I'm honestly so shocked to see how many people are writing off Gio's claims and acting like Hussie can do no wrong, or if they do, it's justified. I think it is in part easy to write off because of the title of Gio's article - in my opinion, this story is not particularly about the UHC being taken down (and when framed that way, the assertion is made, rightly, that it's still accessible and also Gio sucks, end of story).
This is a story of Andrew Hussie's entitlement toward the creative work of others, stretching all the way back to the early days. This is a story of how Andrew Hussie behaves when not able to control the behavior of others. This is a story among far too many of Andrew Hussie's continual weaponization of legal maneuvers to manipulate people. And in fact, it sure sounds to me like part of Gio's assertions of Hussie's shady behavior has already been confirmed in Miles' statement, where he said:
"gio was Not trying everything he could to make this work, because by his own admission in the article he refused to sign a license to continue to publish the Entirety Of A Body Of Work That Didn’t Belong To Him, and i also strongly suspect did everything in his power to dissuade bambosh from licensing when it was bambosh andrew was doing the initial negotiating with, Precisely Because We Were Worried About Situations Like This. at the time i actually thought that was TOO paranoid, believe it or not, but holy shit was i wrong about that, lol."
From Gio's article - In the messages from Miles during the early communication, Miles says that after giving Bambosh the NDA and a private conversation between them and Andrew, Gio would also receive an NDA and have a similar conversation, sort of an interview before the negotiations began. If it is true that no NDA was presented to Gio and Gio was not stalling, this was just an excuse to get Bambosh alone and not have to deal with Gio. Sure sounds like it tracks, at least to me. They cornered Bambosh, tried to only work with him and cut Gio out of the deal while weaponizing legal documents to do so. The NDA/non-NDA dynamic between Bambosh and Gio meant that they could not discuss the negotiations between them, and Bambosh then left the project.
Please don't think that just because Gio's article is dramatic, that it's not credible. To be honest, if I had been jerked around that much for that long I'd be pretty uncharitable too. The most credible part to me is how familiar it sounds. I know people are discrediting Gio and calling them biased...well, everyone has bias - I think it'd be worse had Gio pretended to not feel the way they feel about things at this point. The idea that language used with regards to abusive relationships is overblown - divide and conquer and DARVO are very real tactics people use to have power over others in many situations, like in cases of medical or financial abuse. Domestic violence is not the only arena in which these things happen.
Finally, I personally am not only interested in how Andrew Hussie treats their friends. I'm far more interested in how they treat people they don't respect. And the answer is...extraordinarily poorly and unprofessionally.
