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Code Avarice (http://codeavarice.com/) made an old-school, ultra fast-paced Quake style shooter with very simplistic graphics and put it on Steam Early Access. Today they were supposed to be celebrating the full release on Steam. Except there was a hitch somewhere and on the new releases page on Steam the game was still listed as Early Access. Maybe a database error (as they only removed the EA status a coupe of hours beforehand, maybe a Steam issue, maybe some submission error from the studio. Doesn't matter now because the main dude at Code Avarice decided the best way to engage with Steam to resolve the issue was to threaten to kill Gabe Newell.

(http://i.imgur.com/vZnkS4E.png)

That sound you hear is the crushing sound of inevitability.

https://twitter.com/SpooderW/status/524327596939440128

https://twitter.com/SpooderW/status/524327801340444674

Welp indeed.

Young curve Millennial techies are consistently proving to be morons with no social skills or understanding of consequences. News at 11.

I wish I could chalk this up to just being young and dumb rather than a weird mix of shift in parenting styles, exposure to new tech and the usual 'young dumb kid' stuff.

Remember when we didn't learn about nor give a shit about dumb kids being dumb?

It's not young and dumb unfortunately. It really is that these kids grew up being parented by the internet.

20-somethings I talk to right now are just as stupid and brash and bulletproof as I was. There's zero difference there. The difference is how much of their lives they insist on cataloging in a public forum. They only understand that eyeballs = good, and so they've fallen into the marketing trap of any attention is good attention.

Nobody that age truly understands consequences until they have a real job with real responsibilities.

I think it's the dramatic nature of language, too. As Louis CK said, you wasted 'awesome' on a fucking sandwich. I don't think people realize making public death threats isn't hipster humor.

However, as much as I ignore the 'industry' news many seem to relish...this one was pretty fucking funny.

I'd also rebut Paelos by saying that many times when real consequences kick in, it drives people even further into denial and they become victims and externalize all their problems. Life is awesome.

You're not wrong, Sky, but that behavior doesn't typically kick-in until Adulthood and only after behaviors had been validated during childhood.

Every spoiled kid you see getting their way won't understand why it doesn't work that way as an adult. It always did before, so clearly the person telling them their behavior is wrong is the one at fault.


Yep, which is why I said I wish it was JUST young and dumb.  We've created this world of even greater assholes, it's only going to get worse.

The only good thing is white millenials aren't breeding.

This is like bad performance art from East Shithole Jersey Community College.

The other dude's twitter is more fun: https://twitter.com/Vallisca3x3x3

You know, he could at least have added "And where the fuck is Half Life 2 Episode 3, Gabe?" to the Tweet for extra LULZ.

Maybe treat making games like an actual business? Then shit like this doesn't happen?

No wait, we can't have that.

So I saw this on Ars and immediately had a few questions, like "was the game ever on Early Access to begin with and when did it go live?"  Disappointing that it wasn't originally addressed (one of the comments covered it).  Game was early access until today.  The Steam feature tagged the game as Early Access, which is actually pretty accurate and the whole cause of Dude 1 going off the deep end.  The relevant tweet was:  https://twitter.com/SpooderW/status/524072608984096770

So. 
Indie clicks the "we're done" button.
Steam system comes back with "your update will be processed by noon pacific tomorrow."
Scheduled Steam promotion starts, listing the game as Early Access.
Indie loses his shit and issues a death threat over 'mislabeling' of the game.

Presumably, had they not gotten their game removed from the service, the Early Access decorator would have dropped off the feature promotion in about 30 minutes.  Basically they didn't schedule for the release pipeline they were shipping into, a problem that only exists because Steam has made it easy enough for people who have no idea to get into the game.  That one of their team was unstable makes for drama, but there really isn't any Steam angle here.  This guy would have had similar trouble with a post office.

I avoid early access because it is often crap.  Just looking at some of their recent updates that have a tone of we're calling it done because making it better would be hard I feel entirely justified in ignoring early access crap.  They pushed one last patch and the project into Release at the same time.

Something tells me the whole thing could have been fixed with one email to Steam developer support and a little goddamn patience. Having a Twitter Murder Tirade was perhaps about 10th of the list of "Dumbest Shit I Could Do To Torpedo My Career as a Game Developer."

I mean, fuck's sake, there's guys who have worked on Disasterfuck MMOG's like Horizon that still have jobs in the industry.

"My temper and tendency to use twitter to vent has been a consistent problem since I entered the games industry, and I just can’t do it." As we were saying about these kids today. But then it looks like he has a revelation!  He just can't use twitter to vent anymore. So this has a good ending as someone learns....hold on...

"I don’t have the willpower necessary to be the “face” of a company. If I do continue to work in games it’ll be as an anonymous 1 of 1000 at some shitty corporation, not the most public figure of a single digit sized team."

Oh, for fuck's sake. Instead of manning up and using this as an example of how damaging social media can be, he chooses being a dick on twitter over salvaging a professional career.

Wow.

edit: and I like that even in his apology letter he seems to not grasp that this was a stupid thing to say, "A statement I obviously didn’t mean" Obvious to whom?

(http://i.imgur.com/84uOFfG.jpg)

Don't create a partnership with fuckups. There. You learned a powerful life lesson.

"No, it's cool and Mike's a good guy. He's just really passionate is all and I'd work with him again, just not under him."

I've heard that excuse before!


 :uhrr:

Someone tweet at him the numerous court cases, including the one currently before the Supreme Court about people taking online threats seriously and getting the threatener arrrested.

Yes, gone are the days when an anonymous person could threaten to kill another anonymous person on the internet.  I miss those days.

Yeah, he should probably realize that he is in fact getting off easy because he is just a small indie nobody.  If he was a lead developer at a major studio and did this shit, Valve hunter-killer lawyers would be deployed within moments with orders to leave no survivors.

Also all the woe-is-me my career is ruined shit shows exactly how much perspective this guy has.

Send a clear apology to Valve distancing yourself from the fuckup, and go make another game. You think anybody will care? Did anybody care before?

Nope, instead this guy is going to play the victim and whine about shit that had nothing to do with the actual event.

It's like watching a 16 year old get dumped.

"GAWD guys, I didn't mean I'd actually kill anybody! It's like when you say you want to skullfuck someone's mother, nobody really means that."

Gabe Newell: "My mother was skullfucked to death by the smoking man."

 :ye_gods:

Hey now, this isn't about Eron Gjoni.

The last post from the guy was about how he didn't agree with his partner leaving.

I mean,  :why_so_serious:

Worst coming-of-age movie of 2014.

I've fucked up a lot, and I'm doing OK. :grin:

I haven't followed gamergate much, but is this "meaning it" stuff backed up by anything?  Or is it just a case of "It's funny when I do it, but when you do it you look like a dick"?


I think that's what he's doing.  The problem is that generally indie games aren't fountains of gold at the best of times, and now he's got to live for X months / years off of basically nothing while he works on the next thing.  Or just give up and get a McDonalds job.

Honestly, I do feel bad for both of them.  This is a shitty way to learn a lesson one of them should have learned a long time ago.

Little of column A, little of column B.

The teenaged or sociopathic among the gamergate crowd have been pretty consistent in sending threats to devs (including the one that targeted a bomb threat to Smed's plane) and all the white middle-class developers who are female or over 35 freak out when it happens. 

There's been a few that legit freaked me out (as Lum posts them to Facebook, still) but on the whole they seem to be the 2014 version of sending pizzas to someone's house.  Only by kids with less understanding of why they shouldn't do things, starting with "Because my parents will deal with me if I do."

Yes, I see he added the apology in the last few hours. That's the right way to go, and perhaps somebody more intelligent got to him and made him realize that it was high time to ask for mercy.

The non-stupid one will likely get another shot, and I don't see any reason why Steam wouldn't allow him to continue making games. He literally did nothing wrong other than partner with a nutjob.

As for the nutjob? I don't feel bad for him. He's not thirteen, he's an adult running a company. At no point in society would that come across as an acceptable response to anything. He doesn't belong in charge of a shithouse let alone a gaming company until he learns how to act like a human being.

His entire Twitter feed is filled with rants and expletives. He tweets like I would have spoken when I was in my late teens/early twenties. The issue is that young people see social media as the same thing as talking to friends. You'd think if you are the public face of a company (that you own) you'd try to come off a little more professional.

I really think it is a generational thing. My 23 year old sister-in-law's Facebook page is the same way. If my daughter were old enough to have a Facebook account, I wouldn't let them be friends. If my wife were to act like that on Facebook, her mother would tear her a new one. But the younger sibling does it and it's acceptable.

This passed through my mind in the shower this morning and I realized I'm not just OK with it, I'm glad it's happening.  As someone who could potentially hire people, I'd rather they put all the crazy on display so I can weed them out. No laws are currently keeping me from Googling them and seeing this crap on their profiles or twitter. 

So many 20-somethings still think it's all about the skills and it's just not.  You're hiring the person, not the skillset. If all you want is the skillset you contract them, not hire.

Entry-level skills, no less.

Of course it could have.  But throwing a tantrum is more entertainment for the rest of us.  So I'm glad it happened this way.

Quite.

Not to mention the Darwinism of weeding this fuckwit out of the public dev pool nice and early.

Kids today! :awesome_for_real:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDOZbvE01Fk#t=186

what.the.fuck?

My daughter, who just turned 16, watched that and was extremely frustrated with all of them. She bought an NES on her own last year, though, and had known was it was previously.

I can't get too angry, though, tech moves on. I wasn't big on 1960s tech when I was 16, which is the comparable timeframe, so why would they be familiar with things from 15 years prior to their birth?

They're so precious.

And I'm so damn old.

Man, between this and making an office space joke and watching the intern not get it cause his generation has never heard of it, I'm feeling old :(

So, looks like the guy who left is back now. (http://www.codeavarice.com/dev-blog)  Apparently it's kind of hard to find a real job or something.  On a related note, "we're taking steps to make Code Avarice more about the games and less about the people making them."  Also, they're working on a new game.  So expect this thread to loop in about a year or so.

Works for Blizzard, exceptions notwithstanding.

ahahahahahahahahahah

That's weird. Who wouldn't want to hire that guy, right?

Seems like the kind of stable individual that you indeed want as a key part of your company. Not prone to stupid acts, thinks before doing something. I foresee great things for CA.

Which is why Travis and Mike now have to do everything together. They probably go to the bathroom together now.

Mike would probably just piss all over the floor if Travis wasn't keeping an eye on him.

/guilty puppy dog eyes

Glad they learned a lesson.

Oh wait, nope. I hope reality hits Travis quickly in the nuts again. Stop pairing yourself with idiots. Maybe this time it won't be as public.