This guy is such a dumbass and so arrogant that he can’t fathom he could be wrong with anything. I watched his stuff when he exploded thanks to YouTube shorts, but quickly changed my view of him. If you ever worked with a know it all but not really type of guy, you see through their BS early.
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You truly believe piratesoftware is the only reason a million Europeans didn't sign a petition on game preservation? You truly believe, if not for him, the EU would have passed legislation to regulate the video games industry. You might as well be mad at Gawr Gura for increasing the price of rice in Japan.
He spawned a bunch of misinformation that people are repeating to this day every time the petition is mentioned. He was by far the largest negative influence on the campaign. Even if it was always doomed to fail, who would you have OP clown on if not him?
I was pointing out elsewhere that I hadn't heard of this guy before today, but Chet Faliszek, who you may know from indie hits like... let's see... Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2 and Portal 2, seems to not be on board for very similar reasons.
https://bsky.app/profile/chetsucks.com/post/3lsd7rsd3j22n https://bsky.app/profile/chetsucks.com/post/3lsf4vxbtls2p
I don't fully agree with either of them, but targeting a specific guy just because he happens to be the one that got into a call/response thread with the figurehead of the thing you support is pretty toxic interneting, and I don't like it.
he happens to be the one that got into a call/response thread with the figurehead of the thing you support is pretty toxic
Ross specifically didn't engage with him beyond a comment politely informing him of his mistakes and misunderstandings because he was rude and hostile from the very beginning.
I wouldn't condone harassing him about this. He didn't directly engage with Ross either, so we can both respectfully keep our internet bickering separate.
I don't fully agree with either of them,
And you shouldn't. While his resume sounds impressive and I'm sure he knows way more about game dev than I ever could, he too is plain wrong here. He approaches the initiative as "this could never work in the current landscape" while the whole point of the legislation would be to legally obligate changing that landscape, or not sell in the EU. This is how iphones got USB-C, so why couldn't it work here?
Edit: I meant Ross didn't engage with him before this as he obviously threw some hands in the latest video
Because local servers and plugs aren't the same thing.
I think this whole conversation is mixing two types of disagreements and is going to end poorly for that reason.
One disagreement is technical: can developers provide communities with a safe, functional iteration of their servers to deploy freely in such a way that discontinued games continue to operate?
The answer is "probably not". The devs speaking out aren't wrong about this. This requires rebuilding the entire concept of server architecture for games and centralized servers. Not only are older games probably unsalvageable for that process, but any game that is buying online services would be priced out and you'd end up with only the largest publishers being able to afford basic features like, say, matchmaking.
The other is of design philosophy: is it okay for live service games to exist in their current form, where they run for a bit of time and then, at the sole discretion of the IP owners, they go away with no recourse to ever run them again in any form, ever. Are we cool with that?
I am not. Some of these devs seem to be. I mean, they'd love if there was an alternative, but if the choice is between getting to have MMOs and quirky massive shooters they would rather keep the space deregulated and creatively available than restrict it.
The first one isn't much of a matter of opinion, but there are intermediate steps that can be taken. But because a bunch of people are disagreeing on the second issue with people who a) know a lot more than they do about the first disagreement, and b) aren't particularly inclined to meet them halfway on the second, we end up with this bit of entrenched online drama where ignorance, activism and disagreement is quickly becoming toxic.
I don't have an answer for this, other than maybe... please stop? That'd be nice.
I think the discussion about preservation of live games and consumer rights in server-based games needs to be had. But it needs to be mature and educated. The more the collapse of this petition turns into shitty, petty arguments full of disingenuous misrepresentations and misinformation (on both sides) the more inclined I am to say let it all die and maybe try again with a better understanding of what's being discussed, from scratch.
One disagreement is technical: can developers provide communities with a safe, functional iteration of their servers to deploy freely in such a way that discontinued games continue to operate?
The answer is "probably not". The devs speaking out aren't wrong about this. This requires rebuilding the entire concept of server architecture for games and centralized servers. Not only are older games probably unsalvageable for that process, but any game that is buying online services would be priced out and you'd end up with only the largest publishers being able to afford basic features like, say, matchmaking.
I think a lot of the devs speaking out are missing the forest for the trees.
There are unquestionably technical challenges involved in having to release the server software for games. These aren't the days of Team Fortress 2, and a lot of multiplayer games require clusters and massive tech stacks to handle authentication, persistent storage, and cross play. Add on to that legal challenges like licensing of third-party software, and yeah, it's nearly impossible for a publisher to just release source code or an executable file for the server software.
Multi-player games being killed is an issue, but it's not the big issue that preservationists and consumers care about. The big issue is single player games being designed with the requirement that they connect to publisher servers for activation or for some multi-player component, then the publishers shut down the server and render the entire game inoperable. For example, I have an old CD copy of Bioshock for PC (a completely single player game) that I can't do fuck-all with unless I crack it, because it's tied to Games for Windows Live.
It's not reasonable to expect a developer to make their proprietary server code available after a game reaches end of life, and I absolutely agree with the devs on that point. It's more than reasonable to expect a developer to not be allowed to lock the entire game behind a limited-life service that isn't strictly required for it to be a playable game.
These aren't the days of Team Fortress 2, and a lot of multiplayer games require clusters and massive tech stacks to handle authentication, persistent storage, and cross play.
With the exception of cross play, those are all only problems due to the massive scale of active and total players.
All of these things are already somewhat modular and very scalable in implementation, by very, very intentional design.
So... running a rented VPS or decently beefy home server that is just geared toward handling a much, muuuuch smaller total player count, with just one of every required module, instead of being networked to 5,000 other server units dispersed around the globe?
Totally feasible.
In fact, its often the case the scalability solution is the major 3rd party liscensed thing that causes this legal headache.
Just design a basic non scaling model that works for a lower player count with a simple dedi server model.
This is actually remarkably easier and more simple to code than what the industry does now... if you've ever run or coded any servers.
Have you ever run any dedicated private game servers, have you ever managed a remote server cluster/cloud/whatevercorpobuzzword?
I have!
Sure, matchmaking wouldn't work as well, because your smaller server set up / instance could only handle a smaller number of players... but its not like the code just magically doesn't work at all unless it is massively scaled.
In fact, all matchmaking fundamentally is, is finding an empty dedicated server, and then populating it with players who are in a queue, by some obscenely complex skill based matchmaking algorithm, and also trying to minimize total ping for the player roster it generates.
Or maybe its using one of the client's rigs as the actual host, etc.
Just take these parts out, and expose the more fundamental stuff that everything else is built off of, on your final patch. Make the new paradigm such that this fallback EoL scenario is accepted as a given from the start, and design the rest of everything with that in mind.
I will give you that uh, yeah, crossplay on consoles?
Thats almost certainly not feasible for post EoL games, as its just directly reliant on a Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo or whatever server at some point, and they're not gonna run a server in that situation.
Add on to that legal challenges like licensing of third-party software, and yeah, it's nearly impossible for a publisher to just release source code or an executable file for the server software.
So... the whole point is to make a new paradigm for things moving forward. Not retroactive.
Yes, it would potentially be unduly onerous to just suddenly demand all current games need to re-architect themselves before EoL.
But this isn't what SKG is advocating for. Its advocating for a new standard that applies to new games, such that they can be designed with this all in mind from the get go, and make it more like disabling/removing and swapping out some modules than rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up.
Think of it as having a spare tire and a jackstand in your car before you go on a roadtrip, where you know that one day, one of your tires is gonna blow.
Yep, the game company has to slightly alter the way they do things, have a clear, EoL contingency plan in mind from day one, ready to execute when their balding tire finally gives out.
But this really isn't that difficult or costly to implement at all. Its basically just an emergency fallback plan, which is very, very common in the brosder server hosting industry.
Also uh, obviously they won't release the source code. That would indeed be an insane legal/financial nightmare.
But... a compiled binary for a server?
That's gotten a final update that strips out what they don't directly own? Because the whole game was designed with that inevitabity in mind?
Thats ... completely legally not a problem for game publishers.
There are already tons of laws that punish people who decompile and then distribute or profit off of that, that's been a thing for longer than I've been alive.
It used to be the norm to just release dedicated server binaries for many games, usually shortly after the release of the game, way before support ended... so that people could host their own servers.
Like, by the logic of what you are worried about... Valve should be worried about my CD version of Half Life 2, because it uses a liscensed version of the Havok engine that they built off of to make the physics in the Source engine.
Uh yeah, if I somehow decompiled the Source engine and its Havok code, and then freely distributed that or built something with it I sold for money, I'd get sued into ~~oblivion~~ Xen.
It's not reasonable to expect a developer to make their proprietary server code available after a game reaches end of life.
Nah, it absolutely is, this was the standard norm for the vast majority of games until the new industry norm became games as service, always online.
They intentionally introduced this new paradigm that fucks consumers, the old paradigm of releasing server tools often even before EoL worked fine, they just got greedy.
With all due respect to Chet...
Dude is a writer.
He writes plots, and character dialogue, and storylines.
Not code.
Certainly not server or networking code.
He's waaay out of his element on this.
Also, he is misrepresenting and strawmanning the fuck out of Ross!
Ross did not at any point say that 'All server code needs to be able to run on PS5s'.
Ross did not at any point say that 'the server and client should be the same thing'.
He instead gives a very technical and detailed breakdown of what he is proposing, which either flew right over Chris's head, or Chris is just intentionally strawmanning him, taking a picture that has a PS5 in it and cherry picking and decontextualizing what Ross actually said, such that it might make sense to a twitter brained idiot that believes whatever their favorite person says without even looking at the other side of the argument.
All of the complex legal and usage rights that Chet just implies Ross greatly misunderstands or didn't mention at all, and isn't considering?
Yeah, Ross gave a detailed explanation about how the whole fucking point of this is to redefine the legal and financial landscape and rules around this currently existing paradigm/framework regarding how servers and liscensing work, so that future games are still capable of being produced, still capable of being quite profitable...
...but in a way that game studios/publishers that want to make a fully online only game have to make just a teensy weensy bit less profit off of their MTX money printing machines, and spend a bit of it on making it possible to EoL release some server code that other people could theoretically run, if they wanted to foot the server hosting costs on their own.
...
Here's the goddamned timestamp Chet didn't even link to:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HIfRLujXtUo&t=2231
Watch this and tell me if Ross even approaches the same universe as saying 'PS5s need to be able to run servers' or 'the client and server should be the same thing'.
He throws out 'maybe we should make a regulation that says an EOL online game needs to be mandated to be runnable on consumer hardware'.
And then temporarily includes a PC and a PS5 in his diagram.
And then immediately says, 'but hey, if thats not doable because of hardware limitations, then maybe another option could be to still mandate release of server code, but with specific hardware requirements.'
As in, you know, a PC or Server Rack or rented VPS server with X amount of total processing power, memory and storage, minimum specs.
Which is what every dedicated server or more complex system for any game on the goddamned planet is currently and/or has ever run on.
...
Also, you literally can run a server on a PlayStation!!!
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/10/turning-the-ps4-into-a-useful-linux-machine/
Tada! Linux Distro for a PS4, supports NGINX, and with modern Proton and WINE, you could run a whole lot of dedicated servers that only even have Windows binaries for at least older games on one.
I'm sure we all remember the clusters of PS3s being used to create a sort of poor man's supercomputer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
In case this is news to anyone... those PS3s... they're networked, together, to be able to distribute compute loads intelligently and efficiently.
You know, like servers.
...
For the love of god, people need to stop having 'technical' opinions on this issue if you're not even going to bother to actually listen to both sides of the argument, especially if you don't actually know anything about the tech that's involved.
Watch the entire video.
This is a very complex and detailed topic, and if you are only getting your info on it from fucking tweets and youtube shorts, you are misinformed by definition.
Some things are actually so complicated that they cannot be easily explained or understood in under 1000 words.
Its very, very clear to me that every single prominent 'reputable' critic of Ross has absolutely no experience with actually running and maintaining server clusters, nor developing and implementing any actual code that makes any of that shit work... and then they expand out of their domain of expertise and give 'expert commentary', like a fucking new nurse with an associates degree deciding they actually know how to perform a brain surgery.
Nothing Ross is proposing is fundamentally impossible, it is in fact quite reasonable, and he freely admits when he is venturing beyond his own expertise, unlike everyone else criticizing him.
I repeat, there is nothing technically impossible or unduly financially onerous to game publishers to what Ross is proposing.
The proposed reforms are a very complex legal issue, and Ross is totally open to varying degrees of specific, exact details of what game publishers would have options to do.
Its not going to be some retroactive thing that applies to every game that has ever existed, it would be new guidelines going forward that make the playing field just a bit more tipped in the direction of not totally fucking end users, by forcing new server architectures to adhere to be a bit more modular in design... which again, is completely doable and possible, there are already all kinds of different server stack configurations for all kinds of other large scale networks.
...
Nobody is demanding 'release all your proprietary source code!'
Nobody is demanding 'keep paying liscensing fees for some server component of a game you don't support anymore, forever!'
They're saying:
Build new games in such a way that, when they EoL sunset, you can withdraw those modules and release a closed source, proprietary server hosting solution, such that if a group of enthusiast players wanted to host their own standup, funding it out of their own pockets, not legally allowed any rights to the IP, not allowed to substantially modify that released server code, not to expect any ongoing support whatsoever... to just be able to run the damn server.
...
I can, right now if I wanted to, find the server exe for Battlefield 1942, and standup and host a server for it, and people would be able to use it.
https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/1000-battlefield-1942-windows-standalone-server-1619/
There it is, right there.
This used to be the norm.
I could make my own mod for BF42 that is capable of overriding a specific player's specific kit, to give them a different primary weapon, and I could hook that into my server, and also a mysql or postgres database that keeps track of which players actually have access to the fancy gun, going by the same system a server admin has to ban or unban players.
heck, i think i could also password protect the server, and basically use an id system of all players having their own unique password to id them, intercept the inputted password when it hits the server, have a script that checks that against the list of player passwords, send the actual game server password back to the server to let the player in, and then also now my game mod and sql db know what this player has for weapon upgrades.
While it would be more complex to achieve this with a more modern game... nothing makes this fundamentally impossible with a more complex modern game, other than lazy, in reality, almost certainly contracted out, server architecture.
Studios used to actually... you know, be largely defined by their engine, their netcode, their inhouse shit. Now everything is contracted middlemen, and people can no longer conceive of doing it any other way.
...
You just have to offer companies, companies that are all absurdly wealthy, some kind of incentive trade off structure:
- Adhere to new design and legal guidelines such that when you go EoL, your game gets its last patch, and a black boxxed, 3rd party, unmaintainable deoendencies stripped out server binary is released, such that it is at least even theoretically possible for some other group that is footing their own server hosting costs can at least run a mostly fully featured, but much smaller in total simultaneously supported player count version of the server...
or, 2) If you don't put what would be a tiny, tiny financial amount of effort into doing this, well, now you have to refund some defined set of MTX purchases to players that have now just poofed out of fucking existence.
You can get more complicated with all the various technicalities of this, but something approximating that would work.
...
And yes, this means Free to Play games that are entirely funded by MTX stop being a viable business model if they can't figure out a way to release a usable server model alongside either a sanitized and properly encrypted/obsfuscated and PII/financial data stipped out version of their entire player database so that people can actually keep their digital items...
Or, just develop a kind of giant passkey, UID-like constructor/deconstructor system that encapsulates every possibly variable item or level or ability or attribute they have, and is then encrypted and decrypted by client and server, and provide these keys to every player ... like a CD Key, or ... any moderately complex website with a bunch of possibly varying input request parameters for filling out some kind of multi field form input.
But more to the point, if this is somehow too harmful to the F2P business model?
(which it shouldn't be unless your dev team has no actually competent coders
GOOD.
They are a fucking evil scourge that massively exploit and cause psychological harm to almost entirely children, and they are basically always trash tier games anyway with disgustingly toxic plauerbases.
Switch over to an MMO style recurring subscription model of whatever $$$s a month, have an upfront cost if you want to, and maybe start making more of your in-game new content actually reasonably obtainable by actually playing the game.
...
Thank you for attending my TED~~Talk~~Rant.
I'm sorry to say that I have not and will not be attending that TED Talk. I've already done way more homework for this piece of online drama than anybody should, I'm not reading, dismantling and responding to an essay this fine evening.
At a glance, while I do agree that Faliszek is deliberately ignoring some elements of the argument, but I saw the whole video. The way Scott presents the argument, even acknowledging that he argues that server code may need a dedicated server beyond the capabilities of end users, is just not feasible.
This wall of text seems to just go back to the usual talking points of "in my day servers didn't need matchmaking" and "let F2P die", at which point it's just resetting the argument loop, in that the other side of the argument just goes "but I like F2P games", and we're back to the start.
Why is it not feasible? This is simply bullshit. If a company can do it the end user can do it as well. Even if they needed a thousand servers with 5090s to run the application it would still be a way to do it.
And nobody is saying that this would be the requirement. The requirement is "to keep it in a playable state". How they achieve that is up to them.
This person is a lost cause.
If someone is short an succinct, they write a wall of text with a million questions
If you reply to them with a wall of text that actually answers their gish gallop of questions, they say you are not succinct enough and won't be reading any of it.
Go look at my exchange with them.
This is an overconfident ideological troll who has never run or developed any kind server or networked anything, has no actual career experience in the kinds of large companies to understand how they actually make business decisions around such stuff.
Considering any Valve game that came out after Half-Life 1 as an "indie game" is just... Wrong. Also mentioning a writer who talks out of his ass about programming stuff is just... Stupid.
Nevermind the fact that they have everything to gain from people buying their games as much as possible of course they’re gonna be against skg. If they kill their games they can sell more
who would you have OP clown on if not him?
Nobody? Why start a hate campaign against a person because a petition didn't get enough signatures? The vast majority of petitions don't get enough signatures. It's nobody's fault. Stuff like this just makes me think supporters of SKG are entitled man children.
Why start a hate campaign against a person because a petition didn't get enough signatures?
That's not the reason why people dunk on him. He actively sabotaged the petition by misrepresenting it and lying about it.
Again, you truly believe his video is the only reason a million Europeans did not sign this petition? If he did not release the video, the petition would have all the signatures and the EU parliment would be enacting regulations to preserve video games? You honestly think that?
Why start a hate campaign against a person because a petition didn't get enough signatures?
A single meme or people complaining under articles isn't a hate campaign. And he was hostile and rude enough right from beginning to earn some clowning.
Truth is that most people don’t really care about this. Game preservation is niche. This petition failed because there isn’t enough interest.
The type of people that would watch videos about this are also the type of people that are already invested in this topic. People that didn’t sign the petition are people that don’t even know, or care, about this.
That said, piratesoftware did misrepresent the movement, and I’ll take that into account if someday one of his videos pops up in my feed
Everyone is too busy getting in their "Pirate Software bad" to actually give a shit about the Initiative.
Can anyone name someone of consequence from the EU that has talked about SGK? I genuinely want to know. SKG is a good thing that seemingly only people in the US and Canada seem to care to rally their audiences for.
When will Gawr Gura address these allegations?
I only learned of the petition, because of the backlash to piratesoftware. Which obviously means if it succeeds it's due to them!
He’s literally an industry plant. In the most literal sense
I didn't even know who this person was. So, after reading some comments:
- Goes by thor/pirate software on youtube, has a channel and also streams
- Is a narcissistic asshole who cannot be wrong, ever
- Apparently has developed some games, including one "impossible to pirate"
- Was respected until he decided to talk bullshit about Stop Killing Games (that's the SKG), dunking on Louis Rossman
- Already had some pretty shitty takes before that
I’ve also seen it said that he is “my uncle works at Nintendo” credentials personified. But I can’t be assed to verify it. Just another streamer people shouldn’t even know the name of to me
He used to work at Blizzard.
He caught flak for something that happened while streaming hardcore WoW. People accused him of not using frost magic to help others escape a botched raid. A lot of people made jokes "what you fail to understand is that Thor didn't need to cast Blizzard because he worked there for 8 years."
His dad was a blizzard legend, he isn't.
Thanks for the recommendaion to block this shit goblin.
And apparently he played a match if WoW where he goofed up and let a bunch of his team mates die and then got defensive about it to a foolish degree when called out instead of just saying yeah I made a mistake and laughing it off
My sister watches this Thor dude, and I don't know why because the guy is an insufferable jackass. I absolutely hate hearing his stupid fucking voice, bitching about the stupidest shit for the stupidest reasons. Hell, I don't even want to play his games because I constantly hear the stupid bullshit he does just to stop the players he doesn't like from having fun since they are playing his game "wrong." Not breaking rules, just not playing the way he thinks they should.
The first pirate software video I saw, was claiming he made an unpiratable game because it used Steam achievements to track progress.
I'm no expert, but I think that if it wasn't pirated, it's just cause the pirates didn't give a damn. And it sounds like it could cause a lot of problems like bad syncing, or making the game unreplayable w/o steam achievement manager.
Also, if the game isnt exactly something like oneshot where you literally only have one shot, steam achievements are just totally stupid since you cant replay the game
Also you cant even really save gamedata on there, only your progress
Surely making a local only implementation for tracking Steam achievements is about as hard as cracking some DRM?
There's literally tools to arbitrarily set and change Steam achievements
This dude often has super good takes.
This dude often has deeply misinformed takes.
This dude often doubles down on misinformed takes.
Stop being drawn to confidence.
I like him for being bold and more often right than he is wrong.
I wish he were more philosophical and open to being wrong.
I wish that ideal of him could positively affect all of the gaming community and wider society.
He is often wrong and uses his following to bully people. Then it turns out his following is shit at games and gets them killed on sight ingame for it, so he quits the game leaving a guild of a few thousands of people that is at war with everyone else.
The dude is an egomaniac that thinks he is smarter than other people.
Ngl, I fell for the PirateSoftware take as well. I would not be surprised if others did because of how respected he is in the gaming sphere.
how respected he was.
...
Untill he had his bass ackwards, factually wrong take on Stop Killing Games, because he watched a few minutes of a couple of Ross's vids, and then proceeded to draw a bunch of wild conclusions, all on his own, that yes would have been bad if they were actually true... but they weren't.
Ross had previously gone into much more detail about the things Pirate was confidently saying would happen... and Ross had come up with nuanced and detailed solutions that would not result in the situations Pirate just pulled out of his ass.
What is worse is that some of the things Pirate was worried about happening... some of these alternative solutions were explained by Ross... in videos Pirate was actually clipping to make his SKG response video.
So... in addition to not watching all of Ross's relevant videos... he also either did not actually watch the entirety of the videos he used in his response...
Or, he massively cherry picked what he responded to, knee jerk built entire narratives on the fly without all the relevant context, and then just pretended his initial take was 100% accurate and correct despite knowing he was strawmanning Ross and SKG.
So yeah that's a massively disingenuous and badfaith approach to formulating opinions.
...
Untill he joined a hardcore permadeath WoW clan, and fucked up his casting order, wasted mana unnecessarily by using an overpowered spell to kill a random ad, had enough mana to at least cast a minor paralysis or slow effect to aid an ally who was vocalizing a need for help...
... and he instead just curtly says something to the effect of 'bail' or 'retreat', despite not being the actual shot caller, then runs very far away, telling everyone that he has no mana (which was a lie), proceeds to derogatorily explain that spells have cool downs and mana takes time to recharge, he told them to leave, so its their fault that half of them are now permadead.
He fucked up, panicked, made his own decision to retreat, confidently gaslighting the fuck out of everyone else and blaming the entire mishap on everyone else.
This was all livestreamed, by Pirate, and a good number of people have reviewed this, taken it frame by frame, and concluded he is in fact a narcissistic, lying asshole and a coward.
...
Untill people finally fucking realized that this 'indie game dev' doesn't actually do hardly any game development, and constantly lies about how much game development he does and how much progress he is making...
... because what he actually is is a livestreamer who livestreams nearly fucking constantly.
...
Pirate/Thor is the epitome of your dark triad type personality, he is narcissistic and never wrong unless he sociopathically calculates that he really, really actually has to apologize or defuse some particular bullshit he's done that too many people are aware of with too much evidence and certainty, he is extremely proficient at basically being a cocky asshole who is always the coolest most talented and knowledgeable snd infallible guy in the room.
And these examples I've just given don't even go into half of the other shit out there, including a whole arc of it being discovered that he kinda sorta has a long history and pattern of manipulating people into doing a fuck ton of work for him, and him making most of the money in a bullshit 'partnership' that doesn't really even need to exist because he does basically nothing... to the point that many people say that whole thing actually qualified as grooming, in at least some sense.
The dude is your stereotypical Type A, aggressively manipulative Alpha chad dudebro techbro you'd find in any position of authority at a large software/gaming firm... but because he didn't last long at the one he used to worked for, well now he's actual a genius maverick underdog indie dev!
The dude is a maniacal sociopath and basically a fraud, who, like many other charlatans, is able to gain a following because he is:
-
charismatic and confident, pretty decent looking for a dude, and also has a deeper voice...
-
has a basic to intermediate knowledge level of much of the gaming industry and game development... which easily convinces a bunch of people who think they know how games work, or like to imagine themselves as people who know how games work... but in actuality know almost nothing.
I hate to fall back to gendered stereotypes, but he is the male version of the queen of the cliquey and fashionable and better than you girls in high school.
He does exactly the same bullshit but flipped over into the male videogame nerddom space, wooing the insecure, edgy, gamer boy nerds with overly confident and just technical enough hot takes on game design and the business aspects of game development.
... ... ...
EDIT:
Ok, so... this whole thing with Thor has now just completely blown up, and basically, nearly every single videogame adjacent commentator on youtube is very, very displeased with Thor, as more and more people have seen Ross's counter to all his bullshit.
And, as I said he would... he has now sociopathically determined that he has yet again done something waaaay too bullshit, that waaay too many people have receipts on, for him to continue being entirely cocky and arrogant...
And is now psuedo backpedalling with... statements that resemble admitting he may have gone a bit too far in some specific aspects or that his tone was too harsh...
..., but largely adamantly remaining steadfast in that he has 'valid concerns', continues to reframe aspects of this by leaving out very crucial context, and cast himself as a victim, throw out more red herring statements to try to point out inconsequential, minor factual flaws in some particular person's critique of him, and then act like that represents the mainstay of why people are angry with him....
... all while making just tons of statements that contradict previous, relatively recent statements of his, with no acknowledgement whatsoever that the primary problem is that he just makes up bullshit on the fly constantly, and has no consistent, stable, understanding of any of this...
...no fundamental apology for or explanation of or even acknowledgement that he has changed a stance because he determined he was wrong, that he's sorry for being confusing and contradictory, that he now realizes he has no clue what he is talking about.
He knows that if he just actually admits his whole 'i know stuff about games, actually' public persona collapses, his career and basically public life is over.
He doesn't actually care at all about being internally consistent or factually correct, but he knows he is addicted to attention and praise, and those things will go away if he just flat out admits defeat.
This is a narcissistic sociopath self imploding, very publically, under the weight of their galactic levels of hypocrisy, cruelty, pettiness and attention seeking behavior.
I suggest popcorn.
...
In other news, in the last roughly 24 to 48 hrs... the EU SKG initiative has gotten about 50k more signatures... vastly more than the trickle it had died down to... basically every video game adjacent youtuber is both tearing apart Thor's bullshit, and begging any of their EU/UK viewers to sign the petition.
Maybe, just maybe, this momentum can be sustained sufficiently to breach the million mark, but its not gonna be easy... the EU petition is still about 450k sigs short... it'd need to pull in roughly 11k sigs every day, for each day between now and the July 31 deadline.
ITT: We HaVe tO KeEp kIlLiNg gAmEs bEcAuSe wE’Ve nEvEr oWnEd sOfTwArE.
piratesoftware talking out his ass?
Say it an't so!!
My head: Sperbal Kace Grogram
dudes a turd
YOU CANT BLAME THOR FOR RUINING THIS CAMPAIGN SINGLE HANDED
Is this all his fault alone? No, but if someone starts spewing bullshit excuses and makes up lies about my objectives to his millions of followers, I feel like it is important to correct him, and call him a doo doo head.
his dad worked at blizzard and basically created world of Warcraft /s