So this is quite the debacle surrounding the release of Zombies, or as it’s soon to be called, the “Corporate Lifestyle Simulator”, on Steam. Following a successful Steam Greenlight campaign, developer BigNic originally decided that it would be available to people who bought the original game in bundles, and that it would not be available on its own.

To sum up his original stance, he was demanding that Steam and other bundle websites would give him lists of all the users who had purchased his game, so that he would have concrete information regarding how many users actually bought his game, and would subsequently deserve Steam keys.

No respected distributor would give the private information of users, let alone their financial information, to anyone – not even a developer. He flatly denied giving Steam keys to anyone who bought the game from a bundle or even from Steam directly, and he also refused to give keys to users who bought the original game from his website. Alrighty then.

Naturally, this got a lot of users upset, as he promised Steam keys to them should his game be Greenlit, and once it was released. The outpouring of hate and or disagreement started coming his way, and he eventually buckled and agreed to give keys out – even without lists of all the users’ personal information. He posted on his facebook page that “the crowd has spoken” and that “you will get keys.”

The new version of the game will be called Corporate Lifestyle Simulator, and it will come with a whole host of new features, while the game has been available on iOS for quite some time now. Thankfully, the developer is at least listening to the fans and giving them Steam keys, although it took death threats and name calling to get him to finally budge.

In closing, BigNic did apologize for his conduct on twitter and on other public areas, saying that “everyone who bought the game in a bundle should get a Steam key when they are available,” and that there is “no developer without users … no artist without patrons.”