Remember Digital Homicide? Remember how they recently started the process of trying to sue 100 Steam users, then when Valve responded to attempts to get those users by removing the studio from Steam they announced they’d sue Valve too?

Well, seems like the story might finally be coming to some sort of an end – according to Digital Homicide’s founder the studio is closing down for good along with the dismissal of the lawsuits. Don’t all cry out in anguish at once.

The cause of the studio’s demise has been put down to both the removal of their revenue from Steam, as well as funneling all the money they did have into the lawsuits they were running (with possibly the exception of the one against Sterling, which as far as I know is still being ‘crowd-funded’). Founder Romine has had an interview in TechRaptor in which he also claims that some of the harrassers on Steam he was going after were part of competitor studios.

“At least two were competitors. The case dismissal was only due to financial reasons caused by the removal of our games. I believe the case was very solid. There were in excess of 140 false statements by the 11 steam users, tens of thousands of posts harassing myself and my customers, three direct interference with written contracts with third parties by steam users (some of which were competitors), and much more. A combined in excess of 25 reports were filed against the worst users of the 11 with no resolutions being found.”

“As far as digital homicide? It’s destroyed. It’s been stomped into the ground from a thousand directions and use is discontinued. I’m going back into the work force and watching what’s really going on. Not gaming media gossip – the real stories are in the legal documents. Not talking about mine.”

While I doubt too many of you will be upset by this news, it is worth saying that Romine does at least have some point about online harrassment. As I said in my last article, death threats and threats against people’s family are not cool; regardless of any intentions to carry them out or not.

Somehow though, I’m not sure if this is the last we’ll here of Romine and Digital Homicide in some shape or form… but let’s hope that for a while no more ridiculousness emerges.

Recently it seems that Nvidia has been running a promotion that included a free key to Gears of War 4 if you purchased one of their new GPUs. Unfortunately, like anything it seems that some people have found a way to abuse this, which has led to The Coalition now revoking access to a number of Gears 4 keys gained through this method.

The loophole involved purchasing a GTX 1070 through Amazon, which would come with the free code which would be e-mailed to the customer. Having gotten the code, the order was then cancelled and the key would either be redeemed by the customer or sold on to someone else.

Because of this, the company was revoked access to the game for anyone with the keys they judge to be illegitimately obtained. The news was broken by community director Adam Fletcher through a NeoGAF thread and includes a number of keys purchased through key reseller sites.

“We detected some Gears 4 Windows 10 keys were obtained illegitimately via our Nvidia promotion,” Fletcher announced via a thread about the promotion. “We have gone ahead and revoked keys that fell in this bucket. If you believe your key was incorrectly revoked, we highly recommend you contact Nvidia support with proof of purchase to help out with this.”

The problem comes from the fact that some people legitimately did buy their Nvidia hardware, but simply didn’t want the game that came with it – so they sold it on. This unfortunately leaves whoever bought the code from them with something they now cannot use, unless the person who sold them the code is willing to help them out at all.

It’s a good example of those who exploit something ruining it for people who haven’t really done anything wrong. As well as why it’s better to get your keys from somewhere like Steam or GoG where you know that there’s little chance of them ceasing to work.

So a few hours ago, the studio behind one of the most popular indie hits of the last few years – The Escapists – announced that the game is going to have a sequel which will be even bigger, better and will contain a feature missing from the first game: multiplyer.

The trailer above does a good job of showcasing a range of the new things we can expect. For one thing the graphics are now a bit more 3D looking and have more subtle colour variation. A whole bunch of new things are going to be available, from items to craft, methods of escape, prison activities and more. One of the biggest overhauls seems to be that the game now has a much more detailed combat system. In the original you won fights based on your strength, if you were armed or if you were quick enough to punch and run away before you got hit back. Now with a lock-on system and blocking, it should be a lot more strategic than before.

The announcement trailer is only for the Playstation 4 so far, but given the popularity of the previous game and how excited people are for this sequel, expect to see more platforms added to that list as more information surfaces.

The last Developer Session of the day was from Failbetter Games, known for Sunless Sea and Fallen London.

The panel dealt mainly with the upcoming expansion to Sunless Sea, Zubmariner. For those who haven’t read our last article on the expansion, Zubmariner will essentially let you take the gameplay to a whole new area of the Unterzee – underneath the waves themselves. While the governments and ports around you have declared there to be nothing worth looking for, there is treasure for those who dare dive deep. But beware for it’s dark down there, fierce beasts roam the waters and you only have a limited amount of time before your oxygen will run out entirely.

As far as talking about content, we were told that you would be able to convert your ship into a zubmarine but only after you had essentially ‘invented’ the process to do so. After that has been discovered, all future captains in the game will have access to the converting process, but it will take time to complete. Underwater there will be currents that can sweep you along, sometimes cutting down the journey time of a voyage if you catch one going the right way but the murky depths make it hard to see what’s coming at you from the gloom. A dive will always be high-risk. There will also be new cities to discover too.

The other part of the session dealt with the announcement of Failbetter’s next game, revealed to be Sunless Skies – the sequel game to Sunless Sea. Set essentially in the same world as Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies will be taking place in ‘space’. Kind of. Set in a place known as the ‘high wilderness’, a splinter of the British Empire has set up a new empire in this unexplored place. We didn’t learn too much about it other than it is based on a Victorian interpretation of ‘space’ and will contain a lot of the same interface information as Sunless Sea has now.

We don’t know when the new game will be coming out (it’s still in development), but Zubmariner will be hitting digital store fronts October 11th.

One of the Developer Sessions onstage today at EGX was from Frontier, as they talked about the development process of Planet Coaster, both what they’d already been through and what was still to come in the game.

The game at its basic level is a theme park designer, utilising paths, rides, shops and other things to make money from guests. The game had been in Alpha this year from March until around Gamescom and the team talked about how the community had helped them shape the game. They gave examples of when feedback from the community playing the game made the revise new updates to the game, such as when height limits were imposed on roller coasters for gameplay and cost sake, they eventually reversed it because the community overwhelmingly asked them to remove it again.

They spoke about the future of what they wanted the game to be, with one big thing being that they wanted a game that had a community sharing maps with each other through the cloud and especially Steam Workshop. Already when an alpha update removed some basic toilets from the set of buildings available, someone had remade them and put them into the Workshop shortly after. They showed off that the game would contain transport rides to enable guests to go further into the park quicker and also reduce some of the traffic of footpaths, some of the pieces for the new Sci-Fi theme (although they did say that it wasn’t quite finished yet) and spoke at great length about how they really wanted people who played the game to play around with the concepts and create their own ‘themes’ for their parks. They also said that while they wouldn’t be putting in patrol zones, they would make the AI for entertainer staff much more intelligent to stop them either leaving the park altogether or clogging up the entrance ways and stopping people moving into the park.

Of course, the crowning jewel of the presentation was one trailer in which Frontier demonstrated that yes, this is very much like theme park builders of the past:

Planet Coaster will be coming out towards the end of this year, on November 17th. Can’t wait to try this one out.