Overhype Studios are selfish, greedy, disingenuous, deceitful and exploiting
To be more precise the three founders and owners of Overhype Studios, Jan Taaks, Paul Taaks and Christof Schmidt are.
Why, you may ask? Well, continue reading to find out.
Some background information:
Under the name of Love Gun, I was an active moderator on Battle Brothers' Steam forum for almost two and a half years (from 3 Nov 2016 to 1 May 2019). I was there basically every day and when I wasn't I would make good for it, as soon as I could. Weekends, holidays, it did not matter, I was there.
Before that I was a very helpful and active community member on the Steam forums since 9 Aug 2015 (the game was released to Early Access 27 April 2015), reporting bugs, sharing my ideas, after all this was one of the first games that were released as Steam Early Access titles and I thought it was the coolest thing that the community was supposedly part of deveolping a game and the developers were actually in contact with you. Me being so involved also was the very reason they reached out to me to offer that position in the first place.
On top of that I was one of only two persons who also attended every closed beta testing over the years until May 2019. (That includes the base game, Lindwurm DLC, Beasts & Exploration DLC and Warriors of the North DLC.)
A Steam group only a couple of selected verifiably proficient and passionate about the game people are/were invited to.
So, to even be asked to take those positions where I spent multiple hundreds of hours each to do work that they requested of me to do, I had already spent multiple hundreds of hours becoming somewhat of an expert in the game and consumed almost every bit of information about the game and its developement that was shared by the devs on the internet.
During those betas I was a major contributor to make the game better by finding and reporting bugs, giving feedback on balancing and whatnot and making suggestions to improve where the game lacked.
Long story short, I was them a friend; especially during my time as a forum moderator here on Steam, I helped them whenever, whereever plus I showered them with tons of ideas and concepts for the game of which some actually made it into the game.
At the time I was appointed moderator there were already two active moderators in place. I outlived both of them until I was the last active one like for 1 or 1 1/2 years; since after all none of us was paid anything, so I don't blame them. And I would have probably continued, if they hadn't acted so careless and poorly.
So I kept working until a certain incident during the closed beta testing of Warriors of the North were I came to a sudden realisation:
Those devs, for whom I and not only I, but also the other moderators and dedicated testers - basically all the unpaid people that worked on the game have done so, so much - don't give a flying ♥♥♥♥ about us.
Instead of treating us like friends or honored guests, you know make this an enjoyable, fun experience for us the testers by being in a steady dialogue with us, letting us actually participate, we were treated like some sort of paid underling but without the pay. Our posts, thoughts and direct questions were ignored more often than not.
Rather than letting us participate, they would go their own way and use and exploit us and our expertise as they saw fit.
The incident:[i.ibb.co]
I called them out on their bullcrap, but instead of an apology to the testers and an open invitation to the group's chatroom, rapsdjff(Christof) gave me this patronizing response.
He denied the facts.
Nobody, but the two people using it, knew the chatroom was used. It certainly wasn't used in any of the prior beta testings and they certainly did not make it known in the group that it now is used.
And then he had the nerve of basically telling me to go back to work.
Dude, I don't need this. I am doing you one maaaassive favor for more than two years.
How about some humbleness, gratitude and respect?
And then he lied about being interested in what I think about a perk. No, you don't. If you were interested in anyone's opinion, you would have asked in the forum, visible for everyone, in the first place.
The message Jan sent me directly wasn't any better.(The message is incorporated in the mail exchange further down below.)
Even though I don't mention it in those emails, I did tell Jan, back in 2017, shortly after the very first closed beta testing had ended per Steam private message something along the lines of them not visibly responding to our feedback looks to the tester as them not consindering it or caring.
His response back then was the same lame excuse they gave me now, about 2 years later. He said something like, they would of course consider all the feedback and them not responding is because they do have so little time and the end phase is so stressful and they also still had to implement certain features to make the game ready for release.
At that point in time I was still somewhat understanding. Our chat about that ended there.
Now, sure it may very well be stressful, but this is your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ work time. If the testers are able to take their free time to work on your commercial project, then you better take some time off of your work time to do the testers justice.
You had no publisher breathing down your neck to meet any deadline. This is entirely on you and your mismanagement.
In all those years they had learned nothing from the previous betas.
The beta phase for Warriors of the North was especially short, he says later in the emails. Now, whose fault is that?
He had the same alienating attitude as Christof, denying facts, basically telling me that they can do as they please and that that won't change, that I and the other testers have the obligation to them to provide, like I somehow owe them something.
We are specifically invited for our expertise and knowledge of the game that surpasses the devs', in some cases immensly as they even acknowledge themselves, only for them to then be the big decision maker and secretly judge whether our assessment is valid and correct to then make a balancing change or not. Which again would require them to know better than the testers do, which they don't. And if they then judged wrongly, they then expect us to slave away again, let ourselves be treated like some kind of suppliant, to convince them that they are wrong, which again they do decide themselves. What a farce. What a disregard of the unpaid testers' time. What a lack of respect and appreciation.
So I've had it with them. I left that day. I was done. They lost all my respect and the affection I somehow had for them and the game.
I did not respond to Christof's forum post nor to Jan's direct message and I would certainly not go through hell again for those guys, not for them, not anymore, by putting in all those hours that it would require to properly moderate the forum during the release of an expansion.
About two weeks after the incident I got a mail from Jan. Which lead to the exchange of a couple of mails[i.ibb.co] between him and me.
Here are the German originals[i.ibb.co].
(As the AI translations are sadly not as good as I have hoped, I advise you to read the German originals, if possible. But I hope they are good enough to serve the purpose.)
If you don't want to read the mails, here is a quick rundown of the important points with some extra information/explanation/interpretation:
To be continued in the comments of this review
(Click on the thumb at the top of the review to see the full review and the comments.)
