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
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.
Before i miss/forget it:
Congrats on continuing this for 350 days, almost a year
Even if i dont relate to the games you are playing it brings me joy every time because you manage to keep up your diary of gaming
Its just such a nice thing to see :D
I was gonna say I'd love to see a Resident Evil action game but then I remembered Onimusha exists 😅 And I suppose RE 4-6 to a lesser extent.
I feel like Signalis maybe half the way to a Resident Evil metroidvania? Like, if you bring the perspective down to 2D and tie all the areas together, you basically have an RE metroidvania.
What about abilities though? In Metroid, the suit gets the abilities, but no one in the RE cast has a suit or is magic, so I assume you unlock weapons instead?
Yeah, weapons. Take a look at shadow complex. It’s a great Metroidvania. You do unlock a power suit at one point, but other than that, you just upgrade your weapons.
No. No it does not. Piracy is legally copyright infringement, not theft. Stealing requires that the thief deprive the original owner access to the stolen thing. Piracy is not stealing because there is no deprivation of access.
If I made a copy of your car, but you still had access to your car and could drive it like normal, I didn’t steal your car.
bin.pol.social
Najnowsze