It seems as though developer The Indie Stone just can’t catch a break these days. During the past year, they have been locked out of their Paypal funds, had to take their game offline due to major issues of piracy and, just yesterday, their office was broken into. Not much else is known about the incident, other then 2 work laptops were stolen and developer Chris (Lemmy) Simpson’s credit card.
As soon as news of the robbery appeared on Twitter, the “fan” reaction on Reddit has gone from unsympathetic to crass and cold-hearted. Still recovering from this huge loss of work and from the invasion of his home, Simpson went on a bit of a rant on Twitter. He lashed out at a number of commenters on Reddit and Twitter, as well as other developers.
Earlier today, Simpson posted an apology on his blog, trying to atone for his comments last night. In the apology, he also states that he no longer wants to be a part of the, “public face of Project Zomboid.” As part of this, he has closed his Twitter account along with discontinuing his blog on The Indie Stone website.
This incident couldn’t have occurred at a worse time for the Project Zomboid team, as work on the next update was nearly complete. In the statement from The Indie Stone, they reassure all customers that no personal information was contained on those computers and that even though this is another bump in the road for Project Zomboid they will, “come back stronger.” If there is one developer that can roll with the punches, it’s The Indie Stone.
What really shocked me was the overwhelming number of commenters bothered by the fact that Project Zomboid team didn’t regularly back up their data…but not bothered in the slightest about the fact the home shared by two developers were broken into. I understand the importance of disciplining oneself to create backups of all of their digital content; but just because you always remember to save an extra copy of your Word documents on your USB key, it doesn’t mean that you can’t spare a little sympathy for 2 guys that just had something they worked tremendously hard on taken away.
