I’m not going to defend Valve because I haven’t seen anything confirming why they banned Sean from multiplayer and it could have nothing to do with the story even if the timing could be inferred as a reason. But I will crap all over the article writer for what he wrote in the article.

For context, Sean is the only person who comes up in a search about being banned for sharing info about Deadlock despite many people doing so.

Sean said in the Verge article :

And I’m not under NDA. I have signed no contracts and made no verbal agreements; I haven’t even clicked through a EULA.

Then he has a picture with a thing that says not to share information about the game, and the caption is:

This message does pop up when I launch Deadlock, but I didn’t click “OK”; instead, I hit the Escape key and watched it disappear. Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Sean is being an absolute pedantic tool. Saying that there was no agreements because he used the escape key to get past a message saying to not share information is what lawyers do for technicalities, not what journalists should brag about in an article where they clearly understood that they were not supposed to share the information. They could have said that they had an obligation as a journalist or some other positive thing, but instead did the equivalent of eating free bread at a restaurant and then leaving without buying anything because the menu doesn’t say you have to.

When I saw Sean was banned after writing the article my first thought was 'This tool probably got himself banned by doing some jerk thing in game, since he clearly hates being told not to do something." I do not expect Valve to respond to the article, since they aren’t as petty as Sean, so all the public will get is his assumption that the article lead to his ban.

Sounds more like Valve read the rules for Fight Club and applied them in kind.

Valve asks reporter to play game, reporter reports on it.

shocked Pikachu face