Guise of the Wolf Dev Takes Down Negative YouTube Review - Update 2

[Allspice]

WTF, again?! Wow...I, I'm...just wow. What do they hope to gain by this, it's going to go down exactly the same way the thing with Day One: Garry's Incident did.

It's not like you even needed TB's video to see this game is utter trash. There is an LP of the game up (or at least there was, I don't know if it still is) and it highlights everything wrong with the game. That LPer was a frickin' trooper for getting through it.

 

[sleeky01]

Who the fuck writes emails like that? Honestly, what kind of professional company, in any field, would send emails like that?

'close your channel 'we are a big company with lawyers' ....WHAT? LOL

I'd actually consider this whole thing to be a giant troll of some kind, if not for the 'game' they released which is actually horrible on such a scale that I'm inclined to believe these devs might be for real, although they are probably teenagers.

Even with the release of said 'game' the idea of it being a huge troll is starting to whisper in the back of my mind.

As stated by someone in this thread (sorry I forget who that was) their webpage is indeed created by a Microsoft Office template. They say on their website that they are based temporally out of Amman, Jordon. They are using Godaddy out of Singapore for said website.

Fine an indie company would do whatever to try to save money, but this seems so......scattered to me.

Perhaps if they are indeed sitting in Jordan/Singapore lawyers from outside can't do a damm thing to them.

 

[dessertmonkeyjk]

Is there some people at FUN Creators just trying to sabotage the whole company by making them look bad because of some personal vendetta? I can't say that's not a possibility but considering what I seen so far...

Just trying to look at this from another perspective is all.

 

[weirdee]

pff, if they had money for lawyers, then they should really be paying for actual game development

either somebody's got their priorities wrong or they're bluffing

 

[Ratty]

pff, if they had money for lawyers, then they should really be paying for actual game development

either somebody's got their priorities wrong or they're bluffing

Helps to have a lawyer. They're like maps for the courtroom.

Also I'm 99.9% positive that I saw this game on Greenlight shortly after the service came about. And it didn't get Greenlit. I'd bet dollars to donuts Steam went back and pushed the game through because "The Wolf Among Us" is doing well.

 

[A-D.]

pff, if they had money for lawyers, then they should really be paying for actual game development

either somebody's got their priorities wrong or they're bluffing

Helps to have a lawyer. They're like maps for the courtroom.

Also I'm 99.9% positive that I saw this game on Greenlight shortly after the service came about. And it didn't get Greenlit. I'd bet dollars to donuts Steam went back and pushed the game through because "The Wolf Among Us" is doing well.

Which makes no sense when you think about it. What would Valve gain from this? Thats like arguing that GameStop would fund BF5 because CoD is doing well, they gain nothing from it because they are simply a distributor. Yes Valve still makes games occasionally, but steam is really just a distribution platform, its the digital equivalent of a brick and mortar store. The 10% cut Valve gets per sale would not justify this when they get the same, if not more from selling The Wolf among Us, which by the way is priced 10 bucks higher and is from a known developer who has several good games under their belt.

In short, there is no reason that Valve would push this through, if anything it means that alot of people could have voted on it being greenlit just because, maybe they wanted to give them a chance, maybe they were trolling, maybe the devs themselves made tons of new accounts to vote for themselves. If anything it proves how easy it is to game the system, or to abuse it if necessary. Which i saw coming when greenlight was announced, its basicly a popularity contest, games arent judged on merit, but rather who gets more people to vote for them. Its equally as pointless and vapid as the next Miss America/Miss World/Mister Universe Contest.

That being said, this is another case of a developer, or in the usual case it would be a publisher, trying to strong-arm critics into silence. The threat of legal action is often enough to shut smaller channels up, the problem only comes, for them anyway, when they hit a bigger channel that can actually fight this. Even smaller channels can, though usually less successful (3 strikes rule) in that no Dev or IP Holder would take them to court over this, in most cases they hope the target of their Takedown will just shut up and leave it as is, when you counter-file a DCMA or whatever, and it actually gets to a legal level, the "IP Holder" usually "settles out of court" so to speak, because they gain nothing.

If anything, Youtube needs to revise its 3-strikes policy to only take effect if and when a notice isnt contested within say a week, i.e. if you get 3 DCMA Takedowns that you dont contest, your channel gets deleted, once you contest that claim, it goes to the legal level and goes from there, but you dont get a strike instantly. Equally, DCMA Trolls should get banhammered equally, and this includes big dogs such as Capcom, Nintendo and EA, as well as basicly everyone else. If you file 3 DCMA Takedowns wrongfully you lose the right to file another takedown for a year, meaning if you abuse the system you cant use it for a full year.

 

[Ratty]

Which makes no sense when you think about it. What would Valve gain from this?

Money from all the people who got turned onto the idea of werewolf video games by "The Wolf Among Us". Or from people who were like "Hm I heard that "Wolf" game on steam was pretty good. Oh wait there's 2 of them? Well I'll just grab them both. It's still cheaper than buying 1 AAA game, #YOLO lol."

Thats like arguing that GameStop would fund BF5 because CoD is doing well, they gain nothing from it because they are simply a distributor.

No, it's like GameStop distributing BF5 because modern military shooters are doing very well. Which they are and GameStop will do. Except steam doesn't even have to buy up (potentially unsold) physical copies. It's made to order. They essentially lose nothing if the game doesn't sell.

The 10% cut Valve gets per sale would not justify this when they get the same, if not more from selling The Wolf among Us, which by the way is priced 10 bucks higher and is from a known developer who has several good games under their belt.

They want to sell games to people who've already bought "The Wolf Among Us" to. The logic isn't hard to see "Hey, looks like werewolf games might be getting popular, let's get some more of those."

In short, there is no reason that Valve would push this through, if anything it means that alot of people could have voted on it being greenlit just because, maybe they wanted to give them a chance, maybe they were trolling, maybe the devs themselves made tons of new accounts to vote for themselves. If anything it proves how easy it is to game the system, or to abuse it if necessary. Which i saw coming when greenlight was announced, its basicly a popularity contest, games arent judged on merit, but rather who gets more people to vote for them. Its equally as pointless and vapid as the next Miss America/Miss World/Mister Universe Contest.

Except that the game wasn't greenlit I know because (unless I'm badly confusing it with another game) I thought it looked interesting and voted to give it a chance.[footnote]I'm a sucker for both werewolves and cel shading. Which I thought the game was from the deceptive screenshots.[/footnote] But then it just disappeared from my voting history after a few months, and it doesn't say it was greenlit on the store page.

I agree with the rest of your post but yeah, Valve isn't blameless for letting this broken mess get on their store, especially since it didn't even go through greenlight. It's another example of them putting stuff on the store without any kind of quality assurance.

 

[michael87cn]

Really I think that TB has lost this one. He may have felt safe before but one more strike against his channel and he'll be looking for another job...

I really think that its good for criticism to exist, but right now the system is being abused and its kind of foolish to continue to stare a bull in the eye. Probably a good idea to stop doing really abrasive, cocky negative reviews for a while, and simply review games that you like....

 

[rcs619]

Really I think that TB has lost this one. He may have felt safe before but one more strike against his channel and he'll be looking for another job...

I really think that its good for criticism to exist, but right now the system is being abused and its kind of foolish to continue to stare a bull in the eye. Probably a good idea to stop doing really abrasive, cocky negative reviews for a while, and simply review games that you like....

If worst comes to worst (and it shouldn't. Keep in mind, all of the other false-strikes against him were eventually overturned. If they hadn't, his account would have been gone. Sega gave him one, and so did the Garry's Incident devs. The main issue with this one is that the Guise of the Wolf devs gave him TWO strikes because they took down both videos. One First-Impression vid, and a longer recording of his research stream for the game), I don't think it will be catastrophic. Oh, it'll be bad, don't get me wrong, and very much tragic. But it isn't as if TB is just going to go away. It isn't hard to make a new youtube account, and Polaris will sure as hell promote it to get him back on the map. He won't be able to re-upload all of his old vids, but putting back up everything he's done for the past year? That's doable, gradually. Assuming he even bothers, since he's putting out new content basically everyday. Or he may go over to blip, or some other videohost.

Either way, I don't think this is much of an issue. FUN Creators' claim is obviously false. Under every legal definition. Whether they agree it is or not is irrelevant. Youtube will overturn it like they have the others, because review and commentary videos are protected under fair use law. Personally, I hope they do keep doubling-down on all of this idiocy. By filing a false, and malicious copyright claim, they have actually violated US law. In an actual legal case, both sides' email accounts will be looked through and then all their claims about "photoshop games" won't mean a damn thing. And if they try to do something about that, better tack on tampering with evidence and interfering with an investigation on top of everything else. FUN Creators are completely boned and have no legal leg to stand on. The best thing they can do right now is shut up, fire Jasmine, apologize to TB and be thankful they didn't actually have to have their asses handed to them in court.

 

[Shaidz]

FUN Creators are completely boned and have no legal leg to stand on. The best thing they can do right now is shut up, fire Jasmine, apologize to TB and be thankful they didn't actually have to have their asses handed to them in court.

But we don't want them to do that, we want them to keep talking so we can all sit back and watch the train wreck that will unfold in court, why? Because we are the internet.

But still, WHY WOULD YOU GO UP AGAINST TB, like really? Out of everyone, its like a LV1 trying to backchat to Deathwing, you will get incinerated.

 

[rcs619]

FUN Creators are completely boned and have no legal leg to stand on. The best thing they can do right now is shut up, fire Jasmine, apologize to TB and be thankful they didn't actually have to have their asses handed to them in court.

But we don't want them to do that, we want them to keep talking so we can all sit back and watch the train wreck that will unfold in court, why? Because we are the internet.

But still, WHY WOULD YOU GO UP AGAINST TB, like really? Out of everyone, its like a LV1 trying to backchat to Deathwing, you will get incinerated.

I honestly cannot think of a single reason why they are doing this. Maybe they had a company-wide gas leak and are all currently so high they can taste colors and hear smells?

More than likely, they actually don't know anything about the youtube videogame community, or who Totalbiscuit actually is. It could be possible that they are so dumb, and so catastrophically uninformed, that they truly believed their super-scary corporate schtick would actually intimidate him into backing down. Regular people are scared about being sued by big, scary corporations, right?

Either way, they are rapidly approaching maximum-boneage. They literally picked the worst possible person to pull this sort of stunt on, besides maybe Jim Sterling.

 

[A-D.]

Money from all the people who got turned onto the idea of werewolf video games by "The Wolf Among Us". Or from people who were like "Hm I heard that "Wolf" game on steam was pretty good. Oh wait there's 2 of them? Well I'll just grab them both. It's still cheaper than buying 1 AAA game, #YOLO lol."

No, it's like GameStop distributing BF5 because modern military shooters are doing very well. Which they are and GameStop will do. Except steam doesn't even have to buy up (potentially unsold) physical copies. It's made to order. They essentially lose nothing if the game doesn't sell.

They want to sell games to people who've already bought "The Wolf Among Us" to. The logic isn't hard to see "Hey, looks like werewolf games might be getting popular, let's get some more of those."

Except that the game wasn't greenlit I know because (unless I'm badly confusing it with another game) I thought it looked interesting and voted to give it a chance.[footnote]I'm a sucker for both werewolves and cel shading. Which I thought the game was from the deceptive screenshots.[/footnote] But then it just disappeared from my voting history after a few months, and it doesn't say it was greenlit on the store page.

I agree with the rest of your post but yeah, Valve isn't blameless for letting this broken mess get on their store, especially since it didn't even go through greenlight. It's another example of them putting stuff on the store without any kind of quality assurance.

Valve is not responsible for your gaming purchases though, or for your lack of research either. Sure there will be people who just buy it because of the name (WarZ anyone?), the theme (every zombie game ever) or the style. Valve is not responsible for this, nor are they accountable for this. Also your argument is flawed because by your initial argument via greenlight it would be similar to Valve actively publishing them, rather than just selling it, hence the GameStop analogy.

The game went through greenlight, several games have gone through it which never show the "this was on greenlight" banner thing, it just happens. Again Valve has no responsibility here, sure they approved it maybe, but based on what? Votes. You admit you voted for it, there's your answer, everyone who voted for this game is responsible for it actually being on steam. Valve just takes games which have reached X amount of votes and they get released, that is all.

Long story short, yes Valve is partially responsible for letting shit onto their store, but thats it. They arent obligated to pull games from service, they do offer refunds in certain cases but thats it. Demanding they "pull the game" is dumb because no distributor would do so, not GameStop, not EBGames, not fucking Amazon. Every instance where a game has been pulled from a shop was due to legal issues, see WarZ and SimCity with Amazon, thats the only two cases where it actually happened and there are more than 2 terrible games/launches.

Valve is however not responsible for, or obligated to help with, your purchase decisions. If you buy a shitty game, well tough, you bought it. Lack of information? Thats on you. Misleading Information? Tough noogies, shit happens, ***** at the Devs or try getting a refund. At the end of the day, Steam is a store, they just sell the games, they dont make them, they are not required to tell you shit. If you go to GameStop for example and buy a game, are you honestly expecting the staff there wont try to sell you a game, even if its a shitty one? As long as you buy it, they dont really give a crap.

 

[Roxas1359]

Why do dev's keep doing this? It will only hurt you in the end.

All you'll get is our hatred over the shit you try to pull.

Really I'm not as surprised because even after the whole shit storm that the Xbox One has had it's still sold over 3 million in only 2 months and broken Microsoft's projected goals. So really I think it's more of a thing that any PR, even bad PR, is good PR.

 

[Ratty]

SNIP

Well, thankfully for me I didn't buy the game. I never buy things on steam unless they're at least 50% off, and I wouldn't get Guise of the Wolf now if they gave it away for free.

More to your point though, allowing a flood of bad content onto your store is bound to hurt you in the long run. I don't think most people will bother wading through a sea of shit in the hopes of finding a nugget of gold. Or that they'll keep coming back to the well after they've been burned a few times.

There's nothing legally or (probably) morally wrong with steam allowing tons of shovelware on to their store, but in the end this will probably only come back to bite them. It's already starting to tarnish their once pristine image, which is important in a world where your most fierce competitors are never more than a few clicks away.

And there is something wrong with selling games that don't work without so much as a disclaimer. Something they've recently improved their still terribly inadequate refund system to help compensate for.

I'm not demanding they take Guise of the Wolf off, I'm saying in the future it would behoove them to do some quality assurance even on the games that are greenlit. Though I'm still not convinced the game actually was greenlit, it may have been. If steam doesn't want to weed out the trash from their own service that's fine, a competitor will spring up sooner or later who will be happy to do that instead. That was part of what allowed Nintendo to build up such a good image and a lot of goodwill with the NES, doing away with most of the shovelware that had plagued the previous generation.

 

[Roxas1359]

I'm not demanding they take Guise of the Wolf off, I'm saying in the future it would behoove them to do some quality assurance even on the games that are greenlit. Though I'm still not convinced the game actually was greenlit, it may have been. If steam doesn't want to weed out the trash from their own service that's fine, a competitor will spring up sooner or later who will be happy to do that instead. That was part of what allowed Nintendo to build up such a good image and a lot of goodwill with the NES, doing away with most of the shovelware that had plagued the previous generation.

One of the reasons for that though was because Yamauchi would personally go through each of the games and would decide what would and what wouldn't be allowed on the system. That method worked up until the N64 in which there were too many for Yamauchi to check so they made the console purposely difficult to develop for so as to only attract the most "competent" third parties. Unfortunately that planned backfired because there were quite a few shovelware games on the N64, not as many as the Wii mind you. Really the larger your place gets the more difficult it is for quality control unless many are hired to do it. I mean heck, this game right here got the Nintendo Quality Seal of Approval on it's case and it most certainly didn't deserve it at all:

Spoiler

Really the larger a platform gets the more and more shovelware will continue to exist. Hell the mobile gaming industry on smart phones is lost to shovelware already because of it. Greenlit certainly isn't helping Valve with quality control, but at the same time Valve can't be asked to go through every game that is submitted to be sold on Steam without some shovelware ones getting through. Not to mention the fact that Greenlit games are voted on by the community, and it seems that the community wants more shovelware and "early access" games than actual completed games, so it's no wonder more companies start treating consumers like idiots. It's a sad state of affairs because of how easily people will buy anything really.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

Doesn't matter what the trigger is, there's always something immensely satisfying about watching the Streisand Effect in action. I would never have heard about this game if not for this post, made in reference to an action taken by the developer. Had they thought to shut up instead, I might've one day bought it on steam because it was cheapish and looked interesting.

What I don't get is why they don't take the fair criticism and fix the issues, releasing a better product based on feedback, rather than rush out what's apparently a dud of a game and destroy their reputation.

 

[Cyanic]

Really the larger a platform gets the more and more shovelware will continue to exist. Hell the mobile gaming industry on smart phones is lost to shovelware already because of it. Greenlit certainly isn't helping Valve with quality control, but at the same time Valve can't be asked to go through every game that is submitted to be sold on Steam without some shovelware ones getting through. Not to mention the fact that Greenlit games are voted on by the community, and it seems that the community wants more shovelware and "early access" games than actual completed games, so it's no wonder more companies start treating consumers like idiots. It's a sad state of affairs because of how easily people will buy anything really.

This is a pendulum that needs to happen and its good for the industry. It's fair for people to want to see the process as its occurring and the demand has been there for a long time, so good on companies for monetizing early access. This has been in demand for a long, long time. Without free access occurring, many consumers would never realize they don't actually want to be part of the process. It is a fact that some games are actually better in beta than in release as well(Any number of games that get tuned down for accessibility's sake.)

Valve's only responsibility is to the "Greenlight" brand integrity, which is becoming increasingly synonymous with crap. So if they want it to mean anything, they need to take action. I have a feeling they are going to can it soon though, its a failed experiment. Early access is synonymous with buggy and unfinished products, buy at your own risk. Valve's only responsibility is financial in terms of chargebacks. If they are willing to accept that risk, more power to them.

With regards to the topic at hand: For consumers, the integrity of reviews is paramount and they are built into steam. Valve's interest should be in severely punishing developers that abuse the system.

If consumers really wanted to damage the brand integrity of the developer for releasing a crap product, there is nothing more powerful than communicating with your wallet. Demanding enough refunds will cut into Valve's transaction fees and they will yank the game.See WarZ for reference.

Every instance where a game has been pulled from a shop was due to legal issues, see WarZ and SimCity with Amazon, thats the only two cases where it actually happened and there are more than 2 terrible games/launches.

This was business issues. Both cost the distribution platforms so much money in terms of financial transactions and customer service issues that they effectively issued a recall to cut losses. There were no legal issues.

 

[A-D.]

Every instance where a game has been pulled from a shop was due to legal issues, see WarZ and SimCity with Amazon, thats the only two cases where it actually happened and there are more than 2 terrible games/launches.

This was business issues. Both cost the distribution platforms so much money in terms of financial transactions and customer service issues that they effectively issued a recall to cut losses. There were no legal issues.

Actually it was both to a degree. Valve actually pulled WarZ from Steam and offered full refunds, rather than being requested refunds because of misleading and patently false information on its store page, basicly it falls under false advertising which is a legal issue. Amazon did the same with SimCity, though that was mostly a moral issue because they couldnt really sell a game which didnt work given the launch failures.

The fact they offer refunds though means that essentially it is a legal problem as well, since they might as well just pull the game and not sell it anymore, rather than offering full refunds as they did. One comes down to false advertising, the other was essentially broken and unplayable due to EA's Servers. In both instances there would have been a window for legal action, hence they took steps not to get sued on account of problems caused by outside parties, namely EA and Hammerpoint respectively.

 

[Cyanic]

Every instance where a game has been pulled from a shop was due to legal issues, see WarZ and SimCity with Amazon, thats the only two cases where it actually happened and there are more than 2 terrible games/launches.

This was business issues. Both cost the distribution platforms so much money in terms of financial transactions and customer service issues that they effectively issued a recall to cut losses. There were no legal issues.

Actually it was both to a degree. Valve actually pulled WarZ from Steam and offered full refunds, rather than being requested refunds because of misleading and patently false information on its store page, basicly it falls under false advertising which is a legal issue. Amazon did the same with SimCity, though that was mostly a moral issue because they couldnt really sell a game which didnt work given the launch failures.

The fact they offer refunds though means that essentially it is a legal problem as well, since they might as well just pull the game and not sell it anymore, rather than offering full refunds as they did. One comes down to false advertising, the other was essentially broken and unplayable due to EA's Servers. In both instances there would have been a window for legal action, hence they took steps not to get sued on account of problems caused by outside parties, namely EA and Hammerpoint respectively.

Not at all, but nice try. As a third party vendor, they are in no way liable. It would be like suing Best Buy because Madden servers didn't work. And that's not even bringing terms of service into the discussion.

Its a no-brainer move as the distributor to throw the company under the bus. Build temporary goodwill and stop sales to avoid the obvious cost of continuing to sell a faulty product.

 

[tzimize]

Stuff like this is why I like the idea of the Steam Tags. GotW is tagged with everything from "Don't Buy", "Shovelware", and "Buggy" to "False Advertising", "Scam" and "dishonest developer".

Of course, one of the tags is "A better love story than twilight", so I suppose the system ain't perfect yet.

Hahahaha, oh wow. I like the idea of the tag system, but we'll see. If this works as well as people greenlighting stuff....then I really dont think we need it...but for now I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.

OT: There is no fighting the stupid.