Category: Editorials

Crowdfunding Fraudster Update: The Year Of The Northerner


Fraudster:
2a:  a person who is not what he or she pretends to be :impostor;

It’s that time again. Two years have passed since I posted the first Crowdfunding Fraudsters dedicated to Jeremy Soule and The Northerners and the fact that we are coming back for round three should tell you everything you need to know about how much progress has gotten done in the last two years. December 2019 now marks over six years of delays since The Northerner was originally supposed to be launched, that being September 2013, and keeping on brand with Soule’s incompetence as a businessman, the latest launch date promise has come and gone without as much as a peep from the man himself. In fact, it’s gone without a peep from the Kickstarter community.

I can’t imagine there is anyone left with faith in Soule’s ability to deliver a product.

1. Jeremy Soule Is A Talented Fraudster

I said it before and I will say it again, Jeremy Soule isn’t some two-bit hack fraud who managed to dupe people into giving him money for an album he wasn’t capable of publishing. No siree, he’s a two-bit hack fraud of a businessman who managed to dupe people into giving him money for an album he was completely capable of publishing yet has not. Just ask about his DirectSong business. One that more than six years after the intended release date has still not been released! Remember back in the good old days when Jeremy Soule promised that the only risk that might delay the project was scheduling during the summer months?

“I will be working with the same team that has provided reliable and excellent support throughout my career. Recordings aren’t easy to make, but if planning is done within a reasonable time frame, the process can go smoothly. As we have delved into the initial planning stages of the recording session, scheduling for the summer months affords us enough planning time for a recording of this nature.” -Jeremy

Summer scheduling. Oh and we later learned that the instruments Jeremy Soule had planned to use in creating The Northerner Symphony hadn’t been invented yet and wouldn’t be for some years after, but why would you want to put that as a risk on the Kickstarter page? Telling people you are technologically incapable of delivering the thing you are asking for funding for might put them off of giving you a large sum of cash money with virtually no legal strings attached.

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Soule had released a new single this month; Friðr. It’s from the album The Moon & The Night Sky. I’m not sure if the person who uploaded it to Youtube has permission to do so, but you should listen to it now just in case since Jeremy Soule thinks that music piracy is just as bad as the holocaust.

More on that later. Actually, more on that now.

2. This Article Profited Jeremy Soule By $10

Jeremy Soule made $10 from me writing this article, and much like backing The Northerner it was mostly a complete waste of money. I didn’t back The Northerner.

Last time I wrote about Jeremy Soule I noted that he had launched a Patreon, which December 2018 me was smart enough to know wouldn’t provide anything useful within the “weekly Q&A” sessions that Soule publishes once every whenever-he-feels-like-it. This time around I wasn’t that smart, and I ended up giving $10 to Soule’s Patreon so I could get access to all of his posts in the hopes of finding something relevant. I didn’t. Only a lot of curated Q&A’s asking Jeremy why his farts don’t stink.

Back in January, Jeremy posted his grand announcement that he would be releasing two new albums in 2019: On the Spring Equinox we would see The Northerner: The Moon and the Night Sky.” On the winter solstice we would finally get our hands on The Northerner. Pretty freaking grand, huh? Two albums in one year! Well I see your two albums in one year and raise you…no albums in one year.

Yea, The Moon & The Night Sky was more like The Pie In The Sky, and didn’t release. Who could have seen that coming, am I right? Jeremy Soule posted on his Facebook page:

“I’m currently putting the finishing touches on this album. It’s taken a bit longer than expected, but I want it to be right, and it’s close. While I had hoped to have had it to you sooner, I’m proud to say that this music is amongst my best work. This is the official album cover and I’m also excited to say that I have brought the Old Norse language to life in an operatic setting.”

And as we all know, when Jeremy Soule says he’s just about done with a project, he’s just about done with a project. Except for every time. To the best of my research (Soule’s Patreon, Kickstarter updates, social media), I was only able to find the single posted above as the only release related to Soule’s new side-album, in addition to Kickstarter posts from 4-5 months ago lamenting that this new album will also never be released. Screw the Spring Equinox, Friðr got released on December 5.

Enjoy the $10 Soule, I hope it goes to a good cause like a big paper calendar. Because you’re terrible at release dates.

3. The Max Steiner Agency Pulls Out

In preparation for writing this article, I sent an email to the Max Steiner Agency under the guise of someone thinking Soule would be releasing his album on the twenty first as announced, and inquiring about any planned press releases. The response I got was astounding: Max Steiner is not managing The Northerner and has no information about the status of the album. They are still working with Soule generally, just not on this album.

Crazy huh? Because I’ll be honest with my readers. I don’t have the greatest memory of stuff I wrote two years ago, but I distinctly remembered The Max Steiner Agency being a big part of the original Crowdfunding Fraudsters piece. So I looked back and found that yes indeed, they were a big part. Specifically Gloria Soto who made a completely unprofessional jerk of herself in an email to Kotaku.

“It still rings true. All the Backer did was re-post what Jeremy has said in the past. Which is still true. What part do you want to understand? Are you a Composer that has ever tried to write a symphony?”

The context of this piece should be noted for clarity. Soto here is attacking a Kotaku writer after her agency incompetently mistook a fan-written apology for an official statement by Jeremy Soule and posted it as an official update to the Kickstarter campaign. Like any professional adult, Soto attacks the question and condescends to the author’s intelligence, on the grounds that Kotaku writer never wrote a symphony, so shut your stupid fudging mouth on our PR snafu. Oh and in case you’re wondering, nobody has clarified the post’s authenticity to this date directly to backers. Soto at the time went on to separate the “true fans” from the “trolls” asking for refunds, noting that she was working with Kickstarter to get them removed as they had already been refunded.

Narrator: They were not removed, and many of them allege they were not refunded.

“What I do know – is that we are receiving a lot of support from the true fans. Currently- The ones making noise are backers that I have refunded – have become trolls – which I am currently working with Kickstarter to get them removed from posting on our page.”

The Northerner has so many true fans that as of this writing (noon on December 22), not a single person has bothered to comment on The Northerner not meeting its latest deadline. Or at all in the past two weeks. Boy for a company that isn’t managing The Northerner, the Max Steiner Agency put its name on the Kickstarter campaign, was handling refund requests for angry backers, and was actively attempting to work with Kickstarter to shut down dissent over the minor issue of the campaign being years late.

Now I’m not saying that Max Steiner is lying to me. After all two years have passed since these comments, it is completely reasonable (and likely) that the agency told Jeremy Soule it would no longer be managing his project. I can’t imagine having their name attached to The Northerner has been anything but negative, cue Gloria Soto making the company look even worse. It would also explain why the sparse updates to the Kickstarter campaign began being signed by “The Northerner Team” as of January this year, whereas before they were being signed by Jeremy Soule himself.

4. It’s Gone, It’s All Gone

The more astute MMO Fallout viewers might notice that this article is lacking in the citation department. That is 100% 2017 Connor’s fault, as he did not archive anything.

Here’s the problem: A lot of our statements from Jeremy Soule came from his Facebook page. Back in August, Jeremy Soule was accused of sexual misconduct. That’s not the focal point of this piece. Soule was not arrested, nor have charges been filed, but all of Jeremy’s social media accounts have been nuked from orbit in the interim. These quotes we got back in the first Fraudsters article are gone, you can go back and check the links to see that they are mostly all dead. This is my fault. We generally archive comments in case of exactly this type of scenario. It wasn’t done.

I’d fire myself, but I’m good friends with the boss and I’d just be back in the office tomorrow like nothing happened.

I decided to do some digging to check out the other missing links in this whole racket, and unsurprisingly nothing else is functioning. The Northerner Facebook Fan Page URL has been hijacked and currently redirects to a blog by someone named Carol Causey who hasn’t updated her Weebly page since 2016 and appears to be a spam page for another service that is equally no longer operational. The Jeremy Soule Facebook Fan page link redirects to a parked domain that was apparently once used to spam human growth hormone products. Fun times.

I looked up Jeremy Soule’s symphony website: http://northernersymphony.com/, since Soule’s Kickstarter has people sending emails to this domain to change their address in case they moved in the last six years. I sent an email myself to this address and have not received a response which judging by the Kickstarter comments is not out of the ordinary. The domain itself however is nonfunctional and a quick look at the Wayback Machine shows that it never was, displaying a “Server Engine Upgrade In Progress…” since May 2017.

And since we’re checking out URLs, it’s probably germaine to point out that Jeremy Soule’s DirectSong service no longer appears to be operational. You can read up on the original Crowdfunding Fraudsters about the DirectSong fraud racket.

5. In Conclusion…Again

One positive side of this piece is that with $10 I gained access to uncompressed copies of Jeremy Soule’s music, and through the magic of internet I now have those copies sitting on my computer forever. What isn’t forever is my Patreon membership which was promptly cancelled. Enjoy the $10, Jeremy. I hope it goes toward something productive like a sourdough bread starter since we all know it’s not going toward printing Kickstarter rewards.

Otherwise I get the idea that I’m the only one paying attention or even caring about The Northerner at this point, and I didn’t even back the thing. As a fan of Jeremy Soule’s work, I came into writing this Crowdfunding Fraudsters article with the slim hope that December 21 would come around and my skepticism would be proven to be totally unfounded, but I can’t say I’m surprised.

If there are any Northerner fans in the audience who are still holding out hope for a release, I’d like to hear from you. Mostly just to know you exist.

One Year Later, Edengrad Remains Offline


Edengrad

MMO Fallout has been keeping an eye on everyone’s favorite MMO Edengrad for the past year, and at the conclusion of 2019 I can definitively say that the game is still dead.

It feels like forever ago that the Edengrad servers went offline, but the calendar suggests that the actual date might be closer to 2018. Probably around the time that its developer Huckleberry Games went bankrupt. News from the bankruptcy suggested that Huckleberry was receiving attention from investors as well as the government to get them more funding and put the train back on the tracks.

And back on the tracks they were put. Back in November 2018 a dev account just called “office” posted an ominous ‘we’re back soon’ message. How soon is too soon? Thirteen months, since the company hasn’t posted anything to the Edengrad community since then. Huckleberry Games is still alive and kicking, and more importantly pulling money from investors. The company just filed actions a couple of days ago to issue new shares and bring in more revenue. Bully!

The only thing the company doesn’t seem to want to talk about are its games. Will Edengrad come back? If so, when? What else is Huckleberry working on? Does the company exist to do something other than vacuum in investor money? Who knows.

What I do know is that the Edengrad website remains offline, although you can’t buy the domain. I tried. For everyone else, we’ll just have to wait and see if 2020 brings any news.

Diaries From Destiny 2: Milky Vex Nipple Christmas Cookies


The MMO Fallout lawyers have informed me that I cannot legally say that the Vex in Destiny 2 have nipples. But I’ve seen them. Up close.

I wanted to talk about Destiny 2 because I’ve been playing this game quite a bit since the new season launched. Destiny 2 is in the midst of what you might refer to as a “Christmas Event,” notably because the event is taking place around Christmas and includes such things as sleighs and other Christmas-themed delights. In addition to the Christmas event, Destiny 2 is also knee deep in Season 9 and the accompanying storyline.

For today, let’s go through the Christmas event since it is what I based the title of this article around. The Dawning 2019 is the latest edition of the winter-themed event and has you once again going around collecting ingredients to bake up cookies in your Destiny-themed Easy Bake Oven®. You get ingredients based on what creature you killed and how you killed them, like “delicious explosive” is from explosive weapons and chitin powder comes from the Hive mobs. You also get rather disgusting ingredients, like cabal oil. I’m not sure what I find more off-putting, the fact that the Vex (a race of time-traveling robots) drop milk or that the Taken drop their milk pre-churned into butter. Or maybe it’s the idea of taking these ingredients and baking delicious cookies out of them.

Thankfully my automated Vex nipple-plucker will take care of the need to farm that resource. Patent pending. You can milk anything with nipples. The good news is that the Holiday Oven 2.0 app has evidently retained all recipes that you baked last year, and includes something new to get those appetites whetted. Vex milk.

All of this is a fancy way of getting you out into the world and completing activities, and you’ll need to complete those activities because every recipe is founded in one common ingredient: Essence of Dawning. The only way to get that ingredient is to complete events. Lots and lots of public events, as each event grants 5 essence and you’ll need 15 per cookie. 10 per cookie if you bake every recipe and upgrade your oven, and I would recommend putting a priority on completing your recipe list. You don’t need to complete last year’s recipes again if you already did that.

The holiday event is fine, by which I mean it is absolute bull shee-ite once you are hundreds of kills deep and still can’t convince the game to drop one of those Personal Touch ingredients that is rarely dropped via melee kills. In my humble and expert opinion, the Dawning event is best completed as a side-thing that you make progress toward while doing the main grind which is Sundials and leveling up your obelisks for the current season.

An MMO On Steam: Spelling Quest Online


Spelling Quest Online is certainly a game and is absolutely on Steam.

I’ll come right out and admit that I downloaded Spelling Quest Online because it is free to play and in early access, and also because it is tagged in the MMO category. Spelling Quest Online is multiplayer free-form scrabble, which is a fancy way of saying that nobody takes turns as much as you just throw down tiles and hope for the best. You can connect to random boards and just go to town for the ten minutes until the game gets boring and you want to stop and play something fun.

The boards have words that people can easily spell, like anal and bruv. There is a dictionary check when you want to make a word, but I’m not sure what dictionary the game cross-references that thinks bruv is a word because while the Cambridge dictionary recognizes it, the Oxford dictionary does not. There are daily quests that offer you gold which can be used to replace letters. I assume that most of the people playing this game are cheating. I cheated and used a Scrabble helper website because my gaming skills are only second in their inadequacy to my knowledge of words.

I will readily admit that I quit after ten minutes when completing words left me with a hand consisting almost entirely of Y’s, V’s, and X’s and literally no way to continue playing (I didn’t have any gold) on that map. I probably could have found a spot to put one or two of the Y’s but I didn’t feel like putting more effort than this game is worth. Which is nothing.

As for the developer Craig Schwartz, I will continue to love your character in the film Being John Malkovich, even if they didn’t give you anything to do in the sequel; Being John Malkovich 2: District Dafoe.

Pearl Abyss Reveals More On Plan 8, Exosuit Shooter


Plan 8 is one of several games recently revealed by Pearl Abyss. It is an exosuit MMO shooter built on a new proprietary engine being developed for PC and console Minh Le, co-creator of Counter-Strike. A key feature surrounds finding and equipping different gears to the suit which Pearl Abyss promises to create a unique shooter with MMO gameplay elements.

A number of new screenshots have been released for Plan 8, which we have shared below. For more details, check out the official website.

2019’s Awards We Made Up: 2019 Edition Part 1 Of ???


2019 was certainly a year for video games and 2020 is looking to be a year with video games in it as well. And what better way to celebrate video games than by handing out completely arbitrary awards that we made up to talk about video games? This is MMO Fallout’s 2019 Awards We Made Up: 2019 Edition.

I don’t know how many parts this series is going to be because, again, it’s all made up.

1. Best Remake

Winner: Resident Evil 2

I think it stands to reason that a lot of people were…skeptical when they heard that Resident Evil 2 would be remade and not in a way that was similar to how the original game played. And then we got the first trailer and those skeptics were even more skeptical. Why does Leon Kennedy look like three toddlers stacked on top of one another? Why does Claire look a bit like Miranda Cosgrove? And then the game came out and everyone was mostly happy. Resident Evil 2 comes on the cusp of Resident Evil 7 being successful and definitely not on the heels of the REmake which underperformed when it released on the Gamecube and had moderate success on further platforms.

Resident Evil 2 is an all-around beautiful return to a much beloved game in this long franchise. It twisted the story up enough that even those of us who played the original version to death on N64 or Playstation had a reason to go back and buy this at premium AAA game prices. For fans of the older Resident Evil, it continued to give us hope that Capcom was returning to the pre-boulder punching era of Resident Evil when the series was less stupid. Even better, it led to the announcement of a Resident Evil 3 remake in the same style.

2. Most Successful Con

Winner: Star Citizen

I’m using a photo of cheeseburgers because it’s less depressing than reminding people that some of them paid thousands of dollars for a product that will never see full release.

Star Citizen may well go down as the most successful con in the history of the gaming industry. The game has brought in more than a quarter billion dollars in crowdfunding and private investment and despite the fact that they have not come close to finishing what was promised seven years ago under a fraction of the budget that they now have, these sentient wallets we call whales are still lining up to throw thousands of dollars that some can’t personally afford to be spending on jpeg concept art for a game that is never going to release as advertised, and one that will continue to stack unfinished feature and pushing those benchmarks and release dates into the oblivion.

Chris Roberts didn’t make a video game, he built the video game equivalent of scientology where gullible rich kids can happily throw lods of emone into his wallet and finance some of the most well-fed grifters in the industry. He’s also responsible for the last five years being the most times the phrase “I hate to say it, but Derek Smart was right” was uttered.

3. Best Comeback

Winner: Destiny 2

I know Bungie is never going to come out and admit it, so I’ll just say this here: Destiny is probably in the greatest position it ever has been now that Bungie has ended its abusive publishing relationship with Activision. But what has Destiny 2 done since Activision got shown the door? Gone free to play, introduced cross-save, rejigged the cash shop, produced a holiday event that seemed more focused on producing something people would want to play rather than just being an avenue to shove expensive microtransactions down everyone’s throat. Not half bad.

Now that Destiny is back in Bungie’s hands fully, we can look forward to a future without Activision acting as the abusive publisher.

4. Company We Expect To Be Gone In 2020

Winner: Daybreak Game Company

I think I’ve made my contempt for Daybreak Game Company quite well known in 2019; it’s a company that refuses to acknowledge the place it is in while simultaneously begging for money in any avenue possible by selling increasingly low quality stuff that people don’t want. In 2019 I chronologued H1Z1 on PS4 becoming a depressing joke of a title. I also talked about Planetside Arena being a game nobody wanted and, look at that, nobody wanted it.

Daybreak is a shell of what it used to be. Its stable of games has plummeted down to six, the company has suffered more rounds of layoffs in the last two years than any healthy company should, and even their ability to support the games that are still alive has diminished significantly. H1Z1 barely gets anything in the way of new content, Z1 Battle Royale has been abandoned after the failure of a partnership that was NantG Mobile, Planetside Arena was a dud, and Planetside 2 doesn’t seem to be in a much better place in terms of staff still on payroll. 2019 marked Daybreak canning the player studio, the failed relationship with NantG Mobile, we learned that they were probably working on a Marvel MMO, several layoffs, and this company wants us to believe that Planetside 3 and Everquest 3 are still in the works?

I’m not buying it. If Daybreak survives 2020, I will be very surprised. If they manage to release an Everquest 3, I will personally eat a Little Caesars pizza and donate a grand to charity of their choice.

5. Most Interesting Topic

Amro Elansari

People loved MMO Fallout patron saint Amro Elansari this year as it turned out to be the most viewed In Plain English article.

Amro Elansari came to our attention earlier this year when he filed a lawsuit against Jagex in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania alleging constitutional violations after the company apparently muted him in RuneScape. The judge threw out the case as implausible, noting that the constitution does not protect from actions of private companies. While Elansari’s case was tossed out in state court, he was told that he could still file in federal court. Elansari filed a notice of appeal, but there have been no updates since then.

Hopefully 2020 will be full of surprises in the court.

6. Most Unexpected Reboot

Winner: Kritika Reboot

When En Masse Entertainment canned Kritika Online back in May, I didn’t think that the game would be back up and running by the end of the year. Or at all, for that matter. But here we are, and on November 12 Kritika: Reboot launched on to Steam and back into our hearts. The new publishing endeavor is being handled in-house by All-M Co. Ltd.

Response to the title has been quite positive, with a 77% “Mostly Positive” rating on Steam and a seemingly healthy number of concurrent players in-game on a regular basis. We’ll have to see how well the game holds up going into 2020 and if All-M can keep the momentum going on the western relaunch.

7. 2019’s Most Busy Beaver

Winner: Pearl Abyss

Human resources has told us that we are legally not allowed to require being a beaver to be eligible for 2019’s Most Busy Beaver award.

Pearl Abyss has had a busy 2019 indeed. We’ve seen the full scale launch of Black Desert on Playstation, Xbox, and now mobile, as well as more content updates for each platform than you can shake a stick at. What kind of stick would you shake at Black Desert’s updates? Probably something made of pine. But not content with taking over the MMO space, Pearl Abyss announced four new games that will be releasing in the foreseeable future; Plan 8, DokeV, Crimson Desert, and Shadow Arena. Whether your interests lie in exo-suit shooters, creature collection, gritty MMOs, or battle royale games, you’ll have something coming to you.

Busy beavers indeed. We are excited to see what 2020 will bring for the work-loaded Pearl Abyss crew. But for now they can take solace in knowing that they are 2019’s most busy beaver.

Planetside Arena: The Launchpad For Daybreak’s Next Catastrophe


Is it time for Daybreak to give up on the ghost on Planetside Arena? It was time when someone at Daybreak said “let’s make our next game a Planetside battle royale title.”

At any given moment, there are more people browsing MMO Fallout than there are playing Planetside Arena, which really isn’t saying much since the 24 hour peak for the title was 12 people. Under normal circumstances I might use this space to say “I feel bad for Daybreak,” but it’s hard to considering that the idea of a Planetside-themed battle royale game is something that was pretty much universally mocked and rejected by the community long before Planetside Arena was even announced. Hell, you can probably go back to well before the concept was even in the pre-production stages by Daybreak and find people mockingly predicting that Daybreak would hastily shove out another battle royale game while their existing title in H1Z1 was already floundering.

But Planetside: Arena isn’t just a big disappointment, it is the launching pad through which Daybreak plans to fire off its next disaster: Planetside 3.

Granted, this theory assumes that Daybreak will survive long enough or have the capacity to develop a whole new game. Planetside 3 as Daybreak stands now will be a disaster, and I will eat a Little Caesar’s pizza if Planetside 3 launches and is somehow a big hit. For charity. Planetside 2 isn’t totally dead, but it isn’t doing great. The Steam version seems to hold around a thousand players during the good hours and while there are battles to be had on the game world, as pared down as it is a lot of the world is just dead. Quiet, nobody there, outposts clean for the picking.

So what does Daybreak want to do with Planetside 3? Outside of fracturing the community, they envision a future where there is a full-fledged galactic war in an expansive galaxy. That’s right, taking the stragglers from Planetside 2 as well as some stragglers and throwing them into an even larger room where they can run around and not really collide with one another. From a technical standpoint the idea of players having battles on a giant galaxy-sized world is impressive. Unfortunately as I said with 2019’s battle royale games boasting 1,000 players per server, your technology is completely worthless if there is nobody actually filling those servers.

Thankfully I moonlight as an unpaid consultant (assuming appreciation is a currency), and I’m willing to offer my two dollars. Foremost, if Daybreak is going to create this massive world, they need to fill it with living things. Am I saying that Daybreak should go the Fortnite route and populate the maps with somewhat intelligent bots? Not really. I’m suggesting to look back at titles like Titanfall or Tabula Rasa, games that threw in grunts for players to shoot at and feel like they were still contributing to the group even if they weren’t that great at the PvP side of the game.

Let’s take the same scenario twice: I’m rolling around taking bases off in the middle of bumfudge nowhere in Planetside 3. I come up on a small base, there are no players there. I stroll around the empty base for about ten minutes and take over the control nodes, take over the base, I’m friggin bored. Now take the same scenario; I roll up on a base and there are guards present. They’re not really difficult to kill because they’re not as smart as real players, but it does prolong the encounter and I actually have to do something other than notice how empty the game world is. I might even get careless and die once or twice. As I take over the base I’m gaining experience, maybe unlocking something for my gun, and the boring busy work feels a little less boring and the world feels more alive.

Just a thought, I could be completely wrong.

Kickstarter Ketchup: Identity By Asylum Entertainment


Identity is an open world MMORPG by Asylum Entertainment that was successfully Kickstarted back in early 2015 to the tune of $187 thousand Canadian dollars. Following a tumultuous journey, it finally launched into early access on Steam on November 30, 2018. One year later, MMO Fallout is ready to check up on its progress.

Identity describes itself as:

“Identity is a modern-day open-world MMORPG for PC and Mac with complete freedom to do almost anything you can imagine at any time in first or third person views.  Live as an honest civilian, a criminal, police officer, paramedic and many more.  There are no levels or skill grinding, but talent and perk progression so that it’s the actions of you, not your character, which matter most.”

Sure. In reality, Identity has presently released with its first “module” called The Town Square. The town square lets you walk around and enjoy a “bunch of interesting and fun things to do.” What are those fun things to do? Who knows. It might behoove the folks at Asylum Entertainment to actually list some of the activities currently available in-game on the store page whose existence is solely to sell people on your game. It is $30 in early access after all.

How is the public enjoying their open world MMO? They aren’t. All time reviews hold the game at 38% “mostly negative” rating on Steam while the last month rates in at an even more dismal 29% “mostly negative” rating. Traffic ratings are even worse, as the title hasn’t broken double digit peak players since April of this year. The latest content patch news posted is from June 26, however the developer has been quite active on their Twitter account. Assuring people that the game has not been abandoned and referring to Steam’s refund policy.

Identity doesn’t appear to be in a great place right now, but that’s not to say the project is dead or abandoned. According to Asylum Entertainment the next module up for release is the Swat module followed by racing. We’ve seen games start off on rocky grounds and then recover over time, so who is to say that Identity has already doomed itself? Only time and a proper release schedule will tell.

Source: Steam

Not Massive: Civil Contract Dev Shuts Down Discussion On Discord


When it comes to abusive independent developers over the last few months, you really can’t find a much better candidate than Varius Benson. Varius Benson is the project lead of Capital Gaming RP, an indie outfit currently in the middle of creating the game Civil Contract, a roleplaying game set in Australia. Benson has also gotten into hot water over the past couple of months due to his attempts to silence negative commentary about his game, going as far as allegedly abusing the DMCA system to extort various Youtube hosts into removing negative videos about his title.

For more information on Varius Benson’s antics, I recommend checking out the videos below. It looks like Benson’s inability to handle criticism has reached a new height (or new low) as early this morning he announced that all feedback via Discord would come to an end, and that the social media app generally used for discussion would no longer be used for discussion. Benson’s statement is above as posted.