The developer of Paranautical Activity has been in the spotlight today, not for their mildly popular game, but for their complete inept ability to do business in a professional manner. The games creator Mike Maulbeck took to Twitter to vent his frustrations about the Steam platform and while I’m not saying the guy doesn’t have a point, the repercussions were to be expected.
Mike made a death threat against Gabe Newell on Twitter, a tweet that has since been deleted, but he has posted a confirmation of the tweet.
People telling me it's fucking stupid to say I wanna kill gabe.
Can I set up a "no shit" autoresponse on twitter?
— Mike Maulbeck (@SpooderW) October 20, 2014
In fact, Mike has a lot of bad things to say about Gabe and Steam.
First they force me to delay the game because I can't release on weekends, now this.
Steam is the most incompetent piece of fucking shit.
— Mike Maulbeck (@SpooderW) October 20, 2014
In a recent interview with Polygon, Mike said he regrets the outburst. “I have since obviously replied to them saying that I didn’t mean what I said and pleaded that they consider the monopoly they have on the PC market before totally writing us off,” he said, “but let’s be real. If they took the game off the store, they’re f**kin sure about their decision. There’s probably nothing to be done.”
It seems the damage is already done. Doug Lombardi from Steam confirmed that they’ve removed the sale page for the game, and cut all ties with the developer “after he threatened to kill one of our employees.”
“Don’t worry guys, everything is gonna be OK, we sold TWELVE copies on non-steam platforms today,” Tweeted Mike, “We were selling more than that a minute on Steam.” he added. Looks like he’s sobered up from his rage, but we doubt he’ll be getting a warm welcome back from Steam or Valve anytime soon.
Thank you PCGamer for providing us with this information.
Image courtesy of PCGamer.
As if he would actually be able to kill him off….. logic of business I guess. “All death threats are serious.” thye probably say, oblivious to the real world scenario. I say give the game back, he had a valid reason to say it in my opinion :/
In my opinion, a threat is a threat, and if you insult a distributor for a mistake (we all make mistakes), one of which I assume they would be able to fix fairly easy, then I think the distributor has the right to do what they want in regards to the selling of the game.
He acted like an impatient child.