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British freelance video game journalist, critic, and YouTuber, Jim Sterling, famous for his work at Destructoid and The Escapist as well as his own YouTube series the Jimquisition, released a video on November the 1st 2014 that brought about a rise to possibly one of the biggest storm in the gaming community. Jim’s video on November 1st featured his gameplay of The Slaughtering Grounds –previously available on steam for $9.99, now for $0.99– along with his live commentary on the game. The Slaughtering Grounds on its own is already a bit of a mess, the game was put together like a kindergartener’s arts and crafts project, bits and pieces seem to jut out and not match in both artistic consistency and quality. Although somewhat justified, Jim’s criticism of the game was not taken lightly by its creators.
The amount of “toxicity” –gaming jargon for foulness of language and spitefulness– at this point has reached a certain level that isn’t exactly nice enough to be appropriate for a school newspaper article. And so the details will be slightly omitted.
The developers of the game, ImminentUprising, responded by re-uploading Jim’s original video with a bitten text-overlay written in the voice of Jim as the first installment in a new series they named “Review the reviewer”. Jim then replied by uploading a review of their review of his review, which was just a re-upload of Digital Homcide’s re-upload with his laughter overlaying the whole thing.
After the first wave of negativity, ImminentUprising as well The Slaughtering Grounds have been given their very own spotlight as gamers starting digging into this scandal. With hours, gamers from within the community exposed The Slaughtering Grounds for using art assets they don’t legally own. The blood pattern used in the game can be found on Google Images and their official artwork is an uncredited desktop wallpaper made by somebody else. Digital Homicide that they purchased their assets from Shutterstock and that they have removed the assets from the game.
ImminentUprising decided to take it one step further and uploaded a review of Jim’s review of their review of his review. Talk about review-ception.
A week after the uploading of Jim’s review, Digital Homicide, the creator of The Slaughter Grounds, has filed a copyright strike against it as a last resort, removing the video from YouTube.
These law suits to take down YouTube content has a history of not ending up in the favor of angered developers, and this time was not an exception. Digital Homicide’s lawsuit was not held in effect very long and soon after the video was available again on YouTube.
But all of that was 2 years ago, more recently on March 4, 2016 Digital Homicide has decided to sue Jim Sterling claiming that Jim’s video has damaged their business and that they feel attacked. Digital Homicide stated that Jim “falsely accused,” and “caused damage” to the company, they are accusing Jim of “assault, libel, and slander” for $10 million.
Digital Homicide also claim that they’ve received harassment from Jim’s fans and accused Jim to have sent them as a mean to further ridicule them. Whether or not Jim is responsible for the actions of his fans is up to debate but the fact that Digital Homicide feels attacked does not change.
Digital Homicide is a small, independent game developer or “indie” developer and has a rather negative reputation for bad games. However, the reason their reputation was mostly caused by their interactions with Jim Sterling. Digital Homicide blames Jim for ruining their reputation, while Jim feels like Digital Homicide ruined themselves by responding negatively to criticism.
As of now, Digital Homicide has not been able to bring Jim Sterling to court due to insufficient funds. They started a donation campaign aiming to raise the required funds to bring Jim Sterling to court, only to take it down shortly after due to “harassers donating amounts specifically to cause charges rather than donations and charge backs to cause financial fees”.
This issue has yet to be resolved though it’s popularity on the internet seems to be dying down in the last couple weeks. Whether or not the issue would be resolved is still hard to say, Digital Homicide seems to really confident that their law suit will work out in their favor, but unfortunately lacks the funds to bring Jim to court, while Jim on the other hand seems apathetic still playing games and making videos.
Due to inappropriate language and negative attitude the videos mentioned in this article are not school appropriated and therefore not embedded on our site, however they are available on YouTube which can be accessed through links below. Below are links relevant to the article.
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