The ‘Garry’s Incident’ incident

If you aren’t familiar with the independent gaming scene, then it’s doubtful you have heard the recent controversy surrounding a game called “Day One: Garry’s Incident”.

I wasn’t aware that this game existed until a few days ago, when a thread on Reddit exploded with comments bashing the game developer, Wild Games Studio.

Naturally curious, I clicked the link, and it lead me to a video from a well-known YouTube celebrity by the name of TotalBiscuit, otherwise known as John Bain.

Apparently, Wild Games had Bain’s review of the game taken down due to copyright issues.

However, Bain says that this is not the case. The incident started when he e-mailed Wild Games, asking for permission to do a review of it.

Wild Games mentioned that they were going to make ad revenue off of his review through YouTube and a bunch of other legal mumbo jumbo, and in the end, sent Bain a serial key for the game and said, “Go right ahead.”

When Bain made the review, it was overwhelmingly negative, and I could see why. The game was basically broken and unfinished in several different aspects.

If you want to find out for yourself, you can search for the game on YouTube and you will find “over 9000” horrible reviews.

Heck, you don’t even need to go to YouTube; right now on Metacritic.com, the game has received a piddly 40 positive reviews, while the negative reviews exceed 470. The consensus is that everyone hates this game.

As if that wasn’t already enough bad press, there’s a theory floating around that the developer has been making up reviews and posting them to Metacritic in order to increase the game’s score ( a tactic known as “sock-puppeting.”) I’m not sure whether or not the rumor is true, but there is a lot of evidence that suggests it’s the case.

Since Bain has a lot of followers on YouTube, his review became the most watched review of the game. Because of this, the developers filed a copyright claim against him.

The lead developer, Stephane Woods, said publicly, “We protected our copyright because Bain has no right to make advertising revenues with our license.”

If you don’t understand why this is crap, let me tell you. Wild Games gave Bain permission to review the game. They even gave Bain a free copy of the game.

Woods has turned around because someone is saying bad things about his game. That is censorship, no other way to put it. You can’t just abuse the system to remove negative criticism, that is low, and it makes you look like a freaking idiot.

If anything, as an independent developer, Wild Games should be open to criticism! It’s probably the best tool they have at their disposal when they make your next game, and they can be certain not to make the same mistakes.

To be fair, there are a lot of people who just refuse to listen to criticism and go on to make a million dollars for an overhyped/rehashed concept (Call of Duty anyone?), but that is because they are a big company with CEOs.

Smalltime indie developers should be willing to listen to their fans and make compromises.

This whole incident unfolded over the course of last week, and as of writing this, Wild Games  has completely turned around again and withdrew their complaint on YouTube.

They also issued a statement apologizing for the whole ordeal, but that doesn’t do anything for me.

Wild Games Studio’s reputation has now been solidified as “that one game company that no one likes.”

The title is well deserved on their part.