Allow me—blissfully unaffiliated with all the parties involved in my post—highjack this irredeemable piece of spam with an actual “blackjack game” worth playing:
There was a very direct terms of service “Don’t share info”. But The Verge are notoriously awful journalists. It’s like they have no clue of what basic decent journalism entails and confuse good reporting with being trolling assholes. There’s a reason they were the only idiots who broke it and got rightly burned at the stake for it. I bet the guy wasn’t even looking at the screen when he spammed the ESC key at the game. Just because it wasn’t 100 pages of legalese doesn’t mean they weren’t bound by it, clicking ESC instead of the button OK means nothing in legal terms. And just using the software means you agree to the explicit and implicit terms of service that come with the software as long as it isn’t something blatantly illegal. They were assholes and received the consequences of their actions. And that’s that.
Simplify the situation to lol defending the EULA all you want, but “I’m not bound by your NDA because I pressed ESC instead of clicking okay” is the kind of thing I expect a spoiled 14 year old to say while wearing a shit eating grin.
Act unprofessionally in a professional industry and you get dragged by professionals. And rightly so.
If someone ask you for a ride and you tell them not to roll down the window and they say “lol, nope” and still get on the car. They can’t be mad if you stop the car and tell them to get out when they roll down the window laughing hysterically at your face. Pressing escape means nothing in this case. The Verge’s writer was acting stupid on purpose. This is like kids who think that crossing their fingers behind their back means they aren’t bound to a promise. It is wishful thinking.
Add: oh, and BTW, there’s a reason almost all terms of service start with “By using this software you agree to…” the legal fact is using the service not clicking on the agree button. That’s just legal ammunition that companies use to prove on court that the user was aware of the legal contract. EULAs uset to be sheets of paper on a cardboard box along side CDs. No one had to click on an agree button. By buying and using the software, those were the terms you agreed to. Almost all contracts include that sort of language because the use is the fact that supports the legal contract. Law is just leaving facts and agreements on paper, facts overrule legalese, that is actually the basis used by courts to dismiss enforcement of EULAs. Like how signers aren’t legally bound to fulfill irrational or unachievable agreements, or language intentionally obtuse or ambiguous.
To ride this special car, you must agree to not open the windows.
Expectation: No? Okay, then I cannot allow you to ride this special car.
Valve: nope? Okay well get in anyway... Whaaat you opened the windows? Wtf?
Not saying the verge writer was or wasn't behaving like an entitled child. In fact, I'm inclined to think he was, but It's irrelevant. Valve made a goof. (Gasp!)
I could care less what valve does in response. They could blacklist the verge entirely and I probably wouldn't even know. I just wonder if people only care because it's valve.
So people need to be bound by EULAs that they don’t click to agree?
People…? No. And whether they clicked to agree or not should be irrelevant; EULAs should be unenforceable.
Journalists and their employers…? Neither… but then developers don’t have any obligation to provide them with review copies in the future either.
In an industry that depends on mutual goodwill, trust, and agreement, bypassing the implied NDA was completely legal… but profoundly stupid, disingenuous, and unprofessional.
The Verge decided to burn bridges it had probably taken decades to build, for the sake of one single article. It was their right and prerogative to do it, nothing illegal about it, they had no obligation to follow the EULA.
But Valve has no obligation to let them play their invite-only beta either, or to provide them with review copies in the future, and neither has any other developer.
We’ll see how it works out for the Verge in the future.
He hit esc to avoid clicking accept on the nda bit, then bragged about it in the article. There have been other articles about the game, but afaik he’s the only one that was banned for being a smartass.
From what I remember there was no NDA but no EULA either. It was a simple “please don’t share anything about this”, the journo ignored it and their account was banned. As far as I’m aware there’s no legal action going on, the Verge have just lost any goodwill they ever had with Valve.
It does have decent atmosphere, cool visuals, etc. The combat system is very good. Much more action game than horror game. The melee system meant that not running out of ammo and being careful with your shots wasn’t as important as in dead space.
It falls short in several disappointing ways. The “stealth” system is a joke. There’s a level where you have to sneak around “blind” monsters that only act on sound, except you can walk right up to them and just melee kill them, LOUDLY, without any of the others reacting.
So the stealth sections are completely trivial.
There’s a pretty interesting enemy in the form of the automated security robots of the prison, except it literally shows up in just the tutorial, where it shows you how to deal with them, but then they’re utterly absent in the rest of the game.
The whole game is really impressive in a couple ways (graphics and animation, the combat system) but it feels like 50% of what was supposed to be in it was cut, and like several mechanics never got implemented.
Sounds a lot like they tried to make a “game like dead space”. But then by trying to imitate that, they necessarily and almost predictably fell short behind the original.
It’s fairly niche, and it’s been years since I’ve played it, but it seems to still keep an active player base. It’s much more cooperative than most MMOs, with very little PvP. It’s like the whole community is working together to build a civilization.
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