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If you’ve received an e-mail recently from someone promising lucarative Razer sponsorship deals, hold on a second. Word has been going around that a number of content creators and streamers have been receiving these e-mails and they’re not all they seem. In fact, they’re a scam.
Razer does have a sponsorship program in place, but they don’t e-mail people to get them to join. They instead encourage people to sign up over on their streamer support page on the official Razer website. This e-mail will do nothing but install malware onto your machine if you click any link within it.
The e-mail claims that you have been “discovered” by a streamer scout, and thinks that your streamer or content creation skills are worth the sponsorship. The scout has also recommended to Razer that you be offered a contract as ‘a model of our marketing business with Twitch streamers and broadcasters.’ The e-mail apparently comes from a Daniel Werth at Razerzone Ltd. and is sent from an e-mail that is razorzonesponsorship@gmail.com – and there’s where you should pause and think. Razerzone Ltd. sounds like it might be affiliated with Razer, but not hearing any mention of it should at least make you boot up a search engine to do a check to see if this offer is legitimate or not. The second clue, although harder to spot in a quick skim, is that the e-mail is mispelt – Razor rather than Razer.
The e-mail has been turning up in the inboxes of people from the UK, US and Japan among others, so if you got one – ignore it. Your computer will thank you.
One thing that has been most requested as a new feature for users of Twitch has been the ability to change your username. And why not? You don’t want to lose an audience you built up, just because your username no longer fits who you’ve grown into.
From today though, it’s official – username changes are now a feature you can make use of. Username changes can only be performed once every 60 days through your Profile Settings; there should now be a new option visible next to your current username to let you make the change over to whatever you fancy being now. As long as it’s not taken already that is.
Once changed, your old name will be held in status for a minimum of six months just in case before it’s released into the wild of available nicknames people can use of their Twitch accounts, whether those be name changes or new users signing up for accounts. Partner usernames that get retired though will not be recycled, except in special circumstances (although what they’d be is not elaborated upon). Twitch will still not be accepting direct requests for taken by inactive accounts though, so only names that are changed will be made available eventually.
To make sure your streamer stats get preserved as well, you must export them prior to making your username change. Testing revealed that some, but not all streamers who changed their names could lose access to those stats upon the execution of the username change, so this is a better safe than sorry measure.
So go out there and change your usernames! Just make sure you update all the places you’ve linked your URL though, as it’ll also changed upon a username change.
Hey, remember Digital Homicide? The games company that wanted to sue 100 nameless Steam users, and when they asked Valve for their real names Valve turned around and said ‘Nope!’ and then removed them and their games from Steam? Yeah, that was weird wasn’t it?
Before that though they also filed a lawsuit against Youtube critic Jim Sterling for ‘assault, libel and slander’ for one of his reviews against one of their games. That lawsuit wasn’t revoked when Digital Homicide had to cease production after having their games removed from sale (and after filing ANOTHER lawsuit against Valve for having done so), but now that lawsuit has been dismissed with prejudice. That basically means that the lawsuit cannot crop up again.
In a blog post about it, Sterling wrote that the whole ordeal was a drain upon both his resources and emotions. Basically he probably wouldn’t have recovered the costs already involved if it went to court, so a dismissal is the best result possible for him right now. He also says that the suit was dropped after his lawyer explained to the plaintiff, James Romine, what would happen if the case went to court.
“That it got as far as it did, went on for as long as it did, is atrocious – especially when this is a case that amounts to a game developer wanting to silence a game critic. I personally viewed, and still view, the lawsuit as an attempted attack on my freedom to do my legally protected job. I personally perceive it as an attack launched by a man who is unable to deal with criticism in a reasonable fashion and has sought to blame me, continuously, for his failures.” Sterling said.
I thought the story was already over when Digital Homicide went under, but it’s good to hear that the lawsuit is now dead and gone for good.
A lot of strange things happen in the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive community seems. Maybe it’s just because it’s such a big one; but this story’s certainly a new one for me.
Over the last few days an exploit was discovered which let chat bots invade game lobbies – even private ones – to spam whatever they wanted, and what’s more they were unkickable too because of it. So what did one of the main users of the exploit use it to do? Erm, complain about security issues in CS:GO as well as how Valve’s handling it…
As you can see in the screenshot above, the user is trying to stir up the community into a one-day boycott of the game in protest of the “hackers and bugs” he sees, claiming that Valve is more interested in making money from the game through selling skins and cases than fixing these security issues. There’s even a Reddit thread discussing the exploit and the user in question.
Ironically, despite the user’s claims, Valve have responded to that thread saying that they “have deployed a temporary solution to help mitigate the exploit” and that they “will continue working on it throughout next week”.
Stay weird gaming communities. You brighten my day up tremendously.
It’s time for your weekly look into some of the interesting stuff going on with gaming Kickstarter campaigns, starting as always with a little update on things I’ve previously covered.
We’ll start with the good news first as there’s quite a lot of it! Many of the previously covered campaigns have concluded with full met and in some cases very much bypassed goals. Among these are LEGRAND LEGACY, Tortuga 1667, The Pedestrian, Pitch Deck, Sundered, and finally, having made its goal in time – BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION. We look forward to seeing these campaigns progress into good games.
However, it’s not all good news. Project Life has 20 hours to go on its campaign as of time of writing, and it has made barely any of its target so I can’t see it succeeding which is a shame. The funding campaign for the Apocalypse Now game has now been cancelled and crowdfunding has moved to a dedicated site at ApocalypseNow.com with Kickstarter backers being able to grab a tier above the one they pledge to as a thanks for their support thus far. The campaign hadn’t been going well anyway, so we’ll have to see if this game becomes a reality.
Finally, there has been no change in the status of the Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game, although it has now emerged that Frontier were not the ones filing the claim, but rather someone outside of the company. The matter is apparently ongoing and I will update if we get any further news.
First up we have a game that pays homage to 1940s murder mysteries.
Innocence is a survival horror-type game that is a throwback to the same classics of the genre during the PS1-era,and has two playable characters – one a female and the other a male. They are put onto a case located on an island that a year ago was the talk of everyone for the murder of a nine-year-old girl, only to be greeted by a great sense of supernatural uneasy that isn’t helped much by the island’s residents.
Innocence has a $7,500 goal, with stretch goals up to $20,000, and has made $21 so far. It has another 49 days to go.
Next up we have another game that aims to bring back the good old days of survival horror. I swear this wasn’t intentional on my part.
Daymare: 1998 is another survival horror game with people in the team who worked on Resident Evil games in the past and the sub-title of the campaign page describes this game as “Resident Evil 2 Reborn!” Third-person, with puzzles to solve, a need for strategic fighting and resource gathering, it’s pretty much what you would expect from this genre. The team behind it are hoping to get it released on Steam, PS4 and Xbox One if successful.
Daymare: 1998 has 24 days to go, and has made €25,740 of its €180,000 goal.
Next we have a game that I’ve been hearing about a lot this week on Twitter.
Shardbound is called a “tactical Collectible Card Game that gives streamers and their viewers exciting new ways to interact and play together on Twitch!” on its campaign page, which tells you which audience the developers are targeting with this game. Interactive gaming on Twitch is a big thing, and its nice to see another one in the works. The game has been in the works for 2 years and is currently in a private pre-Alpha testing phase.
Shardbound’s promotion has paid off, as they’ve already made their $50,000 and bypassed it. It has 25 more days to go though, so who knows where it’ll be at the end of that?
Lastly we have a game that sounds like a survival crafter game, but hold on.
SmuggleCraft is a game about hovercrafts. More specifically, it’s a quest-based hovercraft game in which you smuggle stuff, customise your craft and participate in a storyline with branching narrative. This is apparently a racing game, but it does seem like the developers wanted to make it more than just that which is nice. Smuggling quests can be legal or not so, and which ones you accept and even if you choose to follow through or steal the cargo for your own needs can have an effect on your narrative for the rest of the game.
SmuggleCraft has made $3,863 of its $15,000 goal, with 25 more days to go.
