You may be familiar with The Slaughtering Grounds, an indie horror game in which the player has to fight off hordes of zombies. It was critically bashed on launch for various reasons, which led to the developer launching a counterattack that consisted of YouTube videos in which reviewers would be mocked.
The first target was Jim Sterling, whose video on The Slaughtering Grounds was also unfairly hit with an automated take-down notice by developer Digital Homicide. Controversy happened and was mostly forgotten in time, except the productive developer, who has since gone on to launch numerous games, took some time today to have an interview with Jim Sterling about that PR meltdown.
I have linked to the recordings of the conversation below, but have two warnings beforehand; first off, the audio quality is low due to technical issues and, secondly, this is hardly a fair and proper debate. Neither party really went into it with the intention of having an open mind and allowing their stance to be swayed, but I was still interested in hearing all of it just to see what Digital Homicide had to say.
The result is about what I expected and throughout the exchange I audibly sighed a few times at the far-fetched nature of some arguments and the cringeworthy lack of awareness displayed by Digital Homicide. Throughout the conversation the duo (yes, there are two people working at the studio) keeps trying to liken the job of reviewing a game to the job of making a game, acting like these are similar professions. By asking us to do away with any subjective thoughts on the subject, Digital Homicide ruins its own arguments, because every job is the same when its description is narrowed down to “produce something with materials.” Where Digital Homicide does have a point, though, is that maybe we could be more considerate and respectful towards developers instead of assuming any bad indie game was made out of greed or malice.
