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.