#bitcake

Early access on steam had been a mixed bag. On the one hand we’ve got the Rusts and the Space Engineers; good games that you can follow the development of by purchasing it before it’s complete and supporting the devs in their efforts to finish it but on the other hand you’ve got things like Towns where the game is not and will never be finished and the devs essentially took the money and ran. So it is a mixed bag but would you stick your hand in a bag if someone said to you “There’s a decent chance you’ll get a Mars bar but if you don’t you might hit one of the many bear traps I have in there.

So this came to my attention recently on Steam. “Surely not” I thought to myself. “Surely there has been some mistake. But no. This is a new game on Steam, an early access release of a soon to be Free to Play game called Holodrive. Now, as I said earlier I know absolutely nothing about this game and to be perfectly honest I really don’t intend to but this right here is taking the concept of early access a tad too far friends. This is an early access game that doesn't even have an image for the steam store front. This is the precursor to madness.

I clicked the broken image and was greeted with the above page. A bundle with only one item in, accompanied by the same broken image as before. This raises so many questions. Why make it a bundle? Why not just upload an image? They clearly have an image, as seen there, they clearly have a logo image, why not just upload that? Why would people be encouraged to buy a game by people who, by the evidence presented here, can’t even upload a fucking JPEG?

You wouldn't. I wouldn't. It’s just not sensible. So I dug into the developers a bit and tried to understand why this might happen. I found some pretty substantial evidence of fuckery within the company that I’ll be happy to show you right here; all from their own website mind you. I've not edited these at all, this is how they want to be portrayed to the public. I've helpfully circled all the problems.

So going clockwise, we’ve got a literal fedora wearing neckbeard, this off-putting grinning motherfucker, a man who was declared functionally brain-dead roughly 4 minutes before this photo was taken, this guy putting on his very best “fuck me” eyes, bottom right is actively flipping us all off and last but not least, the one only known as “the gurner”.

So that’s the dev team and if that wasn't bad enough, this is how they refer to themselves. 

We’ve got the “High Priest”, the “Idea Prophet”, the “Tech Sultan”, the fucking “Brogrammer”, “Information Gatekeeper” and the “Grand Poobah”. Ignoring the fact that this all sounds very cultish, it’s also some of the more repugnant filth I've ever seen. But with this we've found our probable culprit, Matheus Rodrigues, the “Tech Sultan” himself. A man who, as we have clearly seen; cannot effectively upload an image.