Kotaku reports that last week 29-year old Darin Harris “allegedly stole dozens of copies of the game from a warehouse and started selling them online,” prompting lots of pre-release leaks for the game.
“One Reddit user immediately reported the leaks to Bethesda and Memphis police,” adds Kotaku. “And he’s now been banned from the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit after posting about it.”
I know this because the commenter in question, Jasper Adkins, emailed Kotaku to inform us it had happened. “It seems to me that the subreddit is running on ‘bread and circuses’ mode mixed with bystander syndrome,” he wrote in his initial email. “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….”
Despite the criminal charges against him, Harris has become something of a folk hero within the community of fans hungry for Starfield leaks. As the Commercial Appeal reported, memes hail him as “Lord Tyrone” (his middle name) and one player even vowed to name their Starfield ship “Memphian” in his honor…
[Adkins] was banned from r/GamingLeaksAndRumours on August 24 shortly after posting about how he tried to help get Harris arrested. “An officer at the station told me so himself when I called him about it,” he wrote in the middle of a long comment thread. Adkins soon received a notification that he had violated the subreddit’s rules.
He protested, but the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours admins weren’t having it. “Just not interested in having someone here who takes action against the community like that,” they wrote back.
I reached out to one of the subreddit’s admins to confirm what had happened and the thinking behind the ban. “If he just did it I wouldn’t think badly of him but to come on the sub and brag about calling the cops on the dude just rubbed me the wrong way,” one of them told Kotaku in a DM. “Might unban him at some point but for now he’s behind the bars of the internet.”
