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By Michael McWhertor on Oct 20, 2014 at 8:19p

The developer of Paranautical Activity, described by its creators as a fast-paced, first-person shooter roguelike, had its game pulled from Valve's Steam service today after its creator posted a death threat to the company's co-founder, Gabe Newell.

Mike Maulbeck, creator of Paranautical Activity, says he released the final version of his PC game on Steam today. When it went live, the game's Steam page indicated that the game was still in Early Access, which Maulbeck believed would "greatly cripple sales and confuse customers."

"This being a project I spent years of my life on, I was very frustrated by this mistake [Valve] made, so I tweeted a series of tweets calling them incompetent that eventually ended in me saying 'I swear I'm gonna fucking kill gabe' or something," Maulbeck said in an email to Polygon. "A statement I obviously didn't mean, but nonetheless was totally unacceptable and driven entirely by the heat of frustration I was feeling at the time."

Maulbeck let loose a series of vitriolic tweets, calling Valve "incompetent" and expressing anger at Steam's "awful fucking monopoly." Maulbeck then allegedly said in a since-deleted tweet, "I am going to kill gabe newell [sic]. He is going to die."

In response, Valve pulled Paranautical Activity from Steam, and according to Maulbeck, contacted him to say it was terminating its relationship with the developer and closing down his Steam admin account. The game no longer appears on the Steam website. In a statement to Polygon, Valve confirmed that the game was pulled as a result of Maulbeck's threat.

"Yes, we have removed the game's sales page and ceased relations with the developer after he threatened to kill one of our employees," said Valve's Doug Lombardi in an email.

Maulbeck says he has attempted to get Valve to reconsider its decision.

"I have since obviously replied to them saying that I didn't mean what I said and pleaded that they consider the monopoly they have on the PC market before totally writing us off," Maulbeck said in an email to Polygon, "but let's be real. If they took the game off the store, they're fuckin sure about their decision. There's probably nothing to be done."

Maulbeck's studio Code Avarice has a history with getting Paranautical Activity on Steam. The developer was denied a publishing deal on Steam Greenlight last year as part of an agreement with Adult Swim.

Paranautical Activity is available through other digital distribution means, like Desura and the Humble Store, but Maulbeck lamented that the game sold 12 copies on non-Steam platforms today.

Jub wrote:It sounds like he's been hard to work with since day one and doesn't have much of a marketing arm beyond hoping people see his game on Steam's front page; so I'd say yes he just killed his studio.

I'm not entirely convinced that this was done by mistake. Steam's front-end servers are distributed globally and are tried into a traditional CDN (Content Delivery Network, in this case Akamai). These front end servers refresh relevant data from Valve's back-end servers in Bellvue. This replication process can take anywhere from 10-25 minutes normally, unless Valve specifically pushes the data from their origin master server.

The title of the front page carousel not being updated immediately when the game was released is most likely the result of that timing and would have been fixed automatically (most likely) within the next few minutes. In fact, a lot of people on Twitter started reporting that it was showing correctly for them.

Sure, someone at Valve could have probably "flipped the switch" and pushed the update manually. But this guy totally overreacted to what was probably just a routine server function.

Grumman wrote:I wonder whether it would have been better not to have immediately pulled his game from Steam, considering the subject of his ranting. It obviously goes without saying that he shouldn't be threatening to kill people, but Steam exerting its monopolistic power in response to someone calling them "an awful fucking monopoly" isn't going to do anything useful when you're not talking about locking him out of an actual physical building. If you're actually worried about this guy, get the FBI involved.

Thanas wrote:"Paranautical" - what kind of butchering of Greek and latin terms is that? Makes no sense whatsoever.

Grumman wrote:I wonder whether it would have been better not to have immediately pulled his game from Steam, considering the subject of his ranting. It obviously goes without saying that he shouldn't be threatening to kill people, but Steam exerting its monopolistic power in response to someone calling them "an awful fucking monopoly" isn't going to do anything useful when you're not talking about locking him out of an actual physical building. If you're actually worried about this guy, get the FBI involved.

Thanas wrote:"Paranautical" - what kind of butchering of Greek and latin terms is that? Makes no sense whatsoever.

Thanas wrote:"Paranautical" - what kind of butchering of Greek and latin terms is that? Makes no sense whatsoever.

bilateralrope wrote:So what should Valve have done in response ?

Why should they be willing to do anything but end their business relationship with him as fast as they can ?

AniThyng wrote:But this is a PC game we're talking about here - is Steam really a monopoly in this sense? This isn't like being pulled from the Play store or Apple store, aside from logistics there is nothing else standing in the way of distributing the game to the PC gamer market, and now he has a ton of publicity and sympathy from people who think he got shafted by Steam.

Siege wrote:

AniThyng wrote:But this is a PC game we're talking about here - is Steam really a monopoly in this sense? This isn't like being pulled from the Play store or Apple store, aside from logistics there is nothing else standing in the way of distributing the game to the PC gamer market, and now he has a ton of publicity and sympathy from people who think he got shafted by Steam.

In 2013, 92 percent of all PC games were sold digitally. Valve doesn't release its sales figures but it's been reported that Steam accounts for up to 70 percent of the digital distribution market. Of the remaining 30 percent it stands to reason a lot is locked into major publisher controlled platforms like Origin or Uplay. So even if it isn't technically a monopoly it might as well be. Because unless you're Blizzard you can forget about shifting large numbers of games if you're not on Steam.

Grumman wrote:

bilateralrope wrote:So what should Valve have done in response ?

Why should they be willing to do anything but end their business relationship with him as fast as they can ?

Because ending the business relationship makes both parts of the problem worse. It gives a potentially unstable individual two more reasons to do something stupid, and it makes you look more like the awful fucking monopoly he accuses you of being. If you are genuinely concerned about somebody making death threats, telling the authorities is useful, giving him reason to believe his career is over and you're the one who ended it is not.

Siege wrote:In 2013, 92 percent of all PC games were sold digitally. Valve doesn't release its sales figures but it's been reported that Steam accounts for up to 70 percent of the digital distribution market. Of the remaining 30 percent it stands to reason a lot is locked into major publisher controlled platforms like Origin or Uplay. So even if it isn't technically a monopoly it might as well be. Because unless you're Blizzard you can forget about shifting large numbers of games if you're not on Steam.

Darmalus wrote:

Siege wrote:In 2013, 92 percent of all PC games were sold digitally. Valve doesn't release its sales figures but it's been reported that Steam accounts for up to 70 percent of the digital distribution market. Of the remaining 30 percent it stands to reason a lot is locked into major publisher controlled platforms like Origin or Uplay. So even if it isn't technically a monopoly it might as well be. Because unless you're Blizzard you can forget about shifting large numbers of games if you're not on Steam.

Which makes me wonder why no one is trying to challenge Steam, since the profits aren't at all marginal. You could easily improve on Steam's rather dated and clunky interface

AniThyng wrote:So? This is an indie game with tons of press now we're talking about here. He can't put it on a file hosting service, take payment via paypal and call it a day like every other indie game before Steam even existed did?

Darmalus wrote:Which makes me wonder why no one is trying to challenge Steam, since the profits aren't at all marginal. You could easily improve on Steam's rather dated and clunky interface

Grumman wrote:

bilateralrope wrote:So what should Valve have done in response ?

Why should they be willing to do anything but end their business relationship with him as fast as they can ?

Because ending the business relationship makes both parts of the problem worse. It gives a potentially unstable individual two more reasons to do something stupid, and it makes you look more like the awful fucking monopoly he accuses you of being. If you are genuinely concerned about somebody making death threats, telling the authorities is useful, giving him reason to believe his career is over and you're the one who ended it is not.

Mike is leaving Code Avarice

By Mike

Yesterday, Paranautical Activity released out of steam Early Access, and following some confusion about the state of the game I became frustrated with Steam, and tweeted a series of angry tweets that ended in me sarcastically saying I was going to kill Gabe Newell. A statement I obviously didn’t mean but was regardless completely unacceptable.

As a result of my actions, Paranautical Activity, a game made by 4 or 5 people depending on who you count as team members, was removed from steam. I feel is it my responsibility to step down from Code Avarice completely so that Steam has no reason to harbor any more ill will towards the company, and maybe even if we can’t see Paranautical Activity restored, at least future Code Avarice games may be allowed onto the platform.

I’m really, deeply sorry that my short sighted, hot tempered actions resulted in not only my own dreams and aspirations being destroyed, but those of the entire team I worked with. I’m sorry that my statements made Valve and/or Gabe uncomfortable and upset (rightfully so).

My temper and tendency to use twitter to vent has been a consistent problem since I entered the games industry, and I just can’t do it. I don’t have the willpower necessary to be the “face” of a company. If I do continue to work in games it’ll be as an anonymous 1 of 1000 at some shitty corporation, not the most public figure of a single digit sized team.

I’ve sold my half of Code Avarice to Travis. Given up all my rights to CA as a company, and all it’s intellectual properties. I won’t receive any money from the sale of Paranautical Activity or any future games CA develops, I won’t be consulted on business decisions, and I won’t have any hand in development.

I’m out.