What even is Deadrop without Dr Disrespect?
It’s a hectic time for those in the orbit of Guy Beahm, the streamer better known as Dr Disrespect who last week admitted to being banned from Twitch for inappropriately messaging a minor.
Friends, brands, and a professional football team have cut ties with the streamer, though the separation most personal to Beahm was his firing from Midnight Society, the game studio he co-founded in 2021. For almost three years Beahm was the face of Midnight Society and its debut game Deadrop, a «vertical extraction shooter.»
«Face» is actually an understatement: Deadrop wasn’t just Dr Disrespect’s game, it was the Dr Disrespect game. The shooter’s art style matches Beahm’s dark cyberpunk stream graphics and merchandise. Deadrop’s core extraction mode was inspired by Beahm’s love of Escape From Tarkov. The Deadrop assault rifle has two firing modes: «Yaya» and «Yayayaya», a reference to the disgraced streamer’s catchphrase.
In the week since Beahm’s firing Midnight Society has made efforts to scrub the Doc from its official channels—Beahm is no longer mentioned in the studio’s Twitter bio and its About Us page has gone offline. Only scarce mentions of the streamer remain in its FAQ and branding guidelines. Midnight Society might never fully disentangle itself from its co-founder, though even if it could, I seriously question what Deadrop is without its load-bearing hype man. Because I can tell you what Deadrop is not right now: a good, or even particularly promising game.Day zero
Deadrop is not a normal videogame. That’s the way the Midnight Society founding quartet of Beahm, Robert Bowling (former Call of Duty creative lead), Quinn DelHoyo (former Halo Infinite designer), and entrepreneur Sumit Gupta like to talk about Deadrop—as a never-before-seen project that «turns tables upside down» on the game industry. At the center of that mission is what the studio has coined its «Day Zero» development, where early adopters vote on features and give feedback.
Months before Deadrop had a name or we even knew what kind of game it was, Midnight Society started selling $50 Founders Passes, NFTs that granted owners unique, procedurally generated Midnight Society avatars usable in-game.
The studio’s embracing of NFTs and decentralization, as trendy as it was in 2021, alienated PC gamers already exasperated by Web3 startups proclaiming that the future of gaming is a stock market. The decision also instantly associated Deadrop with the shallow, cynical, and scam-prone Web3 gaming space. But those detractions were a blip against the huge audience of eager Beahm supporters. All 10,000 Founder Passes sold out shortly after going on sale. That $50 buy-in got them a digital trinket they could sell later, but the real prize was access to future Deadrop test builds called «Snapshots», Midnight Society’s other self-proclaimed development innovation.
Deadrop is essentially an early access game like any other, but with earlier access, and a promise to deliver a new playable Snapshot every six weeks. I was one of the skeptics who questioned how Midnight Society would pull off releasing a new build of Deadrop every 42 days when it was starting from scratch. What could a studio even accomplish at that pace?
It didn’t take long for Midnight Society to demonstrate why developers usually wait a few years to put their games in front of players. The much-hyped Snapshot 1, released in July 2022, turned out to have three rooms, firing ranges, and a single gun. Midnight Society called it an experience, but it was a tech demo at best. It wouldn’t be until Snapshot 2 in September, which missed its six-week deadline by two weeks, that Deadrop would get the basis of its multiplayer extraction mode, a map, and a few other weapons.
