Is @gabester still working for Beam NG?

I was checking out @gabester's profile and notice he hasn't been on for a year and a half. So does he still work for Beam NG?

 

idk, deleted

 

Whoops, didn't know that.

 

Most probably yes. Not wanting to interact with a bunch of prople on the forums is kinda acceptable nowadays, especially with how some behave…
See how for example Chuck_Norris_ doesn’t have the „BeamNG Team” thing anymore? Gabe still has it, so he’s probably still part of the dev team.

 

If you want the truth - it turns out tdev turned gabstar into a horse as a punishment for making the Piccolina. He's now being used to raise money for development.

https://www.racing.com/horses/gabstar

So far he has raised $108,360. This is why they don't need DLC to continue development.

 

That is amazing.

On the topic of developers, what happened to Stoat Muldoon?

 

No clue. Maybe they got fired. I noticed that they had been on the forums since 2013 and only sent one message before joining the team, afterwards they sent lots of messages, but some of the first ones were in a paid mod argument thread. That made me weary of them almost immediately.

 

Stoat wasn’t fired for defending paid mods- they still work at BeamNG.

 

What happened to the account (and the mods)?

 

I’d suggest asking a forum moderator, I don’t know.

 

Stoat still shows up on the subreddit once in awhile. They openly don't exactly care for the community here so it's not surprising the forum account isn't around anymore.

 

I just feel like it is a shitty move to pull, because the only people affected by this are the game’s customers (aka us). There was no warning either, just randomly, out of the blue, they just basically said fu and deleted all of their shit

 

I remember Stoat had a good deal of posts from pre-hiring but I'm guessing that alot of them were canned when he was hired. Mostly because when you wear a dev tag for Beam your posts here reflect on BeamNG as a game so generally after being hired alot of people just choose to remove old posts

 

Don't be so entitled, if someone doesn't want people using their content anymore it's their right to pull it. And why would you warn people if you were going to pull content, that would just mean everybody would swarm to download it and there would be no reason to pull it

 

So you're telling me people can decide when they want to get their content removed from the internet now? How dare they!

 

They don't owe you being on the forums?? They have no obligation to interact with the community and pretending to be everyone's friend and loving everyone in the community is just a sisyphean task. I get why they deleted their account and it's precisely posts like this to be fair

 

Damn, now I feel like a complete a-hole

 

Look, I'm one of the bigger proponents of modders and their rights—I believe paid mods are ethically above-board and would defend the right to sell mods tooth and nail—but I do actually see two sides to this issue. I do think that once something is put out to the public, the public has a sort of cultural right to that thing. I mean, we'd spent ~30 years complaining about George Lucas butchering Star Wars (his creation, start to finish) and the following ~10 about how Disney (the current rightful, legal owner) is doing the same thing. Or about AAA game publishers deliberately letting their works fade into obsolescence (https://gamehistory.org/87percent/). Other than a question of financial scale, how is this really different?

I'm no proponent of pirating, repackaging, reuploading, or reselling other people's work, but even if you are the rightful owner of a thing, it does feel at least a little scary that you have the ability to wipe that thing away completely.

I don't think you're wrong, but I also don't think it's an unreasonable concern to voice.

 

if you create something you have the right to destroy it. i think its fair

 

Well, something no one’s mentioned yet is that technically, once something is shared on the internet in any capacity, it is out there forever. Sure, you can delete your account and mods, but that doesn’t affect anyone who already downloaded them. Those people have it forever and if you’re not around to stop them, they can ultimately do whatever they want with your content.

I don’t know about other countries but under US law, once you share something online you technically no longer own that data, either the website or hosting company does. The same thing goes for anything posted on social media, shared with news sites, etc. That’s a risk that everyone, including all of us assume by sharing data on the internet.

Edit- On the topic of “planned obsolescence” I am probably biased, but I’m firmly against that idea. Yes, it technically is the creator’s right to remove their content although from a moral standpoint, I find it to be extremely disrespectful to the people that supported them.