Gabe Newell – not the best person to threaten if you’re an indie developer

A tweet threatening to murder Valve’s boss for mislabelling a game has led to Paranautical Activity being removed from Steam.

The video games industry has seen yet more death threats issued over Twitter, although this time it’s a disgruntled indie developer trying to bite the hand that feeds him.

The problem revolves around little known indie game Paranautical Activity, which has been a part of Steam’s Early Access scheme (which allows people to pay for and buy a game before it’s finished) but which creator Mike Mulbeck recently upgraded to a final release.

But Steam didn’t realise and for all of three hours it was still mistakenly listed as Early Access. At which point Mulbeck threatened to kill Gabe Newell, the founder of Valve and the company that runs Steam.


But it was only a joke LOL!

His actual tweet, preserved above, has been deleted but his Twitter account is still full of angry responses, and you can clearly see the point at which he realised the enormity of what he’d done.



We’re not sure if his Twitter name has always been Murderbeck, of if he he changed that before or after making the threat to Newell.

‘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 f****** kill gabe” or something,’ Maulbeck told Polygon.

Welp. PA no longer on steam. I'm done making videogames now. It sucked while it lasted. — Mike Murderbeck (@SpooderW) October 20, 2014

‘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.

‘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,’ added Maulbeck. ‘But let’s be real. If they took the game off the store, they’re f***** sure about their decision. There’s probably nothing to be done.’

Threatening to murder and rape people via Twitter is a sadly commonplace occurrence, both within and without the games industry. Although unlike the victims of GamerGate, anyone working at Steam has an obvious way to punish the perpetrators.

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