As a part of corporate responsibility, we expect videogame developers and other videogame-related institutions to maintain professionalism when dealing with their consumer base. For sometimes, if they voice certain “opinions”, an already bad impression can get infinitely worse.
Such is the case for Dream Studios, developer for Steam Early-Access game Operation Caucasus. Maybe you shouldn’t say “We’re not support lgbt. Please, just f**k you.” to a (former) fan who happened to have a rainbow Facebook icon, if you actually want to sell your game. Unfortunately, that’s what’s happened, and now they’re exposed through a rightfully negative Steam review, and are experiencing the backlash.
Even before this incident, Dream Games came under fire for accidentally posting a demo of the game on Steam for full price ($9) in March. Eventually, the price of the demo was brought down to a dollar, along with this lovely message:
“Hi! As already you know, after bad “demo” experience, we learned somethings about Steam users. We made a mistake before 2 months ago. We shared the demo version Operation Caucasus. But, this demo was for test and for the project future…Yes, we made a mistake. I’ll tell you, why we were shared the demo. There was a button in Steam page. It was “Share full project”. And our editor’ve pressed it. He said, ” i tried to cancel, but it shared on Steam.(9.99$).” After a few days we’ve set the demo price “0.99$” because, we couldn’t hide it. And, you know, it was our first experience.”
That last line alone really sums up this entire mess.
The state of the game and company can easily be summed up by the incredibly high number of free Steam keys they’re giving out, and the lack of a proper company website (the link leads to an expired domain). The blatant homophobia doesn’t help. To make matters worse, they aren’t even trying to pass it off as a “opinionated employee” situation; The developers have voiced their anti-LGBT views in the comments section of the Steam review using their developer account:
“We’ll never support LGBT”, said the developer who added their comment to the Steam review page.
That’s fantastic; looks like your “fans” won’t support you either.
