thinking about valve banning that journalist for covering deadlock unearthed an old forgotten memory. When I was at valve HQ for the portal 2 arg in 2011 one of my main takeaways - and valve staff were NOT shy about saying this - is that valve sees the games press as the enemy. Not like as an inconvenience or something they can ignore - the enemy, an existential threat to be refuted and foiled at all costs.
There was a sort of throughline that their fans, their fans were good and safe and understood them, and they were going to try and route all comms thru fans, as opposed to journalists, who had an agenda.
At the time I remember thinking "damn who hurt you" but in hindsight it's hard not to see this more as a hostile desire to control the message, to never be the subject of any scrutiny. In that context, their behaviour with deadlock looks, well, consistent. They don't care about bad press over banning a journalist - they view all press as bad press. IMO it's a very sketchy way to be, but I guess i'm not a trillion dollar monopoly
This also makes a lot of sense with their whole reliance on user reviews vs professional reviews/criticism
