Following up on our past SteamWatch article talking about LaserChain we have come across news that the game has been pulled from the storefront. To refresh your memory (we strongly recommend reading the past article if you haven't), LaserChain is a game where you earn a cryptocurrency by taking part in activities in the game - and notably is a cryptocurrency that does not utilize mining but instead other methods of judging and creating the LaserChain cryptocurrency. This led to some conflict as confusion about cryptocurrency led many to speculate on its mining, leading to youtubers saying they didn't think it was but not sure, and the developer of LaserChain taking some actions against several Youtubers.
Now, LaserChain has been removed from Steam seemingly by the developers themselves following community outrage regarding the various incidents that have happened. Regarding the situation, we reached out to Ben Midas of LaserChain LLC about the situation and why they had removed LaserChain from the Steam store. Ben said the removal was the result of a "cyber lynch mob", and elaborated:
Sid Alpha mobilized a cyber lynch mob, and falsely accused us of criminal allegations (no charges have been filed from any source). This was repeatedly parroted by his passionate following and unjustly destroyed our games online reputation, primarily through Steam. Being on steam is more of a determent than a boon at this point, with a mass of negative reviews led by Sid. If we decide to put it back up I'll let you know, but we don't believe Steam is the proper platform for this game.Anyway, those are the facts, I'm not responding to any more comments, I apologized for my mistake, end of story.
I take great pains to avoid weaponizing my audience but if they think this was anyone's fault other than theirs then they are even more full of shit than I thought.
