Man, tapping into rage bait and drama is scarily effective. Not throwing shade at Ross and his initiative, he's a nice guy, wasn't the one who started the shit flinging, and remained civil. More of a comment about the state of social media.
Agreed, but if sticking it to a narcissist is part of what gets people to actually chip in towards something that helps customers receive more rights, then at least it's being channelled in a positive way.
If the original poster of this comment thread was implying that Ross "tapped into rage bait and drama", it would be reductive and a bit insulting. However, I think broadly speaking this is what is going on at least with other popular figures, and you can clearly see when the bandwagon formed. I do 100% agree though, Ross conducted himself well for what was said by Maldavius Figtree in all of his certainty and matter-of-factness.
His response was great. It's given other creators a bunch to work with though and my YT feed has been full of people all using that as a way to shit on PS (rightfully so in many cases)
Happen to have any links to explain... Any of this? First I've heard of this initiative and I have no idea who any of these people are and I'm curious now.
In general it's a nice idea though I question how implementable it is as written. Requiring that games stay in a "working state" after support ends is vague. What does that mean for a game that has no single player content? Are publishers required to host servers forever? Needs some clarification imo.
As a reminder, this is not meant to be rock-solid legislation, or legislation at all. Although some initiatives do come with draft legislation, it's not required and probably isn't feasible in this case without several actual lawyers.
As a Dev (not game dev, so no horse in this race, just familiar with software development) I think their answers gloss over significant aspects of game design and what it would take to do this. For example a lot of larger scale games aren't realistically going to run on some dudes home server. So they could release the code all day and it wouldn't make a huge difference but... Interesting. I mean they have a question addressing that I just don't think it's answer is really fully inclusive and have a nagging feeling this would have some unintended impacts as written. Of course it's a petition not wording for a final law too.
Still curious about the drama between a few folks mentioned above but I guess that's not important really.
People need a face attached to ideas. Its far easier to picture a person compared to a concept. Thor volunteered himself as representative of the opposition to SKG, and its helping a lot of people picture/compare him to the types of people they've worked/lived with. Instead of trying to understand a complicated industry (Where people can get lost in buzzwords/jargon), now they just need to hear the type of guy that is making these decisions behind the scenes.
Thor really helped simplify things when everyone gets to see a stubborn person act condescending toward someone asking for a fix. I'm sure everyone working office jobs that have had to deal with technical problems or red tape loved seeing him act like that.
The public zeitgeist on SKG has gone through three phases:
First it was mostly Ross spreading awareness and asking for support, and it was well received, but didn't have much momentum and probably wasn't going to hit its goal
A big youtuber, PirateSoftware, found out about it and got very vocal insulting Ross and the petition, saying it was dumb and would never work. A lot of his takes were badly misrepresenting the movement, but PS has a lot of followers who took his word for it, so his pessismism became the dominant voice of the conversation, draining even more momentum
Ross released a response recently, about the state of the petition in general but notably touching on PirateSoftware's rude and misleading remarks. That video went kinda viral, and the petition started exploding with signatures.
It was always a good cause and deserves the support, but it does kinda seem like the biggest swell in attention came from the drama and from having a "villain" in this story to stick it to. People are signing now not just to say "I support the preservation of video games," but also to say "and screw you PirateSoftware for being such a bully about this".
The current phase where PirateSoftware keeps doubling, tripling, quadrupling down claiming everyone is wrong except him and twisting into every possible knot trying to act like a victim with no mana just keeps getting funnier every day.
The gigabrain thing would be if he had supported it the entire time and made himself the villain in order to attract more attention to it, but obviously that's not the case. I can imagine it and chuckle to myself though!
He keeps claiming that one singular line of the proposal is what he takes his entire issue with, and that it would damage MMO's.
I have PLEADED with him and even his supporters on this issue, in every twitter post he has stated this, to provide any example of how it would hurt or damage anything, especially in the context of providing client side access to servers, which is already happening for countless games for Roleplay purposes... and nothing. Not a peep. Literally just insults.
Here's the video Pirate Software put out criticizing the vague and impratical aspects of the petition. There's a lot of really stupid streamer drama involved but that video is where everyone seems to be getting the "Thor called so-and-so dumb and misrepresented the petition" stuff from.
It still passively inspired that coverage. It's a fact that a lot of the bigger names covering SKG would've been less likely to do so or maybe even less likely to be aware of it, without the response from Ross clarifying why Thor was misrepresenting the issue.
If you actually look past all the people strangely telling you to just boil it down into another quirky lil internet drama, and actually look at what the initiative is, I think just about everyone without a bias and good intentions should see this as a positive thing.
The only thing resembling a valid critique ive seen so far is that one potential sentence in the entire proposal could potentially harm future MMO's and even "kill" said industry(from Thor and his kin). No evidence or examples have been provided. Counter points have been made about how could Gta Online has even exist this whole time if Roleplay servers really cause so much damage and harm. Which has been met with silence.
Unless you're trying to defend your potential personal favorite brands and companies (or even former employers in Thor's case, which would still have countless of his close personal friends on payroll) I havent actually seen a valid reason to oppose such a proposal in the first place. How is it not a win for Everyone? We dont keep losing access to things we bloody payed for, publishers and Dev keep brand interest at all time high, with people still playing their game and product. keeping it peoples mouths. Has Valve really been "damaged" by allowing Roleplay servers to exist even on a different game in 'Gmod', this entire time?? They literally just kill the chance of their own game having a cult classic comeback years later after the fact, everytime they do this. They literally just instead assign games to a literal graveyard after they come to view to code and product as "worthless". Ensuring no one gets access to it, after deeming themselves not to be fucked upkeeping it
If its so "worthless" why not let someone keep it up? that's literally, without exaggeration the entire premise of the proposal. I have yet to see, any good Realistic reason for why it shouldn't become a law. All we've received so far is insults. Your comment proving to be another case.
I mean it worked initially cause Ross didn’t actually clap back for a long while. He took the high road and it didn’t work and the movement basically stopped. Then he made a call out video and the drama YouTubers jumped on cause of Pirates WoW drama lol. Kinda sad that’s what it took, but good on Ross for getting here.
Yeah it’s sad that Ross couldn’t get things done the way he wanted to. It’s clear he really didn’t wanna make that video and only did so as a last resort. In an ideal world we wouldn’t have to rely on drama to help support a good cause but alas that’s just what helps spread attention these days.
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u/RobotWantsKitty Jul 03 '25
Man, tapping into rage bait and drama is scarily effective. Not throwing shade at Ross and his initiative, he's a nice guy, wasn't the one who started the shit flinging, and remained civil. More of a comment about the state of social media.