fdsaion
2674
That said…it kind of does suck that visibility on Steam is almost a needed prerequsite for success.
Although on the flip side…probably the vast majority of these games would not be successful without that platform in the first place.
At least he had the presence of mind not to tweet “I’m going to kill @gaben”
(Does Gabe Newell have a twitter account? The joke works less well if he doesn’t.)
Here’s the text of the email Valve sent to Maulbeck when they de-listed his game:
On your Twitter account today there were a series of messages where you expressed your frustration with Steam. We are generally comfortable with partners expressing this type of frustration or any other viewpoint directly with us or publicly through social media and the press. But one of your tweets this morning was a threat to kill one of our colleagues. Death threats cross a line. We have therefore decided to end our business relationship with you and Code Avarice.
We’ve closed down your Steam admin accounts and we’re removing the game from purchase on Steam. We will leave the Community Hub available so that existing customers will continue to have a place to discuss the game. Our understanding is that you’re done developing the game, but if you need to ship an update to Steam customers, get in touch with us and we can help ship the update out for you.
I wonder if I have a different view on the “death threats” than other people because different cultures, etc. I don’t see why people give it so much importance, given that obviously, it’s not a real death treat, he wasn’t planning to actually kill Gabe. It was the typical “ugghh this sucks I’m going to kill that guy!”, same as “you son of a whore!” it doesn’t mean you think he is the son of a prostitute for reals (not that it isn’t an insult!). Though truly, it was stated matter of factly without obvious hyperbole or sarcasm, but that’s people tripping over a written medium like Internet, forgetting that sometimes writing something literally as you would say it doesn’t convey the same effect.
That said, he was too aggressive and overall assholish in his series of tweets.
I think there’s very little chance that Maulbeck was even half-serious with his death threat. If you look at his tweets, the guy routinely exaggerates and throws around curses as part of his online persona. That said, Valve has a multi-million dollar business with a lot of moving parts. If you’re trying to partner up with serious company, you need to clean up your act and be professional.
I look at it this way. If Johnny’s Pickle Company wants to get their dill pickles distributed by WalMart, they can’t start tweeting death threats to Sam Walton and expect to be carried on the store shelves.
Zuwadza
2679
Except calling someone a “son of a whore” is probably grounds to end a business relationship as well. It doesn’t really matter that the death threat was credible or not, he stepped over the line into extremely crass personal insults/attacks against the CEO of the company he was trying to do business with.
I get the impression that Maulbeck could have said absolutely everything up to threatening to kill gaben and it would have been fine. Not a lot of sympathy from me.
But you don’t call a business partner a son of a whore if you expect to remain their business partner - even if you were “just kidding.”
Don’t say anything on Twitter you a) wouldn’t say to someone’s face, and b) don’t want the entire rest of the world to discuss and nitpick and “misinterpret” because really some of your best friends are sons of whores.
This is very simple and straightforward common sense business courtesy. People who are incapable of understanding it are gonna have to live with the fallout.
Maybe. Part of my family is Vasque. And no wonder I don’t look well on death threats, even if made on “jest”… Sometimes it’s not so easy to distinguish whats plausibly serious or not. Then again had it not been for exposure to that specific kind on unsecurity I probably would think like you. I think living in a very safe country (the rest of Spain does qualify to an extent, depending on your socio-economical level) does make you contextualize things differently.
In all fairness, I’d definitely buy pickles from a bunch of guys who want to kill the reanimated corpse of Sam Walton.
It would be nice to maintain some minimum level of boundaries in this wild new era of social media.
It’s going to be crazy trying to explain the concept of self-control to my kids.
Aleck
2684
It’s even more than common business courtesy – it’s common human courtesy.
Part of why twitter is such a crazy platform is that things which historically would only have been muttered under your breath – or, more recently, perhaps thrown into an email – are now posted publicly for all the world to see. I understand that some folks don’t see the need for self censorship, or privacy, or restraint, frankly, but failing to realize that others don’t see the world in the same way will inevitably result in friction when you are dependent upon folks with different views.
In particular, making death threats at a time when there’s a huge online controversy precisely around death threats being made online? Incredibly short sighted.
Teiman
2686
Charlie’s Angel intro video
Perhaps twitter should delete the messages after 24 hours, or something. And use comics sans. It will still a medium where you dont know what people can read it, and for how long.
Oh, I will be the first one to say that you can’t use Twitter as your personal shoutbox as if the entire world isn’t connected to it, and that you need to be careful in the business relationships, insulting the other partner isn’t very smart. But I was thinking that this isn’t a normal business deal or partnership, where you know, people meet each other in real life, there are (several) meetings, procedures are talked about how the partnership will work, you know, that’s “real business”, traditionally speaking. I’ve been in a few myself. From what we know, the company here is an indie group of a dude and three of his friends and the company at the other side is a giant in the clouds which they never met a representative personally, they just submitted their game in greenlight and had a email direction as contact. For him maybe Valve was still less a business partner and more that huge mysterious faceless company (and everyone feel they can complain of the faceless tech giants, it’s the usual. Damn you Microsoft, Valve, Sony! etc).
He was wrong, of course, he didn’t change the chip from normal consumer to business partner as he should.
Yes, I think this is the gist of it. I wonder if it was their first company/bussiness that they created. It would make sense that they had very little experience.
Dale North (EiC) has left Destructoid.
Without going into details, I feel certain actions taken and statements made by Destructoid management have not accurately reflected my feelings or taken my input as Editor-in-chief into account. I’m no longer comfortable having my name attached to the continued engagement with former staff.
I love Destructoid. It has been at the center of my life for just short of a decade. It was one hell of a ride, and I’ll miss it and its people dearly.
Todays Drama society makes a storm out of a little gust of wind. All he was saying is “I’m so mad right now I could kill Gabe”, it wasn’t an actual threat even though in some countries people go hysterical about these kind of things. Its not as if he went out and bought weapons and explosives then tracked down gabes home location before posting a threat in his mailbox saying “you’re next, fatty”.
Too easy for scum to pile onto the disaster with their own shit, a bit like cockroaches and maggots crawling over a carcass.
Razgon
2692
Words matter - Its time people understand this.
On the other hand, how hard is it not to threaten to kill the CEO of a company that your livelihood depends on? Not very hard.
It’s not like Valve filed a police report. They said “we don’t find this behavior acceptable for our partners”. That’s entirely their prerogative. I’ve seen people fired over less.
