Update, 3/16/2016: Well, I wasn’t expecting to update this 10 months later, but Digital Homicide has decided to do the exact opposite of my advice. This will end well, I state sarcastically.

Digital Homicide is suing Jim Sterling. According to their web page, the suit is over damages incurred from various accusations that Sterling has, frankly, backed up pretty thoroughly in his videos. I believe the law should always err on the side of free speech, but that’s just part of the issue.

The Romine brothers, the two guys behind Digital Homicide, also claim that they’ve gotten some thoroughly nasty harassment from Jim’s fans. That’s a pretty big problem, but whether Jim is responsible for the actions of his fans is something we could argue about for ages (and again, I would err on the side of free speech). That said, the people harassing the Romines should really stop. The Romines seem to make terrible games, but that’s it. This pissing contest with Jim Sterling, no matter how much it has escalated, doesn’t justify directly messing with their lives outside of feedback regarding the games they produce.

Now, here’s your nearly year-old post that predicted this like a mythical NeoGAF prophecy:

Digital Homicide is a small, independent game developer that has gotten a very negative reputation. The reason it has developed that reputation is due to video game reviewer, critic, and video personality Jim Sterling. The more accurate reason it has developed that reputation is its response to Jim Sterling. This has included video takedown requests to YouTube and counter-videos attacking Sterling, and it has recently culminated in over an hour-and-a-half of the most gloriously uncomfortable interview I’ve ever seen, and that includes Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Peter Molyneux disaster. To top it off, it’s an interview that Digital Homicide requested of Sterling.

I have the best idea for Digital Homicide: Let it go. You can’t pull a win from this, and the harder you try the worse it will get.

That isn’t a statement that Sterling is right and Digital Homicide is wrong. We can get to that later. It’s just a statement of fact. Sterling has a huge following of fans that frequent Steam, and every time Digital Homicide tries to get a hit in against him, Sterling will churn that following up simply by pointing out the facts of the attempted attack.

From a purely tactical standpoint, it’s incredibly stupid to go against Jim Sterling because you’re unhappy with his reviews of your games. That unhappiness acknowledges that there is such a thing as bad publicity, and trying to hit him back is asking for even more of it. He has the fans. He has the platform. Trying for a snappy comeback to anything he says about you is just poking a sleeping bear in front of its den, which is filled with thousands of robotic bear-piranha hybrids.

Also, Sterling’s experience as a media figure makes him media-savvy, and trying to catch him flat-footed with some pretty bizarre accusations is just foolish. Going into an antagonistic interview with the biggest bullet in your gun being that Sterling’s real name is the same as another writer’s, and not realizing that it’s a very common name in the UK (and that the tactic is borderline doxxing, a pretty definitive scumbag tactic even if one’s online persona acknowledges their real name in some form; it’s like thinking you’re getting a hand up in the discussion by calling Jon Stewart Jon Leibowitz) is mind-bogglingly stupid. It’s a bad move that will not get anyone on your side.

The second problem, and the one from which everything else stems, is that Digital Homicide is taking things so personally. It’s not divorcing criticism of its work with criticism of itself as a person, and it’s turned that into a campaign for the developer and a running gag for Sterling. Digital Homicide needs to just take whatever lumps it gets in the land of YouTube and reviews and podcasts and move on.

It’s understandable to find Sterling insulting. It’s even completely fair to say you think he’s a jackass in his style and mannerisms. I can acknowledge he sounds like a smarmy bastard more often than not, and I like him. But taking any of it personally and trying to stop it? That’s a bad idea. Sterling will use colorful language to dump on any game he thinks is of low quality. It’s how he does what he does, as a critic. It’s his style. You can like it or hate it, but thinking it’s about you and not just your game is finding significance where there is none.

I have not played any of Digital Homicide’s games, so I can’t evaluate them and I won’t recommend any purchasing decision toward them one way or another. From what I’ve seen of them, they seem to be poorly made and derivative. Sterling did play them, and he evaluated them as terrible. He’s a critic; that’s what he does. He used harsh language because that’s also what he does. And it’s completely within his rights to do that.

Digital Homicide is a small developer, and small developers are affected by negative reviews more than large publishers. That’s generally true. It’s also a fact that if you put out a product for people to purchase, you’re putting it out there for reviewers to recommend to not purchase. You’re also putting out a product that, especially in Steam listings, will receive a great deal of non-professional word of mouth from people who do purchase them.

The success or lack thereof of Digital Homicide isn’t because of Jim Sterling. It’s because the games it put out were broadly seen as poor quality. Sterling is a single face to put on that, because after the first attempt to take down his video review, Sterling took Digital Homicide and made it into a running joke. It doesn’t make the games any better, and it doesn’t give consumers any more of a reason to buy them.

I have no doubt that some of Sterling’s fans dumped on Digital Homicide regardless of whether they played any of its games or not, on Steam. That’s awful, but that’s what happens when you have a lot of enthusiastic fans; some are going to be awful. It’s petty harassment, but it’s not Sterling’s fault or responsibility outside of simply condemning that behavior. He doesn’t lead an army, he just has a lot of people who listen to what he says. Some of those people are probably jerks.

If you put anything out on the internet, you’re going to take crap from people. I’ve taken crap from people, but it’s nowhere near what Digital Homicide has taken. It’s also nowhere near what Jim Sterling has taken. If you open yourself up to feedback, you open yourself up to negative feedback. If you open yourself up to feedback on the Internet, you open yourself up to negative feedback from hordes of anonymous, juvenile creeps who get more enjoyment from antagonizing someone than they do from actually consuming what they claim to like. Welcome to the internet, man. Hope you brought waders.

Digital Homicide could some day make good games. It could some day become popular on Steam. It won’t if it fixates on Jim Sterling as the avatar of all of its problems instead of recognizing that the games it has put out in the past are, at least according to many people who have played them, fundamentally awful. It’s not about fixing bugs, it’s not about flipping assets, and it’s not about gun sound effects. The core of a game is bad and the game simply isn’t enjoyable or rewarding, it is a bad game. No excuses or changes of subject will change that. Digital Homicide needs to take its licks from an unforgiving public that has made a very acerbic reviewer very popular, and move on. It shouldn’t ask whose fault its lack of success is. It should ask how it can improve what it makes. That’s the only thing that matters.

And Jim Sterling’s fans should lay off Digital Homicide until they actually try the games, or until Digital Homicide attempts another video takedown. You can be as amused and informed by Sterling’s reviews all you want, but using that as a platform to blindly dump on a game you’ve never touched, just because the review was funny? That’s a dick move.