Circumventing bans is still a bad idea.
Here at MMO Fallout I am more than aware that this website gets read and shared by a variety of game developers. The problem is that none of them listen to me, especially when I discuss Valve’s history of banning games from the Steam platform and the crazy ways developers can avoid such terminations.
Over the last couple of weeks on Twitter we’ve been bringing light to a developer who goes by the name CureLovelyWarrior, one who I hesitate to call a developer because they don’t actually create games. Rather CureLovelyWarrior’s MO is to take pre-built games and swap their assets, and then vomit them on Itch.io for free. This developer in my humble opinion has likely never expressed an original thought that wasn’t fed to them from a cartoon.
If CureLovelyWarrior can be summed up in a few words they would be “lazy indifference.” The games are not only chock full of stolen assets and lazily ripped sprite sheets, but the developer appears to be proud of their complete lack of ethics and morality. CLW’s games also feature a descriptively illegal End User License Agreement, one that threatens vaguely criminal acts on those whose opinions the developer considers improper, including slightly obscure threats of abduction by force and mental reconditioning. Despite repeated mentions of love and friendship, CLW regularly inserts people they don’t like in their games to be murdered by the player over simple political differences.
Both Lovely Warriors of Friendship and Hikaru’s Imagination Rebellion were rejected by Valve due to abusive levels of asset theft, a rejection that is rare without a existing DMCA complaint. So CLW did what any dirty dev does, they pulled the old switcheroo and updated their existing games to include both of these titles. Given the sheer number of games that have been banned this year alone for that practice, the outcome seemed predestined.
So on September 12, Valve woke up and banned CureLovelyWarrior and all of their games from the store including those that hadn’t released. It’s an end to an embarrassing saga that should have never happened, and one that will no doubt occur again in the coming weeks because these stories are cyclical and the only definites in life are death, taxes, and dirty devs evading bans.
This is the best outcome for everyone, especially CureLovelyWarrior who can return to the obscurity of Itch.io will put them at relative safety from notice by Nintendo’s lawyers.
MMO Fallout 