That is what happened to independent game developer Mike Maulbeck. He was slightly annoyed at some of the issues he had been having in getting his game Paranautical Activity published on Steam. When it was finally up it was listed as early access despite Maulbeck’s claims that it was a final product. He took to Twitter to express his frustrations with comments like “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME STEAM? WE JUST RELEASED OUT OF EARLY ACCESS AND THIS IS OUR FRONT PAGE BANNER?”

Steam had added them to a special section of the store that was highlighting Halloween themed games, but they had missed the fact that the game was out of early access. Maulbeck was not done with his rant at Steam though he followed the first explosion with another just as bad: “First they force me to delay the game because I can't release on weekends, now this. Steam is the most incompetent piece of fucking shit.” Next up was “fucking steam is just fucking taking money out of my pocket. misinforming people that my game is in fucking early access.”

However the crowning jewel in this tantrum was “I am going to kill gabe newell. He is going to die.”
This last comment was deleted from Maulbeck’s Twitter feed pretty quickly, but not before the damage was done. It was not that long after that his game was completely removed from the Steam Store and Valve was publicly saying they were severing all relationships with him. “We have removed the game's sales page and ceased relations with the developer after he threatened to kill one of our employees.”

Maulbeck has stated that he did not really mean what he said, but that does not matter. You simply cannot behave like that and not expect consequences. Valve could have gone a very different route and called that into law enforcement. At that point he would have a lot more to worry about than having his game listed in Steam.

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