It is an unhealthy pleasure that keeps me up at night.
If I had to describe Digital Homicide in culinary terms (and I’m not sure why anyone would ask me to), I would compare them to a standard McDonald’s cheeseburger. An unhealthy, unfulfilling, nutritionally deficient void of fat, grease, and cheese hastily cobbled together by an unskilled teenager whose brain is off in lala land thinking about whether his dealer is considered an essential employee too.
And yet every so often I get that craving in my stomach, that specific flavor combination of dense bread, an overcooked patty and American cheese, and that combination of condiments, and I go to McDonald’s and get my signature meal: #9. Two cheeseburgers, fries, and a drink. It used to be #4 and then McDonald’s jumped the shark and MOVED IT.
James and Robert Romine, the two (knuckle)heads of Digital Homicide, could easily outpace the likes of Sergey Titov for the worst developer in the industry. Digital Homicide’s games weren’t just bad, they were professionally awful and pumped out at a nauseatingly fast pace. And the Romines were like Tommy Wiseau, basking in the attention while not fully understanding that the crowd was laughing at them, not with them.
We are entering four years since Digital Homicide’s lawsuit against Jim Sterling ended, as well as the much shorter lawsuit against John Doe Steam users that ultimately ended in Valve terminating their business agreement and DigiHom going broke. Since then DigiHom has cropped up here and there under a few schemes one might call desperate or pathetic.
That is until this January when Robert Romine created Digital Homicide Uncensored because someone needed to pull DigiHom’s bloated carcass out its grave, dust it off, and call it dinner. The first post asks “who missed me” and you know what? I missed you. I missed you, Robert. I missed writing about something less intellectually challenging than arguing with my nephew on which dinosaur is the most awesomest. It’s the Ankylosaur, Matthew, you drew your dog in purple and you think you know dinosaurs more than me?
Robert wants to set the record straight, in the way one might do so if they had never encountered a record and were raised in one of those island civilizations that never progressed to the bronze age.
I love reading Robert’s posts because they paint a detailed picture of life after DigiHom. For all our talk about James, the other Romine brother has had the sense to keep his big mouth shut and depart the industry that made it very clear he had overstayed his welcome. Robert on the other hand is another story.
I was going to do a point by point article about Romine’s drivel, but I can just save us all time by saying mostly all of the claims on DigiHom Uncensored are half-truths, hand-waving, arguing straw men, and pushing the blame. It would also be pointless since it’s the existence of the posts shows a contempt for the truth and everyone already knows not to trust anything Digital Homicide says.
Robert desperately wants us to believe that the lawsuit against Sterling and Steam wasn’t about suppressing criticism and free speech despite it clearly being about suppressing criticism and free speech, or that the focal point of the lawsuit was a comment about DH possibly stealing concept art which was fixed so fast that Digital Homicide doesn’t even have proof it existed outside of a correction. Again, a delusional fantasy debunked to the point that it’s getting excessive.
Robert’s latest piece came out a week ago and argues the semantics of what constitutes an asset flip while trying to throw Big Fish under the bus for releasing a lot of games. Here’s the thing; Big Fish Games is a developer and publisher worth nearly a billion dollars. They have 700 employees as of 2013 and a web of developers working for them. They aren’t some indie dev cobbling together assets they bought from a marketplace in their garage to create some Frankenstein’s Monster of a Unity game.
I’m also going to go out on a limb and say that Jim Sterling understands the definition of an asset flip given that he coined the phrase.
Games like Temper Tantrum sold as well as they did at a quarter because of trading card farmers and not because people thought the game was good quality. Romine still wants to push his worthless shovelware on Steam going as far as to claim that Valve should be required to sell his hastily cobbled garbage for a penny if he decides to charge that much.
“Theres really no reason a game on Steam can’t be sold for whatever price you want even a penny. Except maybe Steam wants to make sure your paying top dollar when you’re shopping on their store front…I mean as a monopoly shouldn’t they be required to distribute games at all price points?”
The factually and demonstrably false delusion that Steam is a monopoly is one of Romine’s running gags along with this claim that Valve terminated DigiHom because the Romines had an airtight legal claim against them for breach of contract and “monopolistic practices.”
“So they did the thing I should have seen coming and told James about, painted a bullshit picture to secure public approval and financially crippled us so we couldn’t pursue them legally.”
This is the Uncle Dave defense, life would have been so much better but it’s everyone else’s fault. Valve didn’t need to “secure public approval” because the public was already clamoring for DigiHom’s removal from Steam.
Back in January the Loot Toot Youtube page put out a video about Jim Sterling and the failure of Plague Road. Plague Road was developed by Jim’s friend and podcast co-host Conrad Zimmerman. Jim voiced a role in it and promoted it as clearly the work of a friend. Yes, another arm-flailing tantrum video about Jim Sterling, except this one is years down the line because one party is making $13k per month on Patreon and the other destroyed their own business. I’ll let you guess which one is which.
You’ll notice that the like/dislike ratio and comments are both disabled on the video, because the company whose slogan is “creating content almost everyone will enjoy” knows that everyone hates them. Even in 2020 the desecrated remains of Digital Homicide can’t find relevance without bringing up Jim F’n Sterling Son.
Anyhow I don’t know how to end this article, so I’ll cut out with a 2016 SidAlpha video from back when he showed his face on camera. Now ain’t that cute.
MMO Fallout 