Steam Greenlight is the Mos Eisley of the gaming world, and in terms of overall quality of games there is no more wretched hive of scum and villainy anywhere. You can put anything on Steam Greenlight and digging through there to find a game worth supporting is like trying to find a piece of hay in a needlestack. There are some truly great games out there, but for every amazing little gem worth supporting you’ll find one hundred Rock Simulator Extreme Editions. The people out there working on finding and promoting games worth supporting in this pile of trash are truly the heroes of our generation. Even more heroic, however, are people like Jim Sterling, who in his “Best of Steam Greenlight” series on YouTube goes out and finds the most amazing games that Steam Greenlight has to offer. Not amazing in a genuine sense, mind you. More so amazing like, “hey, get over here and check out this game — I think it might have been made by monkeys suffering from concussions!” In a recent video, Sterling talks about the Kobra Studio game Island Light. Then things got stupid. According to Sterling:
Sterling has since filed a counter notification warning that this is perhaps not the best course of action for them and not a route they’d like to pursue. Kobra Studio then decided to reach new levels of crazy by fervently moderating and deleting any negative comments or discussion about their game on their Steam Greenlight page because clearly if no one reads about it there it must not be happening. I worry Kobra Studio does not quite understand the Internet, because trying to stem the tide of negative comments once the collective Internet really gets a hold of something is like trying to dump out water from a leaky rowboat using a thimble. While some man sprays you with a firehose. Also there is no boat and you’re just drowning.“Kobra Studio hit my YouTube channel with an intentional copywrite strike for my Best of Steam Greenlight Trailers video for Island Light. This is a new and interesting development. Contacted my “people” for advice in this matter.”
I was not able to see Sterling’s original video as it had already been taken down by the time I heard about this. I can say this with absolute certainty however: whatever Sterling said was not harsh enough. Check out their Steam Greenlight page for the trailer and find out the answer to the question “can a person without hands or eyes really illustrate a computer game?” If this game had come out for the NES in 1988, you would have scratched your eyes out and gone back to playing Pong. If you had spent twenty years of your life trying to teach a dog how to make a computer game and at the end of your experience the dog had made Island Light, you would have considered your experiment a failure and destroyed the game. Also, you would’ve shot the dog. I would call this game shovelware quality, but that would insult the fine people that worked on actual shovelware titles. This isn’t even shovelware, as if you found this lying around your property you wouldn’t want to dirty your shovel by bringing it anywhere near it. This is Hazmatware, something that you need to call in a team of trained professional for to have them safely remove it and bury it in a dump somewhere in New Mexico.
Maybe if you didn’t want people making fun of your game, Kobra Studios, you should’ve spent more than five minutes cobbling it together before releasing the trailer. Perhaps if you were as dedicated to making a quality game as you were trying to censor everyone making fun of it you wouldn’t even have this problem in the first place. Good luck convincing the Internet to leave you alone now. If there is anything it is definitely known for, it is for its propensity to forget and forgive jerks.