844k now. Wow. I wonder what caused the sudden surge? Or is it just that most momentum can be gain at the start and towards the end like with Kickstarters?
After Ross announced the campaign is dead a bunch of YouTubers (and media, I think?) picked up the topic and started spreading the word far and wide. This is the result.
That’s actually one of the most annoying parts about the whole thing. SKG campaign has been running for what, a year now? Barely anyone with an audience cared enough to even look into it, let alone spread the news. Now that things came close to failing suddenly everyone thinks it’s an important topic and scrambled to make videos/posts/whatever. I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt but I just don’t have that in me any more…
We could’ve been in so much better place with awareness, petitions and general sentiment if people in the industry actually cared about these things from the start.
Better late than never, I guess. I just hope there’s enough time to push through the EU petition as well.
Up untill Ross posted his ‘SKG is dead’ video… Thor had by far gotten the most views of anyone with a video discussing SKG.
And Thor… well, he was anti-SKG, and had been spreading a bunch of objectively false bullshit about it, actual FUDD.
So… about half of Ross’s video was dedicated to pointing out how Thor was wildly misunderstanding things, and fairly graciously and politely trying to correct these misconceptions.
So here’s the two sort of things at play I see, in terms of 'why sudden surge now?'
Thor was just shown to be objectively, factually wrong. Thus, the immediate effect of this would be to reiterate and clarify and reinforce with more specificity what SKG actually is… and that could directly convince people to give a damn, to believe in Ross’s SKG over Thor’s misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.
But uh, almost certainly much, much more relevant:
Ross doing (1) created an absolute drama shit storm via the way youtube works now… which is very much just drama mongers and commentators reporting on e-drama. (1) kicked off an actual, organic, honest to god, truly viral explosion of many, many people who’d basically never heard of any of this before, mostly dogpiling on Thor for being such a disingenuous, egotistical asshole and liar, but also of course encouraging people to sign the SKG petition.
This kind of absurd, out of nowhere explosion of popularity of some topic, idea, meme, whatever, that spreads from person to person to person, from the ground up instead of top down… this is what something going ‘viral’ originally meant in the earlier days of the internet, 15 to 20 ish years ago.
You know, it spreads, from host to host, like a pandemic outbreak, shockingly rapidly.
These days we have everything hypermanaged by algorithms that silo you into your own content niche… and this was an exceptional enough of an event that it broke containment.
Videos like … this entire topic/event/story… used to be what the YouTube trending tab looked like… just totally random shit that for whatever reason, a bunch of people organically shared with each other, back when the algos were much, much more primitive.
…
Anyway… extremely ironically, a whole lot of the viral nature of this is due to Thor being just such an astoundingly massive piece of shit liar and manipulator.
He has a whole entire history of being astoundingly cocky, arrogant, dishonest, deceptive, intellectually inconsistent, rhetorically manipulative, etc, and it is genuienly… just astounding, i dont know what other word to use, to go through every single shitty thing Thor has done or said, not only in regards to SKG, but many, many other things Thor has done.
Basically, Thor is now a lolcow, a perfect person to milk by making content criticizing him, because he really is that much of an unbelievable, outrageuous idiot asshole.
LTT likely because Linus is extremely out of touch. Like comically so.
Game nexus likely because Steve is more focused on other sectors of the industry. He’s a hardware and news guy more then a “gaming” channel in the strictest of sense. So it just very likely slipped his radar.
I mean, its not technically completely impossible, but the vast majority of EU countries require a valid name, id, address, etc, its usually a pretty dumb idea to bot spam an official government web portal, and I’m sure there will be a review process after July 31.
Also… its not like it hits a million and then just no one else can sign up to it anymore.
It’ll stay open till the end of the month, could easily breach a million, maybe even two million if anything like this insane rate keeps up.
Right now we need 1669 per day remaining, though that number is probably going ot be smaller by the time you click the link.
Worth noting that the actual target is somewhere above one million, since there’s probably some invalid signatures mixed in and the initiative needs a million even after these get removed. Still, it’s looking really good.
Didn’t it already reach the threshold last year and the government (or the civil servant in charge of rejecting every petition) closed it saying that current consumer protection laws already apply?
They didn't close it. They provided an answer early. That as they see it, existing trade and consumer law should cover games and they don't plan on carving out extra legislation for it but they will "keep an eye on it".
Now it is over 100k, it doesn't actually mean anything more than they "might" debate it in parliament.
Now, don't get me wrong. I signed the petition, and I think they SHOULD look into it. But, my old cynical bones tell me that even if they do have a debate in parliament. It will be at a time when there will be 5 MPs in there, who will have nothing to say on the matter and it will be swept under the rug with a further canned statement drawn up by some civil servant in whitehall talking about consumer law just like the statement before.
Most western governments are on the side of industry, and that includes game developers. I cannot imagine they care about this subject and will do the bare minimum lip service to move past it.
I hope I'm wrong.
I do have a bit more hope for the European parliament. Just a little. They do seem to be a bit more pro-consumer. That is the one that matters most IMO.
The UK petition ends before the EU petition so my guess is that they’ll give us some canned response before the end of the month. In their heads that will end the discussion.
Parliament will have 7 days after it closes before their planned summer recess. You think they will work that quickly to churn out a boilerplate debate?
Wait untill people realize that Ross Scott has had a running show, ‘Freeman’s Mind’, going back to basically the fucking machinima days, where he just does a playthrough of all of Half Life and voices Gordon’s inner thoughts.
We are going to need another petition to get Ross an honorary title, a goddamned bust of an upraised fist in an HEV suit, clenching a crowbar, with ‘For Exceptional Valor and Dutiful Service in the Defense of Video Gaming’ emblazoned on its base.
Whats wrong with PirateSoftware? He runs a ferret rescue which doesn’t claim any tax incentives and he teaches people about security and ethics, I’ve never heard of him having beef with anyone.
Yeah he seems pretty positive and helpful, so did his bias mislead him on this one?
Also I wasn’t even sure he was still a huge fan of his former employer—but now that I think of it I guess he was really pleased with his time there, cuz he’s proud of his ban wave strategies and stuff
He tends to be condescending, toxic, and dishonest. I happened to watch this video the other day that covers a fair bit of stuff including the stop killing games petitions, if you’ve got 20 minutes.
completely misrepresenting the stop killing games initiative.
bitching for quite a while that “someone” pulled a mob during a world of warcraft raid causing a wipe, going back to see who it was to remove them, seeing it was himself and then justifying why it was now the right call.
running away from his group in world of warcraft in a fight claiming he has no mana, while he’s wasting moves to drain the last of his mana and he has ways of getting around half of it back. This was during some kind of creater guild thing where if you die you lose your character. So abandoning his team to save himself and lying about it.
banning/blocking everyone who criticizes or corrects him on these things
DMCA’d and threatened legal action on an indie dev for a parody game that included him as a cockroach.
Pirate has a history of, grooming, digital labor theft, lying, sexism, scamming, being an asshole, to name a few things.
Hell his current persona isn’t even his first one. He never actually worked on blizzards security team, he was a support staff. Half his stories have been proven to be lies.
About the only thing that’s true is family connections got him a job there.
But the man his a raging narcissist and a grifter. The whole pirate software persona is just his latest grift.
Everyone has beef with him literally everyone. But he makes sure to ban from anything he can to keep them out of his chat or other places his community gathers.
Hes been grifting lying and grooming since second life. He just changes his name and moves to a new community when shit blows up in his face and it becomes too much of a problem.
His entire professional shtick is to make sure people don’t learn about his past and to lie and make himself look good
Good. States shouldn’t be able to just go out on a whim and immediately go back in again like it’s a revolving door. The consequences should be severe for leaving. Otherwise voters in other member states will pull this shit as well, because they think they can just rejoin when the next pro EU government comes around. Also many voters in the UK voted for leave as a protest vote not because they actually wanted to leave. They didn’t understand the ramifications of their vote. Let the UK be the example of what a protest vote can cause.
Hmm I’m not sure using gacha games which are designed for addictive gameplay loops and predatory monetisation being the games that your kid prefers over standalone experiences is a good argument to make
Perhaps this is a weird part to single out, but it surprised me
I mainly played on the 3DS from when I was 6 until I was 15, so I don’t have as much experience with other consoles.
[…] The 3DS was simply Nintendo’s best era, and I don’t think we’ll see anything like that again given the current direction of their latest consoles…
Curious if others agree. I would’ve thought that it would be the SNES era, but that’s probably betraying my age more than anything.
Great article! On par with gaming publications, and actually probably better than most Nintendo Power articles I remember from back in the day. Great job!!
I’m in my 30’s and I think I agree with this. The amount of bangers for the 3ds is insane, and the virtual console lineups on both the 3ds and wii u were unmatched any time before or after. Even today, the 3ds is the best console to buy used and hack. You have QR-code access to ALL titles, including virtual console titles. It’s a Nintendo emulation powerhouse. Technically you can do all of that on the switch, but it’s much harder to do, much harder to get content, and not nearly as many things are compatible.
I actually never had one while it was “recent” (I skipped from the ds to the switch) but I’ve since bought a refurbished one and loaded custom firmware (very simple compared to other consoles) and played some of the top rated games and a few niche ones. I fell in love, and I use it for emulation of other Nintendo consoles up to N64 and all handheld consoles. I’m even working on a full living pokedex using only a 3ds and a switch, which is completely legit using Pokémon bank and Pokémon home and the virtual console, all official Nintendo software.
I'd say the DS was the best handheld of all time, and GBA was close behind it. 3DS had its share of bangers, but if you compare its library to the DS it's not even close.
3DS was the era where we started to see the conflict between handhelds being a place for experimental low budget titles, versus the need for larger budgets on better hardware. This also just made it more difficult to juggle supporting handheld and console platforms at the same time. And halfway through the system's lifespan, mobile gaming exploded in popularity, which really ate into the system's marketshare. There's a very observable trend in how third party support kept dropping over time.
I’d argue that the backwards compatibility between the 3ds and ds makes the 3ds just as good as the DS if you’re counting ds games. Though if we’re talking how good the games are of each generation instead of how useful and fun each console is with all available means of play, it might be a different story.
What’s funny about this whole thing is it’s almost like PirateSoftwares days in EVE Online when he invited everyone to Pochven space cause he thought he was hot shit and then proceeded to get his ass handed to him and he rage quit the game. He brought attention to something that ended up having the opposite effect of what he wanted.
Granted he was absolutely shit at EVE regardless of what he’s told his audience. couldn’t fit a ship to save his life, ran for CSM and no one voted for him, then rage quit when everyone and even his own corp proceeded to kick his teeth in.
The worst part is that this are far from the only two events. He has been kicked from several other guilds, for exactly the same narcissistic and egoistic behavior. If everywhere you go it smells like shit, at some point you have to start checking your own shoes. He is just always adamant that it’s other people’s fault that it smells like shit, when he has full diaper.
There’s the whole… apparently when Thor was essentially high school to post high school age, he managed to cajole a younger SecondLife user, who was actually decently talented at creating like clothes and custom player models…
So in SecondLife, you can actually make real money that way, you can cash out the SecondLife currency for actual realworld money.
Yeah SecondLife was actually quite a pioneer in a lot of ways, from a technical and just ‘what even is a video game’ standpoint, lets say uh ‘eccentric’ community and reputation aside.
And Thor basically convinced this other SL user, who was like 5 years younger than him… that he could make them both more money as a sort of salesman, promoter, of this other persons user made content… if they profit share.
I may have some details wrong here, but basically… Thor did basically nothing in terms of promotion, yet he made a significant chunk of change off of this other person.
Because … SL just has basically a universal market you can list things in.
Like uh, Escape from Tarkov, or FF14’s auction house or what not, fully built into the game… but even more so as it actually allows you to cash out to real world money.
its not like you’d have to do some kind of technical wizardry to enable sales, its not like Thor whipped up some kind of gray/black market system / payment processor way back when PayPal was still a fairly new idea.
Alongside that, there were allegations of basically ERP going waaay too far.
Now, this other person has I think entirely denied any kind of ERP abuse, sexual or just normal relationship abuse, says everything was fine…
But a good number of people seem to think that the essentially digital labor theft Thor did, basically amounts to its own kind of grooming, exploitation.
I was in his corp (my old one merged with his, I had no idea who he was for quite a while), and this… isn’t exactly accurate. First, from what I remember, he left on okay terms with the corp.
There was a laundry list of issues with Pochven, a lot of them due to CCP just not bothering to fix issues that the players reported, and moving devs who did want to try and fix some of the issues to different areas of the game. It got to the point where it wasn’t economically viable to live in the area, which reduced how many ships we could field, and the number of people even willing to join.
CCP also took forever to decide on how wormholes interacted with the region, and changed those interactions frequently. Some of these were great, for instance there was a point where most of the wormholes linked to wormhole systems, and it was a complicated (and dangerous) dance to get people in and out of the region undetected. CCP ended up going with the worst possible interaction: many wormholes directly linked to nullsec space, where massive alliances could easily find them and send massive fleets through with little effort.
He wasn’t the only one to quit, to be honest I’m surprised he stayed for as long as he did given how he acts now.
Is Thor an egotistical narcissist? Absolutely. Was this a case of that? Not really
PirateSoftware was critical of the initiative when it first started. Some people attribute its initial lack of success to his opposition.
He was later involved in some drama and his reputation fell, and the petition’s creator finally addressed his claims. Now the petition is having a second wind in its final hour
He wasn’t just critical of it, he spread misinformation about it. It was wild to watch someone be so completely and utterly wrong, then double and triple and quadruple down on it.
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Aktywne