https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp67
Last week the small digital game developer Digital Homicide sued Jim Sterling in Arizona federal court for libel and slander. Digital claims that Sterling has defamed their company and products with disparaging statements and seeks over $10 Million of damages. Why would a small developer go to litigation to fight with an online personality? The history between these two tells the story.
Sterling makes YouTube videos and often reviews (and pokes fun at) some of the worst games available on Steam and other stores. His first interaction with a Digital product was a 10-minute review of Digital's first-person shooter Slaughtering Grounds in 2014. He dubbed the game a contender for the worst of 2014 because the awfulness just doesn't stop. Digital responded with two videos of their own accusing Sterling of not playing the game and calling him an F-word idiot. Both sides traded some further back and forth, and Sterling has since written a few more articles and reviews critical of the game developer.
The key to a successful libel or slander claim is the making of a false statement that is damaging to a person's or company's reputation. There have to be actual lies to make such a claim work.
That may be the difficult part here, even though Digital has identified what it believes to be nine different damaging false statements or lies allegedly made by Sterling. One example is in a review of another Digital game Galactic Hitman, Sterling stated that the game included artwork that may have been stolen from an artist on the DeviantArt site. Another example is when Sterling questioned whether Digital was misleading consumers by using a different name ECC Games for newer game products, a name which is also used by an unrelated Polish game developer. In this latter count, Digital also takes offense to Sterling's description of this name-changing situation as "being as sly as the Wet Bandits," i.e., the villains of the movie Home Alone.
Although these statements are critical of Digital Homicide and they potentially toe the line of fair criticism, it looks like it may be hard to prove that these statements are false. Even if a couple of the statements are false, proving the actual damages will likely be difficult for a small indie developer, especially one with dirty hands by failing to take any of Sterling's criticism well from Day 1. It looks like an uphill battle for Digital Homicide, but this may be a ploy to just stop what the company feels is harassment by Sterling, if nothing else.
The Bottom Line is, game developers should likely avoid taking criticism so seriously to the point of hostile responses, let alone litigation. However, there are fair rules of reviews and reporting like avoiding lies, so perhaps Sterling and other reviewers will be reminded of these important aspects as this plays out in public and in court. There's some lessons both sides could learn about civility, but they won't likely find truly satisfactory answers in court.
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Thanks for reading. Please provide feedback and legal-themed questions as segment suggestions to me on Twitter @BuckeyeFitzy
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