Arizona-based game developer Digital Homicide has been effectively removed from Steam after studio cofounder James Romine filed a lawsuit against 100 Steam users last week seeking roughly $18 million in potential damages.
What’s intriguing here is that Valve representative Doug Lombardi has stated to multiple media outlets that “Valve has stopped doing business with Digital Homicide for being hostile to Steam customers,” a statement Digital Homicide (via a recent blog post) claims is “incorrect.”
The post goes on to claim that Digital Homicide is “defending ourselves against harassment” by filing the lawsuit against Steam users “where no resolution was able to be obtained from Steam to provide a safe environment for us to conduct business.” It goes on to suggest that Digital Homicide may now be considering legal action against Valve itself over the matter.
It’s worth noting here that the lawsuit Romine filed last week (a copy of which has been posted online, courtesy of Kotaku) named a list of Steam usernames as defendants, with the assumption that the real names of those users would be discovered by the court subpoenaing Valve. The lawsuit accuses said Steam users of everything from stalking to cyber-bullying to harassment.
This isn’t the first time Romine has taken Digital Homicide’s critics to court, either; he filed a lawsuit against YouTuber Jim Sterling last year seeking over $10 million in damages for “libel” and “slander” that had allegedly harmed Digital Homicide’s ability to do business. Kotaku has a good rundown of the whole case, which has yet to be (publicly) resolved.