes before posting as well as a final confirmation.

When has caps-lock ever signaled positivity and understanding?

But it's Sunshine and Smilies week at GB :(.

I wouldn't employ this guy in the games industry or otherwise. Even if he didn't issue the death threat, learn to deal with people in a professional manner. You can still be angry and not speak like a petulant child.

The only implication I was making was that Patrick's story, and the comments contained within it, would be different if the receiver of this threat was a woman. There are no value judgments in my statement.

See above.

Yes, unfortunately you are probably correct.

@tesla said:

Maulbeck's dispute with Valve/Newell was over the business/advertising of his game. Even if Newell were female, the death threat would still have nothing to do with Newell's gender. Your comment seemed pointless and inflammatory.

@ottorostock: Really reductive view.

Yes its a form of DRM. But if it didn't exist, indies would have to find a publisher to print and distribute their discs. Or They can sell it on their website, or on another 'DRM' which they do, and it doesn't seem to be working out for them.

Download speeds on Steam I find are faster than any other service out there.

@cybertification: No one said it wasn't incompetent, nor does that incompetence justify being that fucking angry about it.

i suppose that in a vacuum that's valid thing to ponder, but given recent context, i'm not sure i believe when you say your motives are simply to posit, "What if Gabe was Gabrielle?"

i just wonder what you're getting at- because frankly if Gabe was a woman, A LOT OF SHIT would be different.

either way the threats are utterly sophomoric and out of line.

I think stating that I feel like the tone of the conversation would be different is the exact opposite of inflammatory. I don't say if this difference is good or bad, merely that it (probably) exists. Whether or not that is pointless is up to the reader, but it is almost certainly not inflammatory.

Saying "fuck you" to someone, however, falls under both categories in my opinion.

(Ok. Snark button off)

A five second Google search will destroy any job interview or business endeavor this guy goes for.

Let that be a lesson to our younger posters. You can actually ruin your educational or professional career pulling crap like this. Don't do it.

Sadly, this threat has gotten more prompt coverage than the dozens of women who have been more credibly threatened under the guise of #gamersgate.

@sweep: Or oligarchy of PC distribution. Threats aren't OK, but I think the problem is Stream, it just has so much power.

Agreed, I don't think death threats are ever a reasonable approach in any normal, every day situation.

I only wanted to point out that the conversation is decidedly less charged than other recent stories of death threats, and I believe the opinions on both sides are not as fervent. My motives are to get people to think...am I less outraged at this than I am at the threats towards Zoe Quinn? If so, why?

When is Gabe Newell ever going to work with this guy personally? Ever?

Gabe Newell doesn't vet the games on Steam and he wouldn't have vetted this game, they never would have worked together anyways.

This guy is now blacklisted for a dumb tweet and that seems to be what a majority of people think is the correct decision. I disagree. I feel that looking at these worthless tweets doesn't come close to giving me a good impression of who Maulbeck is and should not be a defining factor of if this developer is allowed to participate in the workforce. He's passionate and wants the best for his creation. I find that to be an enviable quality in a co-worker. I would work with someone who would say something like this on the internet. Patrick Klepek has made an empty death threat to anyone who uses AdBlock before. He told them to die in a fire. Should he have been blacklisted from games journalism for that remark?

Yeah, pretty much this.

That's good that he apologized, though personally I would probably be too vindictive to reverse the action Valve took. It's super unfair of me to critique the guy's grammar, but the apology doesn't read well. Both in terms of its simple errors and communicating regret/personal growth. When "rightfully so" is a parenthetical you aren't doing a great job at apologizing.

Cutting ties with his partner was the right move, but the idea that his reaction to all this is to pursue a development role as part of a "shitty corporation" seems, for lack of a better word, petulant.

I knew there was going to be soem damage control, but this was a bit more then i expected, ouch!

I don't get this at all. Steam has "power" because it has people who love it and its competition is inferior. The people give it power, it doesn't have some stranglehold, it doesn't ever prevent you from releasing your games elsewhere, it's not a "problem" in any sense of the word. It's what the market decided. Working as intended.

Pretty sure the "problem" here is some idiot making death threats. I don't care how passionate he is, I've been in plenty of extraordinarily frustrating and life-altering situations and have never given a death threat as a joke or otherwise in a professional capacity. That's fucking stupid.

@nicked: Video game corporations do kind of tend to be shitty towards developers. There is consistent evidence that AAA game developers are subject to intense working conditions and mass layoffs following their games release. That's pretty shitty.

@spraynardtatum: not even close to being the same thing. We don't have the power the ban Patrick from games journalism. A more immediate approximation would be if Patrick told CBSi to die in a fire. And not only that, he would have to call them incompetent (you know using that bad language), and tweet that he would kill the CEO of CBSi.

I'm pretty sure CBSi would fire him if he did that.

You do not have as you don't live in a country where you have to guess whether or not a retail title will activate unless you use a bloody VPN.

Have you ever activated a 90$ game only to discover that "this product is not available in your region" upon trying to play it?

Have you tried to activate a proper copy of a game only to discover that you cannot do so as you already have a bad copy already activated?

Have you ever waited a year and a half for this said "proper" copy to be released in your region?

Have you bought a 90$ retail copy of a game only to discover it is in Russian with no means to change the language?

Have you ever paid 90$ for a retail PC game because there's no digital version of a 50-or-less-$ game available in your region?

Have you ever preloaded a 60GB (it being Final Fantasy XIII) game only to discover that Steam is going to download again it upon the full release?

Have you ever waited 10 minutes for game to launch for Steam to finally decide that it cannot sync with its cloud?

Have you ever refreshed the bloody community or market page 15 times for it to finally display correctly?

Have you ever left your PC on overnight to download something only to discover that it has paused itself after downloading, say, 10%?

Have had your copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 ever downloaded and installed itself for no apparent fucking reason?

Have you waited a response from fucking anyone within the support team to answer your query for a week only to discover it is an automated message, making no sense whatsoever?

See, I've been a Steam user for 5 years now, I have almost 400 products on my account and about 50 of them I've gotten only after shedding sweat. I have a 100mbit fiber connection, and a decent PC. No one could give me shit about me being a poor third world country resident. I've never conducted a single trade or anything, so everything's legit, bought with cold hard earned money. Until this July I had to undergo at least a part of all this bullshit weekly, now it's monthly, so it's an improvement. Still, I am still bothered greatly by all of this, even more so because I am not getting anywhere near 100% of what I've paid for.

Of course, most of this is due of me living in a fucked up zone between the great mother Russia and Europe and publishers fuck us, the ones living here, over hard because they cannot decide whether we live in Russia or Europe, though we are most definitely a member state of EU. And this differs very much so from game to game. I wouldn't give any of this shit for Steam if it wasn't acting for a goddamn conduit, between me and the publisher, and wasn't so bad at it. As most of the software is now tied to it, I cannot go around it, thus the aggravated rant.

And, of course, I will agree with anyone who openly admits that Steam is kinda shit for whatever reason.

I'm pretty sure they would too.

But Patricks main reason for his empty death threat was because people who use AdBlock are essentially taking money out of his pocket. So I do think my example is appropriate still.

Huh. And biting the hand that feeds you usually works so well.

One does not mess with the Gaben

It's good to see some idiot making a death threat on twitter have it bite him in the ass. Valve made an example out of him and that's good.

Oh my goodness.

"a game made by 4 or 5 people depending on who you count as team members"

That seems like a slightly jerky statement.

The same could be said about Murderbeck's comments

@playastation: sure, when it's a night time in the rest of the world. No, it's not reductive at all. It's still a DRM in any case whether it is easier for someone to distribute something or not. Also, such distributions just wouldn't work without their link to the DRM. In this sense, it is the lesser part DRM scheme, not a co-existing, independent system.

Furthermore, from consumers' perspective only the DRM part is existent because they wouldn't care that indies are easier to convey to them.

Gaben's power is maximum.

Who's Murderbeck?

@kirillorlov: quick we need a hot injection of brad muir, stat!!!

This kind of shit is exactly why I left twitter. Twitter just isn't worth it anymore. It just feels like a constant culling of crazy people. Being reminded of people's darkest side day in and day out just gets to you after a while.

I don't even understand why he was raging... He got front page on an indie release... And he got all crazy because of the image? If his game was 100% misrepresented in a banner on the front page, it would still sell more than if it was just dumped in the indie trash heap with all the german toe cheese collector simulators and whatnot.
Bummer..

Fuck that guy. If he is someone who thinks threatening to kill someone can ever be a joke, he deserves the scorn of Valve, his company, and the players.

The vast majority of your complaints are 100% down to publishers, not "Steam." A few are certainly due to Steam, but I've never had any sort of online (or offline) service work 100% of the time. At least with Steam I know Valve is constantly trying to improve it, unlike Origin, where we still don't have a fucking gifting option what the FUCK.

@spraynardtatum: It's at times like this that I wish Twitter wasn't fucking kindergarten, and people would just use their real names instead of a spoooooooky variant around Halloween. Would certainly cause less confusion.

I don't have much sympathy for a dude getting punished for his temper tantrums on the internet. It's just unfortunate that he's dragging some other people down with him.

@ripelivejam: your call will go unanswered until I'm off of work and off of mobile. Closest I can get is :D