Very far. And he's crucified his future chances to give it another attempt by reacting the way he did. Now he'd be labeled at "that histrionic guy who once threw a fit on the internet and made a spectacle of himself". Not a good move if you ask me.

Yeah. Releasing a terrible game is one thing. You can come back from that. Becoming known as "the guy who did that thing" is much harder to come back from... if it's even possible at all.

Release lazy Alien Breed clone.

Full on meltdown over negative reviews.

Call community childish.

Upload picture of a turd.

"DURR YOU ALL NEED TO GROW UP!"

Wow... I guess he will never live those words down... talk about burning bridges.

Or shitting on bridges, as the case may be. -_-

OK, I installed it and played through the first level.

It's a very simple top-down, 2D alien shooter. It's not utterly awful - it's playable - but to call it unpolished is a bit of a kindness. The art is rudimentary, the sound design is bad, and the UI lacks all kind of functionality gamers take for granted.

I beat the first level pretty easily and poked around the second level (where you get an automap, that doesn't show your position). Very simple controls, and the game tells you there will only ever be one gun available. I really couldn't be arsed to go any further.

So yeah, not utterly terrible, but really a barrel bottom game. Shovelware. If this were a student project for a high school senior, we'd pat him on the back and tell him he had a future. As a commercial product, though, it's pretty bad.

There certainly are black sheep among the devs (as in any community), and it's the job of critics to point them out and protect the customers from falling into their traps.

What Sterling does, though, is behaving like a vulture. He picks targets that are weak already, and seems to enjoy himself massively while being an incredibly arrogant dick and thumping them into the mud even further. Whenever I watched one of videos, I just wish he had never started gaming.

Really, if the main "champion" for gamers is an arrogant prick with a vulture mentality, then that speaks volumes about the gaming community itself.

Thankfully, there _are_ critics who do a much better job. But it's just sad to see someone with Sterling's behavior to get that much coverage.

Yep. It's like that guy that got so drunk once that he had no idea what he was doing and had a rather "over friendly" experience with a Goat. He only did it once in his entire life and was a model guy in every way for the remainder of his life, always helping people and giving to charity, working hard to cure cancer etc. And yet, all anyone remembers him as is: "that no good dirty "Goatf@#$%r".

I had to check it out... The game is literally this. You can make your own DarkBase01 if you have Construct :)

While Jim could almost certainly have handled his somewhat snotty reaction better (trust me, I've had my own brief and less than amicable exchange with Jim Sterling), the fact of the matter is that he is a journalist, and you can't go and try influencing his publications. By the by, he very rarely links to the storefront pages in his reviews, anyway.

Sorry to say this, but when the market entry barriers were lowered, that basically turned every single developer into an inconsequential piece of garbage. There are literally thousands of developers out there dreaming of being the next Jonathan Blow or Ed McMillen, or fantasising about establishing the next big developer. Every one of them thinks that their game is absolutely awesome, and every one of them is going to find out that their game is irrelevant in the greater scheme of things.

Journalists get dozens of games shipped to them each week by aspiring indie developers, and most of them just get tossed by the wayside and never even reviewed. Even if it was a negative review, count yourself lucky that you even got that kind of coverage in a major online publication.

(For what it's worth - I don't even like Jim Sterling. He was fine when he was constrained by The Escapist, as he had limits imposed on him that inspired him to be a little more witty and discerning with his criticism. Since he left (or maybe was kicked out behind the scenes) hís website has been basically nothing but vitriol.)

The "Please notice me Senpai!" mentality is strong in dev community :o)

Joke aside, it would be better for everyone if gaming websites were less generalist and more niche (less games to review for journalists, more exposure for devs, more quality content for readers)

I hope that refunds will help cut down on player abuse. Don't like the game, get your money back, no need to sling mud at the dev.

Anyway, I really feel for the dev. I think I read what he wrote a few days ago, and it seemed rather tame, probably a lot more tame than what's been said about him.

Nothing stopping himself releasing games under a new name or company name.
Yeah, regardless of the state of the game he could have put a lot of effort in and had high hopes. He could be a really nice guy with good intentions who is just not really cut out for developing full games himself. Not like he is one of the early access scam dev teams like the guys who done that Stomping Ground game where they blatantly robbed people. Those guys deserve scorn. Releasing a bad game doesn't make someone a bad person and this shows he was at least very passionate about giving it a shot.

That's a common problem with creative types. I'm not sure this is any more common now than it used to be, the main difference is that more of them are able to show things to the public.

It's a consequence of failing to shop the idea around to enough people before starting and a failure to shop it around to enough people before launching. I'm likely to write my own language book in the near future and the thing I really need to do before I set out is realy research what other people are doing and if any of that is what I'm wanting to do. I'm guessing mine won't be the only one as it's not based upon any particularly new ideas, but unfortunately a lot of the older methods have fallen into disuse and have been forgotten.

Anyways, anybody wanting to sell creative works has to be pretty brutal about whether their idea is good or not and then execute it perfectly. Walt Disney had 3 rooms for creating new ideas. One where anything was OK and there were no bad ideas, the next where they were lenient about removing lesser ideas and a 3rd where they brutally attacked and burned all but the absolute best. Say what you will about Disney, but during that era they had a huge amount of success creatively, even if they were stealing a lot of the story ideas.