A Starfield fan was banned on a popular subreddit after admitting to reporting a leak of the game to the police.
We’ve had Starfield for a few days now, and despite the unsurprising amount of hate and backlash to Bethesda’s new IP, mainly over pronouns of all things, it’s been a pretty successful early access launch.
Have you played Starfield yet? Check out our review below
The game’s hype and popularity have contributed to a huge increase in sales for the Xbox Series X, and review scores have been very positive, including our own review which you can check out here. While the game is yet to be officially released for Standard Edition buyers and Xbox Game Pass subscribers, it’s so far so good for Starfield.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing though, as aside from outrage from PlayStation fans about it being an Xbox exclusive, and then outrage from Xbox fans that it won’t run at 60fps, it had its fair share of problems prior to launch.
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The biggest problem came from leaks, which were especially prevalent when it finally made its way to reviewers, as despite the strict embargo, gameplay, and even whole reviews, were released onto the internet early.
While Bethesda will have likely taken action in their own way, some die-hard fans took matters into their own hands, with one recently admitting to Kotaku that they reported leaks to the police, and faced a ban on Reddit for it.
A Reddit user by the name of Jasper Adkins, who frequently visited the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit, saw that early copies of the game had allegedly been stolen and were being sold online leading to an avalanche of gameplay leaks.
Adkins protested the leaks, arguing it wasn’t fair on Bethesda and that they’d actually pursued legal action with the police to bring justice to who was responsible. The subreddit’s response was to ban Adkins.
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Speaking in an email chain Kotaku, Adkins reportedly said: “It seems to me that the subreddit is running on ‘bread and circuses’ mode mixed with bystander syndrome … They’re perfectly willing to ignore a crime that hurts a developer they claim to support, in exchange for a few minutes of shaky gameplay filmed from a phone.”
At the time of writing, Adkins's ban seemingly hasn’t been lifted.