Breaking the Law, Breaking the Law
DANIEL WILKS doesn’t have any money to sue for
If you follow games journalism and Internet drama you’ll probably be familiar with the case of Digital Homicide v. Jim Sterling. If not, the short version is that Jim Sterling (nee James Stanton) was extremely critical of a terrible game by Digital Homicide, there was some back and forth and it ended up with the owner of Digital Homicide and a number of other “developers” attempting to sue Sterling for “assault, libel and slander”, initially for 10 million dollars but later revising that amount up to 15 million. In February the suit was dismissed with prejudice, meaning that Digital Homicide could not attempt to sue Sterling again for the same perceived infractions.
Though this case was patently ridiculous, and no matter how abrasive Sterling can be in his Youtube videos nothing he said amounted to anything like libel or slander, let alone abuse, there was still a number of us in the industry watching the case from a distance with interest and a small undercurrent of dread. While there was very little doubt that the case would be thrown out or that Digital Homicide would have lost, it still could have set a new precedent for something that is all too common in the industry – people trying to influence (at best) or silence (at worst) the opinions of any critical voices.
By and large the overt attempts at silencing critics is reserved for new media, in which it is easier to use automated systems such as DMCA attacks to take down or block offending content, but there are those in the print realm who still try and silence those who may not agree with the company line.
Many moons ago, when the Earth was young and I was starting my career in magazines, things were different. Many distributors of both games and tech openly tried intimidation techniques to get scores they didn’t agree with changed. In 2001 or 2002 or so I ran something called the $1500 challenge in PCPP. The idea was that system builders would put together a complete gaming machine for $1500 or less and we would benchmark them all to discover the best. One company, who shall remain nameless because I can’t remember and couldn’t be bothered looking it, up submitted a PC with a terribly underpowered CPU, no GPU and so little
I was threatened with both a lawsuit and physical violence if I didn’t print a retraction
ram it could barely boot. Understandably I slammed the machine. Luckily everything I wrote that wasn’t opinion was entirely factual, so when the system builder in question threatened to sue both myself and Next Media as a whole, the boss at the time was ready and willing to throw our lawyers at the problem until it went away. The eventual lawsuit didn’t eventuate but the system builder wanted me to print a retraction, review the PC again and give it a good score, and to financially reimburse him for lost revenue because nobody wanted to spend $1500 on such an underpowered machine.
A few years later I was threatened with both a lawsuit and physical violence if I didn’t print a retraction and give a better score to a terrible gamepad that broke within hours of being plugged in. Talk to any journo who was working in the late 90s, early 00s and they will most likely have similar stories of threats both veiled and overt. As the years have drawn on, the types of pressure that developers, distributors and manufacturers try to exert grew more and more subtle. Some try and guarantee positive coverage by trying to go through the advertising department for editorial content (our ad guys always put editorial queries straight through to editors), to withholding products until after release dates to ensure that what might be a critical voice is only heard after the critical early period has expired. This is what appears to have happened to us in the case of CoD: Infinite Warfare. For weeks leading up to release we requested code with no response, then, a few weeks after release we had contact again and offers of review code. From what I understand, as a territory, Australia gave Infinite the lowest aggregated score of anywhere, even without our contribution. We may have a history of being quite critical of the series, but hell, we may have been the review to bring the average up if we had code on time.
There is also the matter of blacklisting, something that it’s far more common than it should be. I can understand companies being protective of their IP, but blacklisting outlets that don’t have a positive opinion ultimately doesn’t help anyone. Developers don’t get critical feedback, the public doesn’t get a range of opinions and publishers make themselves look petty. It’s all bad but it still goes on.
I breathed a sigh of relief when the Digital Homicide affair was finally put to bed. The last thing the games industry needs is a developer successfully suing a critic for doing his job.