Submitted 2 weeks ago by mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works to games@lemmy.world
As the title suggests, over the last couple of days there’s been an influx of doomer comments over the SKG petition. While it’s fine to disagree, I’m finding it suspicious that there weren’t comments like this posted a week or 2 ago
Are people criticizing it? There is a certain critical mass that when something becomes popular enough a subset of the population will automatically oppose it.
There’s also a threshold where Industry Groups will start astroturfing. Especially when it comes to worker’s rights or consumer’s rights.
It seems like it’s a bit too late now to start astroturfing this though
I don’t find the absence of criticism suspicious. The petition makes sense.
What I do find suspicious is the sudden emergence of criticism now that it looks like it might succeed. I smell astroturfing and media manipulation.
This is exactly my point for the post, though yours is better worded
As the petition got more successful it became a bigger topic on here. Bigger topics draw more opinions.
I don’t find it suspicious. Bring attention to it and it’ll get more votes. Ignore it and it’ll go away.
Now that it’s passed multiple thresholds and is gained a lot of support. They will not try and stop it.
Because it’s about to affect big money so they sic their bots on it to shape public opinion and stomp it, like everything else.
Welcome to the age of bots.
Enjoy your perpetual unavoidable and even undetectable bias and opinion influencing astroturfing.
Paid for by whoever doesn’t want the things that you want, to influence the people around you to bite at each other’s throats and work against their own interests.
This is one of the biggest reasons Reddit has turned to shit.
One year ago, right at the beginning of the petition, PirateSoftware came out misreading the initiative by suggesting the idea the petition was about forcing indie developer to host their server, at their expense, forever and other stupid idea on this line. A fabricated these narrative to act as the typical popular youtubers that say endlessly: “this is st0pid, they are st0pid”. The fabricated narrative confused other popular YouTubers with mixed feelings; and there was very little support. This assured PirateSoftware the first place on the youtube rankings when you search for “stop killing games”, plus had lot of kids brainwashed into thinking " this is st0pid". This kind of criticism never went away completely, the were partially silenced by the very recent roaring as people understood correctly what it was actually about. As SKG keep hitting its milestone the angered roar did lowered, so now you can ear again the “this is st0pid” team
You can swear on the Internet. The same way I can say that I want to spray pepper spray on your private parts. And you can then cry about me because I said the big bad stupid word, so I have to una1iv3 myself.
The same way I can say I want to spray pepper spray on your private parts
That’s assault, dumbass.
I mean, if you wanna KYS because people called you shitty for saying you’re going to do a shitty thing. Then maybe…
There’s always been criticism but until now it’s been low level insiders and nobodies like pirate software. And the reasons the publishers and big names that would be affected did SKGs didn’t say or do anything until now because they didn’t want to give it any oxygen. They were smart enough to ignore it because they knew if they said anything it’d rile up a shift storm. Which is exactly what Pirate Software did so he’s probably got a lot of people on both sides pissed at him for being too narcissistic to shut up and let the movement die.
Now that it has enough signatures to be taken seriously you’re going to see the fire hoses open up and a lot of misinformation spread about how the movement would make the gaming industry unviable for the current model. Now is the point where if you are an EU citizen that you write and call your representatives who would consider this issue and help write the law if it did pass on how important it would be to you personally to not allow game companies to revoke your ability to utilize a game you paid for.
pissed at him for being too narcissistic to shut up and let the movement die.
You’ve got a typo there. What you meant to write was “pissed at him for struggling with managing the symptoms from his narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis too much to shut up and let the movement die.”
You know that someone can act like something without being that thing right? You can say someone is narcissistic without them being an actual narcissist.
Like me saying that you’re stupid shouldn’t imply that you’ve had a traumatic brain injury or were born without a frontal lobe.
Excuse the ignorance, what’s the difference?
Does he actually have a diagnosis or are you making that up or assuming things?
Does anyone else find it suspicious there wasn’t any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures?
Nobody here disagrees with any point of the petition. I signed it. Even if gaming companies were rushing to send shills to raid discussions they would have done it months ago and last places they would go astroturff for is this Kazakhstani anti-whaling forum. Especially when their target now is the Eu bureaucracy and MEPs. Where I might say they have not a bad chance of succeeding.
Kazakhstani
? Is lemmy.world hosted by Borat?
I brlieve it is hosted in Germany. Not sure though.
There was criticism about it every time it’s been brought up. But it’s only been like 5 or 6 people just parroting what some AAA studio’s CEO said about it.
Yeah bit he worked at blizzard, so he knows way more about assaulting co workers than you. Wait what are we talking about?
I believe all that “I worked at blizzard” and “my dad worked at blizzard” turned out to be lies. Even his claims about being a current game dev were based on some vaporware looking shit.
he also used to work for the US Government hacking nuclear sites.
I’ve made some comments critical of how relentlessly PirateSoftware is being harassed and how annoying it is and how distracting from the actual movement it is.
Nothing wrong with the petition itself, and I haven’t noticed any negative astroturfing about it.
PirateSoftware is being harassed for a whole lot more than just his SKG misinformation campaign.
Perhaps, but the most I’ve seen are some tenuous “evidence” about him being a little selfish in WoW, not finishing games, or using his dad’s influence to land a job at Blizzard. Neither of those are particularly bad, and certainly don’t warrant the negative attention he got. It really seems like people are looking for dirt just because they don’t like his position on SKG.
Then again, I didn’t hear about him until he came out against it, and I saw he defended Godot, which is pretty rad. That’s the extent of my knowledge about him, other than the handful of hit pieces against him people posted here once he got negative attention.
I support SKG and don’t think PirateSoftware is a bad dude. I say just let him be, and don’t watch his content if you don’t like it.
Another bot paranoia…
Not every people that disagree with the norm is a bot. The petition got more popular recently, even some news outlet that has nothing to do with games started talking about it in my country in the last week, so has a high chance of a bunch of people that didn’t read much about started to comment with their “protect the billionaires” reaction.
Attention work both ways.
People who were not aware, now are. From all sides.
what right do you have to stop me from killling your games?
Right.
Well certain EU politicians support SKG, so yeah it’s making a lot of corpos uncomfy
I have posts being critical of it from over a year ago. I’d assume most people who have criticism don’t leave a comment because it’ll get you massively downvoted and your inbox will be flooded with angry replies.
What are the criticisms? Genuinely curious, have no idea what problems anyone might have with it, other than some quotes from the Ubisoft exec trying to act like implementing user run servers is borderline impossible
People don’t have problems with SKG. They have problems with reading and/or comprehending what it wants.
In my experience about half the posts about it (since the start) have some dummy saying it’s unreasonable for devs to support games forever.
I don’t understand why there’s such a hyperfocus on petitions. The only thing being attempted is signing petitions in various countries. Every country has declined to do anything and the last hope is the EU parliament which is being treated like some all or nothing final bet. Why just petitions?
Why not directly put pressure on some of the worst offenders like Ubisoft? Lots of people are saying they’re not buying another Ubisoft game again. Cool! Start an official boycott. People who cant sign the EU petition can sign a boycott promise. It wouldn’t be binding or anything but it could create more solidarity around not purchasing their next big release. Companies care about their bottom line.
You know the hate campaign against piratesoftware? Why not do that to the official Ubisoft account instead? They’re the company that is actually causing the problem. You might not like piratesoftware but he’s not the enemy. He hasn’t killed any of his own games. He didn’t make the decision to shut down the Crew. The offical Ubisoft account shouldn’t get to post a single thing without pressure from the movement. Critical memes should be made about the company and shared on social media. The CEO shouldn’t get to speak to an audience without being booed. Companies cave to negative PR all the time.
These things can be done in addition to the petitions. Personally, I don’t think any petitions are going to bring about the change people are looking for. Governments rarely listen to them and the EU isn’t much better. There are just 10 citizens initiatives that have passed and all their responses have been pretty lack luster. Even if the EU enacts the exact laws people are hoping for, what about everywhere else? The idea seems to be that other countries will get trickle down consumer protections. Americans are pushing Europeans to petition the EU parliament to make law changes hoping it will cause American companies to change how they sell products to Americans. It’s just such an odd strategy to me. Again, it can be done, but there’s no reason more direct action can’t be taken in tandem with the petition.
I get lots of downvotes and angry replies for this take which I’m not sure why. I can only assume people don’t like hearing that petitions are largely useless.
I have posts being critical of it from over a year ago.
Not on this account…
Maybe an issue with federation? Heres the link https://lemmy.ca/comment/10932620
No, there was definitely some criticism before. Prior to this month, it wouldn’t be unusual to hear people complain about how it would destroy the live service market and was therefore Bad Actually for games and game preservation
The topic getting much more mainstream just brought all those people with.
The implication that “games as a service” is somehow a positive for game preservation is its own kind of illiteracy.
It makes sense if you are completely consumer-brained and only see it as “companies will make less (live service) games if they are forced to support them/let them be community supported”
so far the only legit critique I’ve seen is the uncertainty of what this will mean to indie devs - will they be forced to sign with publishers who can assist with compliance etc., what will compliance actually look like to small shops, etc.
I will say this: the vast majority of game devs feel the same way and want to be able to play the games we paid for as well. there’s just a bit of fear of the unknown for small devs.
There are a handful of concerns from insiders are that somewhat valid, more or less things to be careful about when trying to sort out how to make this fair and reasonable to both sides.
You can ponder how long from shutdown of an online server until the companies IP is no longer worth anything because they have to give up keys to playing it without subs. Same goes for anti-piracy. If A goes under and is bought up by B, how long is that timer before the assets aren’t worth anything anymore.
But all those concepts get thrown the hell out the window when CEOS stick their fingers in their ears and start stamping their feet and shouting “nothing is written in stone” “at some point the service may be discontinued” “Nothing is eternal” when in fact all those problems can be solved. Fucking tone-deaf asshats. Costs you money, sorry nothing is eternal. Costs them money, ohhh noooo can’t do that it might cost money.
When you launch a title with online requirements, you have to escrow or insure the servers for X months and escrow code. When you sell or fold, you then have X months to work out a new buyer or maintainer. At the end of X months. you either keep the game online through other means (sales) or provide server binaries, serverless binaries, or details/code to keep the game running indefinitely.
Why would they? Most people didn’t know about the petition until a few weeks ago, and I think people are largely knee-jerk supporting their favorite streamer (in this case, PirateSoftware). I don’t think there’s a concerted effort here to kill it, just people coming out of the woodwork now that it got a lot of attention.
This may have killed piratesoftwares career
Perhaps, which I think is really unfortunate. I think he misread or misunderstood what the petition was about, and doubled down instead of taking a step back.
But he’s not going to be making a bunch of accounts on random message boards like Lemmy to try to kill it. The more reasonable argument is that some of his fans and other people who disagree w/ the petition are attacking it, not that he or the games industry cares enough to come here and spread FUD, I think regular people are dumb and emotional enough to do that for them.
Lemmy is way too small and insignificant for Industry Plants to be posting on here about SKG, if that is what you are implying.
Lol you are funny. Propaganda doesn’t come here!
Industry shills will show up on a obscure message board that only a handful of people have ever seen. They are everywhere, they are here.
It’s so stupid to think that small message boards are spared; small boards are where they infest with the most enthusiasm; you infiltrate a hundred small boards, one grows into the mainstream and now you have a socmed in your control.
People have opinions. No everyone disagreeing with one opinion or other is a paid actor.
I’m all for SKG. I signed it. And I haven’t actually seen much criticism at all here. But if someone were to disagree I won’t automatically think it’s a paid actor, probably just a person with an opinion.
Lemmy has 100k users and, more importantly, almost zero countermeasures against botting and influence ops. It would not be some huge undertaking to target this place.
The smaller a community is, the more influence you have. Propaganda here is much more effective than on Reddit
I think suspicious is the wrong word. Suspicious seems to suggest doubt or a lack of certainty, but the criticism is pretty predictable. Industry forces could afford to ignore it when it looked impossible to get the signatures, but now that the signatures are in the bag they’re having to take a different tactic.
SOME of the criticism is certainly genuine and exactly what it appears to be at face value, but it was inevitable that those doubts would be artificially boosted now.
I mean I was critical of it well before it hit 1.4M signatures. As it ramps up in articles about it, I'd assume an increase in negative sentiment in addition to the positive side. Its not a perfect thing and has different viewpoints, so it makes sense.
And what is your argument against the petition? All it says is that developers need to leave their game in some playable state for those who laid for it, with several options offered as examples
Because as you already stated, that's all it says. There is a lot of open interpretation to what that means and not all of it refers to big publishers/devs like EA.
For example, indie games like Objects in Space. It was Early Access and ran into technical issues which led to funding issues as they could only work so long on it. Its broken essentially. But it doesn't matter if the project was beyond their scope of skill or they ran out of money, they would be forced to pay to fix it. This means (and for other indie devs) if not certain their project will succeed, having to block sales in EU. Its potentially the most damaging not to the Ubisoft's and EA's, but to the Flat Earth Games, Bugbytes, ColePowered Games, etc. Its asking new indie developers to take on optional risk by releasing in the EU. Remember no where in the petition does it mention live service games. Only just games.
Additionally, the points brought up in the petition needed to be bullet proof. The moment that petition started to get close to 1M, you know publishers started turning gears to block future legislation. The committee of petitions will verify the petition and then refer it for fact finding. The points needed to be concise for the purpose of the fact finding committee. And they needed to be geared towards the EU acting which around a dozen times now have stated that while concerns are valid, it is up to the member nations to propose legislation on this (which is who the major publishers are reported to have approached - not some EU committee).
I'm still salty about EA's Darkspore (which I might add doesn't mention on the case that internet access is required to play - which I did not have back in the day), but this petition just feels like minimal impact. I would just like to remind people that advocating SKG may feel good but that rarely equates to doing good.
I’m not against the goal. But I have voiced that I don’t think this route/configuration of leadership will work.
I only heard about it once people on Lemmy started talking shit about this pirate guy. I hadn’t heard about him either. So it came on my radar as drama. And I ended up having a rough time sharing my point of view. People are really emotional about this intuitive. They take any criticism as an attack that could harm progress on signatures.
In the end the drama with this pirate dork ended up actually bringing positive attention that helped an otherwise flagging initiative for signatures.
I hope this initiative causes positive change.
I saw it posted on here much before it reached the threshold. I think that before then it was really just a few people running with it, now that it has gotten momentum, more people are sharing and we run in similar circles so it can appear to be overwhelming.
This
So much internet space wasted for mundsnr thing,
Is This petition even automatic to get to the board of European Commission or European leaders?
If not, then it’s waste of time,
Also I have zero knowledge about European Legislation, to be honest so I maybe in wrong
Pretty sure:
Yes, this is a legit thing the EU cares about. However that’s also why I’ve always wondered why they’re soliciting signatures outside the EU…
Didn’t it come out that the people who pushed payroll processors to force studios to censor, have been found out to be a bunch of far right religious extremists who definitely aren’t going to stop here.
The bot farms and clout grasping social climbers don’t care about things until they reqch a certain size.
Not at all.
More attention means more people see it, so even if the percentage of complainers haven’t changed, there are more people who know.
On top of that, there was criticism before. There’s that streamer who was mocked relentlessly, there were articles about game developer lobby groups complaining, etc. But less prominent than now, since it was less of a draw in the news cycle.
Maybe because those of us saying it probably wouldn’t lead to much meaningful change got downvoted to shit.
Maybe he meant me? (Thank god karma doesn’t exist here)
I just wrote a comment on how it’s interesting from a philosophical angle that we’re willing to petition the preservation of our distractions but not the thing we need ever more distraction from.
Don’t bother with downvoting, your brothers and sisters already nailed me to the cross, covered me in tar and dragged me through 30km of molten lava.
I haven’t changed my mind.
Not a single person I know has significantly changed their behaviour due to the climate emergency. Imagine if we had this kind of rallying support to put an end to fossil fuels tomorrow.
But that doesn’t directly benefit anyone
It’s interesting, but it’s also completely unrelated aside from a larger discussion about what people can spend their time and energy on? The obvious answer is “people can care about more than one thing” and the secondary response is about how this initiative is easy to participate in compared to limiting climate change. If you could just sign an online petition to limit the effects of climate change I am quite certain it would get just as much or more support… so false equivalency/over exaggeration of what “this kind of rallying support” is
The vast majority of people are not contributing significantly to climate change compared to the big players like the oil and gas industries and the big moving industries.
If you want to make for effective change, stop whining like a street corner crazy picketer and push against those actually doing most of the polluting.
See that sounds like a good counter argument on the surface but it is very flawed.
By just blaming big corporations and pointing the finger, your missing two important factors:
As much as I like blaming big corporations, we got here (and every point in human history before us) because of what the masses did or neglected to do.
So as inconvenient as it must be, until we pop out of this us vs them, the corporation expected lifespans can be centuries, human’s are finite, and if you keep that whataboutism alive, will get a lot shorter soon.
Maybe not specifically this comm, but I had been sporadically arguing with people on various places on lemmy about SKG before Ross even droppes his 'SKG is probably dead, video that (re)ignited this whole thing.
A whole, whole lot of people I talked to basically had the same talking points Thor initially did, a lot of them were dedicated to various facts that were simply wrong, rhetoric that was either bipolar/hypocritical, or just ultimately nihlist (nothing can be done).
I was actually very relieved, initially, when Ross made above mentioned video, simply so I would no longer have to keep explaining all the various intricacies… Ross had addresed all this stuff before, but you’d have to watch about 2 or 3 hours of videos to truly get it, in all its detail.
The ‘SKG is probably dead’ video did a good job of doing both a broad overview, as well as going into detail with the more common, in-depth misunderstandings… which were pretty much all popularized by Thor.
I made some critical posts about it several months ago. It was exhausting. So I stopped. Haven’t changed my position though.
MisterNeon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I haven’t seen anyone here against it.
Ross got hit with some anonymous legal complaint so I wouldn’t be surprised with astroturfing.
I’m also an American so I can’t help.
dinckelman@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The entire complaint was based on nothing too. They claimed he’s orchestrating some crazy financial scheme, and getting paid 6 digits from it, when he’s not only doing it for free, but can’t even participate in the initiative to begin with
AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If he helps bump the gaming industry in a better/healthier direction, he deserves 6 figures imo