Curious what the Half-Life and Dota 2 maker’s been up to?

It’s like Overwatch, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2 all baked into a pie.

  • @CTDummy@lemm.ee
    61•3 months ago

    And I’m not under NDA. I have signed no contracts, made no verbal agreements; I haven’t even clicked through a EULA.  This message does pop up when I launch Deadlock, but I didn’t click OK; instead, I hit the Escape key and watched it disappear.

    I’m not a lawyer but I sure hope the writer of this checked with a lawyer before posting because that does not sound right.

    Edit: Thank you Vodulas for pointing out this update appended to the article.

    Update, August 12th: Turns out Valve was not fine with me trying Deadlock with friends; I’ve been banned from matchmaking! Oh well. Please feel free to make fun of me in the comments!

    • Virkkunen
      33•3 months ago

      There is no NDA to sign or anything though, only this pop up warning. Valve can’t sue you for sharing details of the game but they absolutely can remove you from the play testing and/or ban you from ever playing it again for this.

      • Vodulas [they/them]
        19•3 months ago

        Which they did. There is an update at the end of the article. Just a thoughtless move by that author

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️English
      27•3 months ago

      Usually the first line in these agreements is “by using this software you agree…” And not “by pressing okay you agree…”

      Though I also am not sure how that itself would hold up in court.

      • @Nilz@sopuli.xyz
        12•3 months ago

        Didn’t we reach a point where EULAs are non-enforcable? Or is that just in the EU? But regardless, Valve can just ban you and good luck doing anything about it.

        • KaynA
          17•3 months ago

          Certain clauses may be unenforceable, but not the entire EULA.

      • @CTDummy@lemm.ee
        5•3 months ago

        I’ll have to see if I’ve got a copy of an NDA I signed for play testing but that’s what I would have thought. It would be provisional on your participation not on an agreement like old school EULAs. As someone else pointed out it seems to be in closed beta or some form of early access, so maybe Valve won’t care and it won’t come back on them.

        • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️English
          5•3 months ago

          At best they ignore it. At worst, they never invite the user to test anything again. I doubt they’d issue an account ban for that. Not even sure if they can straight up ban you from the platform anyway and lock you out of your games entirely; pretty sure the bans are limited to VAC secured servers for online play and the array of community features like posting on the forums.

    • GammaEnglish
      19•3 months ago

      Lawyers hate this one simple trick

    • @powerofm@lemmy.ca
      4•3 months ago

      Looks like anyone who has access can invite their steam friends, so I guess it’s like closed beta? Seems weird to have something soft-launch with zero announcements. The design also looks very rudimentary. Im

      • Virkkunen
        12•3 months ago

        It’s a closed alpha test claiming everything is placeholder content and could/will change while they flesh out the design, hence why they don’t want you to share anything.