April 2019

Well quitting Opengameart turned out to be much more complicated than I thought. I hardly ever experienced so much back-stabbing and dishonest behavior. Initially I wanted to go through all lies and correct them, but I thought I keep it short instead, since the fact, that they constantly have to censor me should be proof enough, that their version does not hold water and I don't really care about that drama, I just wanted to leave, but they would not let me.

Sure I wanted to create trouble by editing my contributions to leave a message, but they are my contributions, I can edit them how I want, an admin can delete them and ban me for it, if he wants, but what I did not expect was, that my account was banned and my changes were reverted, so now my account was stolen from me and made to look like I appreciate to release those things there under my name, which I did not want. So I requested that my account AND contributions to be deleted, the admin instantly deleted my account, but nothing else and that started the whole drama.

I mean almost anywhere you can request your account and stuff to be deleted. Even if a website or service does not officially provide such an option, if you contact the support they almost always comply with your requests without much trouble. On other websites or services you can also just go and delete your posts, scramble your data, do whatever and nobody cares, some even offer it in their support as instructions to scramble your data, before deleting your account, since after you delete it, you will no longer be able to change that. So I thought since Opengameart does not offer a method of account deletion, I just render my contributions useless, by uploading a dummy file. I did not want to delete it, since some people may come towards it through links or search results, so they could still find it and download it on my website or on another website I still am at.

My plan was to harm the platform, but not the users. If you want to harm an internet platform, you remove your content or better render the data useless, that is what hurts them the most, since they profit from your work, you basically work for them for free and it is legal, since it is your account and your content, that you own. But what they did now was to ban me and edit my stuff back using my account and preventing me from deleting my stuff, which is probably illegal on multiple levels.

If they would have wanted to steal my content, but ban me from the platform, the most elegant solution would have been to ban me, delete all my contributions and have someone else upload them again, this would even have been legal due to the nature of open source, they would have "only" violated their own websites rules and blamed themselves as wanting to be thieves. So of course they did not do that.

The reason I did not instantly delete everything was that I spend huge amounts of time creating it and submitting it, creating screenshots, descriptions etc and I of course wanted people to use it, thats the whole purpose. But now where I experienced how ruthless and ignorant the operators of Opengameart are regarding their own supposed cause, I just thought, just erase everything, I don't want to have anything to do with it anymore. I mean it is sad for all my wasted efford and of the people who will not find it anymore, but if they do not care at all about their supposed cause and only trying to manipulate me I cannot support that at all.

You have to consider I was literally banned for "Not correcting my behavior after I was punished multiple times". Imagine you communicate with a group and at some point they say "Oh you cannot say that, thats negative and as punishment we will ban you for 2 weeks". After you are unbanned you question the person and argue that "negative" is totally subjective and for that you are punished again with 2 weeks ban. After the other ban you get banned again for supposedly saying something wrong and threatened to be banned permanently. Those people must be totally batshit insane. They are basically running a business and I'm one of their biggest contributors and I work for free and they get most of the profit, but they do not care what I do for them at all, all they care about is to constantly try to manipulate me to what I am allowed to say and what not. All they seem to care about to have their own little politically correct cult, where nobody is allowed to criticize anyone or say anything negative and what is negative is defined by the mighty admin and if you question him you get banned.

In the real world at least almost no reputable company behaves like that. Let me find a nice metaphor, imagine someone runs a business and you are a good customer and some day the store owner starts commanding you around and trys to tell you how you have to behave and if you do not behave like he wants, you cannot buy from him and then he bans you in hope you correct your behavior how he wants it and then is pissed of after you are pissed off for being banned. Of course that rarely happens, there is a saying that the customer is always king, of course he is, because the customer brings the profit and it would be stupid to piss him off, since he brings all the profit. Well now they pissed me off and some others also already left, like the site creator himself who left many years ago.

There is a scenario however where I could imagine their behavior would make sense and that is if their supposed cause is not their real cause, in short this is usually called a hypocrite. I at least really believed into open source game development for a while, but now I realize that they do not seem to care at all and those platforms primary customers are mobile game developers who want to make as much money as possible with using free content so they need to put in as little work as possible, but mobile game development is kind of diametrically opposed to open source game development, at least it should be seen as that.

Now they have to censor me so I cannot tell them the truth and eventually piss off their two other customer groups which are at first mobile game developers and at second a small group that only cares about political correctness and not about really contributing good content and advancing open source game development. Well at least I hope I can quit that chapter now, I just feel shit now for having fallen for that cult and all that harassment I had to endure from their cult members and that only because I wanted to give stuff away for free and make people happy.