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I’m not going to defend Valve because I haven’t seen anything confirming why they banned Sean from multiplayer and it could have nothing to do with the story even if the timing could be inferred as a reason. But I will crap all over the article writer for what he wrote in the article.
For context, Sean is the only person who comes up in a search about being banned for sharing info about Deadlock despite many people doing so.
Sean said in the Verge article :
And I’m not under NDA. I have signed no contracts and made no verbal agreements; I haven’t even clicked through a EULA.
Then he has a picture with a thing that says not to share information about the game, and the caption is:
This message does pop up when I launch Deadlock, but I didn’t click “OK”; instead, I hit the Escape key and watched it disappear. Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge
Sean is being an absolute pedantic tool. Saying that there was no agreements because he used the escape key to get past a message saying to not share information is what lawyers do for technicalities, not what journalists should brag about in an article where they clearly understood that they were not supposed to share the information. They could have said that they had an obligation as a journalist or some other positive thing, but instead did the equivalent of eating free bread at a restaurant and then leaving without buying anything because the menu doesn’t say you have to.
When I saw Sean was banned after writing the article my first thought was 'This tool probably got himself banned by doing some jerk thing in game, since he clearly hates being told not to do something." I do not expect Valve to respond to the article, since they aren’t as petty as Sean, so all the public will get is his assumption that the article lead to his ban.
The thing that really irked me too was his edit after he was banned said something like “I guess valve did have a problem with me playing with my friends” completely ignoring his blatant ‘fuck you valve’ tone of the article
lol at “not making players sign an NDA means that ignoring the very obvious ‘don’t share this’ message is their fault and they’re not allowed to ban me”.
Like whatever, you don’t have a contract so they can’t sue you. But they very obviously are entitled to kick you off the game for it.
In any other setting if you tell a journalist something without an NDA, and outside of a personal setting, you should expect it to get published.
What the fuck did they think they where doing when they released it to 18,000 players?
My guess is building hype, probably.
I’ve seen no indication Valve is upset at what has transpired besides banning the person who shared information, which is the exact same thing they do to random people who (mistakenly or otherwise) stream the game on twitch/youtube.
Valve absolutely knows if they want Deadlock to be an absolute secret, they need to issue NDAs. They didn’t, so it must be something else.
The something else is that we all talk about the game because of this stunt. It is pretty obvious what the plan was from the Start.
In any other setting if you tell a journalist something without an NDA, and outside of a personal setting, you should expect it to get published.
In any setting, if a journalist is asked not to publish something and they do anyway, the journalist should expect to not have people willing to talk to them or show them things anymore.
Sounds more like Valve read the rules for Fight Club and applied them in kind.
Valve asks reporter to play game, reporter reports on it.
shocked Pikachu face
