I saw some “review bombing” on his game Heartbound.
heartbound is his game. It’s not published by the company he resigned from. It also isn’t just people review bombing it for some unrelated reason. His game has been in early access hell for years with no sign of ever releasing to the people who’ve backed him and paid for it. And after he started getting all this attention, various developers have been digging into his code and finding out that’s it’s coded horribly, and the chances of him finishing the game with the way it’s coded are low. And in PirateSoftware fashion, he’s been having his fanbase brigade, harass, threaten, and abuse the developers who criticize his coding instead of praise it, which has only made it blow up even more. It’s not review bombing of the reviews are legitimately criticizing the game. The fact that they’re so recent is because Pirates poor behavior is putting his game in the spotlight.
So my take here is that he was worried that reaction would spread to the other studio
Your take would be wrong. He didn’t say he resigned because he was worried about the publishers games getting potentially review bombed in the future. He said they had been review bombed, in the affirmative. Which was yet another PirateSoftware lie.
I disagree, but I don’t know much about him.
Well this keeps coming up and it’s getting really weird that you keep making the point of “Here is my opinion on something, strong enough to believe others are wrong, even though I’m ignorant to most of what’s going on here”.
Perhaps before you make any more assertions you should just go and… figure out what it is you’re talking about? I don’t mean to be rude but your opinions just mean less than nothing when they’re admittedly based on ignorance. Ive explained a lot to you here and it’s not even close to all of it. Before you go defending him more, you should see what he’s actually about.
I don’t think he’s been swatted. In fact, a lot of the “backlash” that Pirate has complained about has also been debunked.He said he had to step away from his role at a game publisher because people were “Reviewing bombing all of the company’s games”. Somehow he didn’t realize that game reviews are public and in the case of Steam reviews very detailed. People went right to the Steam reviews and found that literally none of the games had been review-bombed.
On the contrary, since the backlash started he’s been calling for his fans to brigade and mass report anyone who criticizes him, live on stream. He filed a lawsuit against a guy who made a game and put a cameo of Pirate in his game as a cockroach wearing Pirates signature wizards hat. (A cockroach is the wow term for people who do what Pirate did)
As for the resignation, generally companies don’t like to have people who are ongoing, unapologetic public menaces to be the faces of their company. Any consequences Pirate faces are all of his own doing. If you’re going to be a public figure, you have to understand that you’re going to be held accountable for your behavior by somebody.
Isn’t that par for the course for streamers/youtubers though?
No.
I’ve seen people claim to be “indie game devs” when they’ve never actually released a game, or if they did, it made so few sales as to be little more than a hobby.
That would in fact make those people indie game devs. Thats not a high bar to meet. Pirate likes to word it as if he was a game dev in the industry, and often leaves the context of him just working in QA out. As for the cybersecurity role, his role dealt mostly with the human aspect of the business. Compliance, awareness training, etc. the most active things he did were social engineering phone calls. Yet he has explicitly calls himself “a hacker”.
they’re all working their way to the boss together 2. they start getting wrecked, so some (all?) decide to bail 3. he casts some spell to help his team get out, using up the rest of his mana 4. his teammate is about to die and asks for help he keeps running, as was the plan 5. he gets roasted for not helping out, and explains that we has out of mana and couldn’t do anything even if he wanted to
You’re missing a step here. 3.5. He chooses not to use the items he has that would have restored his mana. Which changes number 5 a bit as a consequence.
he gets roasted for not helping out, and explains lies that we has out of mana and couldn’t do anything even if he wanted to (Even though he could have. He just didn’t want to)
Maybe he’s as bad as everyone says, but I haven’t seen enough actual evidence of that.
Well you have done a pretty good job of focusing on just two of the things he’s been in hot water over, and avoiding all the other evidence that’s out there you haven’t seen. So yeah I wouldn’t want you to jump on a bandwagon without any evidence, but at the same time you’ve explained that you haven’t seen most of the evidence. So I’m not sure what the point of you weighing in here against the people who have seen all the evidence, from a perspective that hasn’t seen the evidence is.
There are hours and hours of video, photo, and written accounts of other events so I’m not just going to recap it all here for you, but it’s all out there for you to find. One of my favorites is when he’s playing another MMO on stream and a dungeon run his party does is ruined by someone accidentally pulling an extra mob. Pirate proceeds to be a huge dick about it. He doesn’t give the person who pulled it the benefit of the doubt like you have to Pirate. At the end of his rant it’s pointed out to him by his own chat that he himself was the one who pulled the mob lol. After which instead of apologizing, he then says he’s not sorry about what he did. He’s so unabashed about his view that only other people make mistakes.
The WoW thing wasn’t about being selfish, it’s just one of a dozen or more incidents of him being a narcissistic bully who screws other people over and can’t take accountability for anything.
And nobody is giving him too much shit for simply being a nepo baby. The Blizzard thing is about him being a fraud who’s been caught repeatedly lying and misleading people about his credentials and work experience in order to appear like an expert. He uses his time at Blizzard like a magic wand to expel criticism, going so far as to misrepresent what he even did at Blizzard to appear like an authority when people criticize him.
The backlash against him has been well earned by bad behavior over a long period of time, most of which involves him treating other people poorly for his own benefit.
The first game is a ton of fun. And seems to have been an 8/10 game. This one is evidently more so and is a 9/10 game. How you get 5/10 from that I’ll never know.
There’s a group with a petition to “Stop Killing Games” which seeks to legally remedy the issue of game developers making games that are later turned off and left unplayable even in the case of them being single player.
Thor of PirateSoftware owns a development outfit that makes indie games and he also does a lot of streams. He’s against Stop Killing Games, but doesn’t seem to even understand it, and has publicly spoke out against it, going so far as to spread misinformation about it.
What about the 92 metacritic score and the vast majority of reviews calling it “better than the first game in every way” makes it look like a 5/10 for you?
I’ve been served PirateSoftware’s shorts long before all this controversy and it always bugged me how confidently wrong he was about systems and network things. He seems to be under the impression that he understands these things on an advanced level due to his experience as a checks notes QA tester for Blizzard, and a… indie software developer lol.
I mean, big YouTubers like Charlie and others covering Thor’s bullshit is what drove this huge spike in signatures so maybe we should be thanking Thor lol
I remember being the lone voice against GamePass and Microsoft buying up all these studios. These idiots kept saying “It’s pro consumer bro! The more studios they buy the better the GamePass value gets bro!” “So many games for one low monthly price! Let’s see greedy Sony do that!”
As if they didn’t live in the same world where Netflix exists. We’ve already seen this bro, it’s a classic. Yeah man it’s great deal now while they desperately need your buy-in. But a few short years later and very predictably we get nothing but layoffs, award winning studios shuttered for no reason, formerly third party games becoming exclusive etc.
I’m no corporate simp for Sony or any other corp out there by any means. But the Microsoft grift was so blatantly, obviously an unsustainable market grab that would inevitably go south and make the industry worse for all of us.