Update: In a post on the Code Avarice blog, Mike Maulbeck announced that he is stepping down from the company, and has sold his interest in it to fellow developer Travis Pfenning. The move is an effort to convince Valve that it "has no reason to harbor any more ill will towards the company, and maybe even if we can’t see Paranautical Activity restored [to Steam], at least future Code Avarice games may be allowed onto the platform."

After apologizing again for his intemperate tweet, Maulbeck noted that "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."

Original Story

Voxel-based first-person shooter Paranautical Activity has been removed from Steam after creator Mike Maulbeck tweeted a death threat at Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell.

The incident can be traced back to yesterday morning, when Paranautical Activity was featured on the front page of Steam as part of a list of Halloween-themed games. That listing prominently noted that the game was in "Early Access," however, even though it had just progressed to a full release. This oversight led to a series of irate, profanity-laced tweets from Maulbeck about Steam—"misinforming people that my game is in fucking early access. ... Steam is the most incompetent piece of fucking shit... fucking Steam is just fucking taking money out of my pocket. ... I hope by the time my next game comes out steam doesn't have this awful fucking monopoly anymore."

Then, in a since-deleted tweet (screencapped by Player Attack and shown above), Maulbeck went a few steps further. "I am going to kill gabe newell," he wrote. "He is going to die."

Maulbeck confirmed to Polygon that he made the threat via Twitter, adding that he "obviously didn't mean" the sentiment and that it was "totally unacceptable and driven entirely by the heat of frustration I was feeling at the time." The damage was done, though; Paranautical Activity has been pulled down from Steam and Maulbeck's Code Avarice studio has been blackballed from the service. "We have removed the game's sales page and ceased relations with the developer after he threatened to kill one of our employees," a Valve spokesperson said in a statement.

On Twitter, Maulbeck expressed bitterness over the entire episode, saying he is "done making videogames now. It sucked while it lasted." He has also continued to rail against what he sees as Steam's monopoly over the PC gaming market, noting that the 12 non-Steam copies he sold yesterday would have represented less than a minute's worth of sales on Steam. "It's just not possible to make a living in this industry without steam, so I'm just out," he wrote. Recent estimates suggest that Steam currently accounts for 70 to 75 percent of the PC gaming market in the US.