Midnight Society, the game studio started by popular streamer Herschel "Guy" Beahm, also known as Dr Disrespect, has come under fire for allegedly stealing content from the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer. Though Dr Disrespect has never shied away from controversy in his streaming career and in producing content, the added scrutiny to his latest business endeavor has been more related to business practices than Beahm's brash personality.
Recently, Midnight Society came under fire for its decision to include NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, in its still-unknown first title. Although Dr Disrespect and Midnight Society assured players that the integration of NFTs wouldn't affect gameplay and players could get the full experience of the game without buying NFTs, it still led many to criticize the decision. Other streamers have gone so far as to call NFTs a scam and condemn the decision by the studio. Unfortunately for both Dr Disrespect and his studio, this does not appear to be the only issue that will bring negative attention to Midnight Society.
Twitter user inhuman recently shared two screenshots that appear to be identical. One is from the website for Midnight Society, the other is from the Cyberpunk 2077 teaser trailer, which debuted back in 2018. Players immediately began to accuse Midnight Society of stealing assets, but developer Robert Bowling quickly quelled these accusations. According to Bowling, the engineer pushing an update accidentally published the wrong image. This would indicate that this uploaded image is not indicative of the assets that Midnight Society will use in its games.
Even though this incident appears to be the result of an honest mistake, detractors of Dr Disrespect may still use it in arguments against him. Although Beahm was an accomplished game developer with experience working on big-time shooters like games in the Call of Duty franchise, he has also been banned from streaming platform Twitch for still-unknown reasons. Although Dr Disrespect has a large fanbase, many players have grown suspicious of him and Midnight Society. The NFT scandal and now this use of Cyberpunk 2077 assets - though it appears to be an accident - have only increased scrutiny around the game.
Although Midnight Society professes to create games that cater to the hardcore fans of shooters, these new issues have raised some eyebrows by gamers. Even in the initial tweet, inhuman described Midnight Society's game as an "NFT game" so the discourse surrounding Midnight Society is clearly not where Dr Disrespect and the other devs would like. Hopefully, as Dr Disrespect and Midnight Society release more information about the game, discourse around the title will focus more on what this title will bring to gamers that they want.
'I destroyed months of your work in seconds' says AI coding tool after deleting a devs entire database during a code freeze: 'I panicked instead of thinking'
Brütal Legend is free in honor of Ozzy Osbourne, but only for 666 minutes
The dairy industry would like Gen Z to drink more milk, so they made a Fortnite diner tycoon game
Microsoft warns of 'active attacks' on its government and business server tech, with one cybersecurity expert claiming that they should 'assume that you have been compromised'
