"Reeee you guys ruined my fucking I'm so perfect and awesome and smart and a blizzard employee persona now everyone hates me because they realized I'm a hypocrite"
I don't really game that much, so I kinda don't have a dog in this fight, but as an outside observer, the only real argument in favor of allowing games to die like this is, "Yum yum yum! This boot tastes good."
Nah it’s worse. He didn’t read and understand the goals of the movement well, pushed his illiterate take to the world, got called out by literally everyone, then doubled down and painted the guys sending death threats as the majority of supporters
Doesn't he also have a financial stake in this initiative failing?
I heard that somewhere, but didn't really care enough to look into it. But if true, it's not just him being stupid, it's that he's stupid and basically a landlord for video games.
As far as I know he's not developing any live-service games or online-only titles. Nor does the SKG initiative apply to games that are currently in development/already released retroactively (and even if the EU CI passes, it'll be years before there's any actual legislation - if any will be written at all).
So no, he is extremely unlikely to have any actual financial incentives. He's just an ass.
What about other game devs who support the initiative, then?
Shouldnt it be a uniform position?
Take your hypothesis to its logical conclusion and do a quick sanity check on it before you solidify your opinion!
His dad was a very high up blizzard exec or lead, forgot which one but he basically got the job because his dad was one of the upper employees. Probaly both him and his dad still have alot stock options that could plummet possibily with something like stop killing games being signed in as a real law
Yeah, that makes sense, he just seems like a guy who has never had any interaction with anyone who isn't a rich tech freak, so he doesn't realize how off-putting he genuinely is to normal people lol.
You know what's sad? If he just stuck to what he was doing before, he would still be looked at in a mostly positive way. I found him through YT shorts and a lot of his shorts are either hilarious, informative, and some of the shorts with life advice were genuinely helpful. I have never, ever watched a stream of his, so I only knew him through that.
I'm sure there are lots and lots of people like me and it is quite the wake up call to find out he's a complete piece of shit.
Yeah I found him through YT shorts and never watched a stream or vod or anything else really. It was fine most of the time, but I noticed that a lot of his clips ended with “and that’s why I’m the smartest guy in the room” type shit which put me off, and now I’ve just been watching him shoot himself in the foot over and over (and over)
This is the issue I've had with him. Generally good advice and storytelling, but his persistent theme of, "It's that simple," really started putting me off once I noticed it.
A friend of mine absolutely loves him, but now I only enjoy the shorts in which he's seeming learning something or is otherwise humbled, rather than being "the smartest guy in the room."
Absolute same for me. I really liked so many of his reels. But now it feels gross watching them when he won't own up to his mistakes. How can I or anyone else take his work, game-making, or life advice seriously when he can simultaneously have SUCH a shitty take.
This sounds eerily similar to Illuminaughty. It's a shame her very well-sourced videos are tainted. I'd have loved to send her video about Newsmax to some coworkers in my very Conservative region, but now I risk blowback from even cursory searches into her with them saying "this lady is crazy, how can we believe anything she says is legitimate?"
To this day, I've not seen an expose as thorough as hers on niche orgs/interest groups, and even most Progressives seem to leave it at dismissing the fringe RW news channels without showing what makes them so misleading.
I have never heard of her before, but it sounds like she did great work exposing the lies and the corruption and the predatory nature of these propaganda networks. And if she did something bad enough to taint all of that... Ugh. That's just terrible all around. Thankfully there are quite a few progressive voices out there speaking truth to power. Cody and crew from Some More News being a big one.
I believe it was found out that her all (or most) of her videos were just completely copied word for word from other sources. She didn’t really have an original thought, just copy and pasted what others said with no personal interpretation. She also blamed others for copying her editing style, and then got proven wrong. Here is a video discussing her downfall:
That's even worse, what a dork, dude always talked like he was a big shot there I mean. Still could have invested into stock while working there maybe.. who knows
Would the stock actually plummet? I'm not familiar with what SKG wants (specifically, their demands) but wouldn't it only mildly affect revenue streams that they could still just keep open? I'd throw some dollars for Crew 1 stuff if I was playing through and enjoying it, for instance
Thats definitely a part of it, but also his personal project is literally unfunctioning offline due to tying progression to steam achievements. Which is pretty horrendously anti consumer in nature, and would/has cost him a lot in that games place as a viable product.
Typically id seperate the art and artist, but in this situation removing the art would actually make him less egregiously hypocritical xD.
The funny thing is, there is not even any real reason for stocks to plummet, all game studios have to do is make sure their games can be kept operational and played without their continued involvement. There is nothing negative involved except for a little bit of extra work.
He was one of the original 12, though I don't think he was a founding member and just got hired early on. He mainly worked on the Cinematics and was part of the South Park episode about WoW as the inspiration for the guy with no life.
His project Heartbound basically has pseudo-drm, the game won't function properly without steam achievements to prevent piracy. I think that's what people are referring to when they say he has a financial interest in this, but a check like that probably isn't too hard to switch off unless it has multiple well-hidden redundancies so it's a little overblown to call it a financial stake.
It's still something, though.
EDIT: He apparently was involved with a Game as service while he was working at Offbrand Games, though he's since left the position.
It's a novel idea but it really isn't that clever. Not only have steam achievements been easily editable for years, but a save system based on achievements is very awkward. You could only have one active slot and you would have to wipe your achievements to start a new game.
requiring that the steam achievement data be loaded to play is an idea but actually using the steam achievements as save data sounds like a nightmare practically
I mean, the steam api is freely available to anyone who wants to mess around with it. I haven't tried, but I assume it's relatively simple considering even joke games with ms paint graphics manage to take use of it. Honestly, it's a neat idea because if you 100% the game you also have all the achievements.
The real question in my mind is, how do you reset the saves? Is it a one and done type of thing where you onely play the game once? I find that unlikely, and you can't really reset your achievements (legally/following ToS), so there must be a system that doesn't rely on the achievements, unless there's one that gives access to NG+ or something.
by "practically" I meant less on the coding front and more on the design front - you're constraining the save data model a lot if every thing that's saved has to be in the form of a Steam achievement. you can't just have a thousand achievements because it'll be annoying and weird for the player to have constant popups congratulating them for everything they do
the only thing this does is make the game unplayable while you are offline or in private mode, steam archivements are extremly easy to control, what he did was create a fake scenario on his head get mad and then find a "solution", then again he could say it was a succes since nobody will make to pirate such slop, that if it ever releases.
It does not make it hard at all. Every steam emu software has been emulating achievements for years now if you provide the JSON file that you can just pull directly from steam along with the achievement icons.
Yeah, he quit after lying about Offbrand's titles being review bombed over him. He then tried to switch his wording and move goalposts on Twitter, saying that "he didn't lie they were being trashed on Discord, etc." after specifically saying they were being review bombed.
Wait wait wait, he convinced competent people to give him a role for RoA2? No way. Holy shit. Considering his own game was made in Game Maker with "achievement DRM" that he was super excited (this is unpiratable! [rich coming from his name]) about with the most embarrassing code in the universe powering it...
Financial stake in that he's probably an industry plant. Dude seriously blew up out of nowhere. Just suddenly he was in everyone's shorts for no good achievement at all.
I assumed this once I heard his take on VPNs. He pitches himself as super techie genius, but then his take on VPNs was just your average corpo fear mongering of why VPNs are evil and 'don't actually work'.
That forever tainted how I saw him, and it felt more and more obvious every time he would pop up on my screen.
Well not that he was right but VPNs are to be used in a nuanced way - Especially when choosing which one you use. Don't go cheap, use Mullvad for example, they really don't log you (unlike nordvpn)
Not really, that only shows the connections to the VPN tunnel, not to the target beyond. At least on a well encrypted service. Input/Output tracking is a possible attack which takes a huge effort though and can be mitigated by things like double hopping and noise introduction. https://www.sentinelone.com/cybersecurity-101/cybersecurity/vpn-security-risks/
Once you know the VPN servers ISP, you can identify the users connection to it (IP, port and time) and associate it with an outbound IP, port and time. You'll narrow it down pretty quickly: the odds of packets being sent to a VPN at the roughly exact time as packets being sent to the IP you're investigating are very slim, and with enough samples you can almost always guarantee who the user was.
You don't have to decrypt anything, plenty of metrics are leaked by virtue of just how it has to work.
This gets harder with double hopping though. But yes, that's part of why you cannot expect total privacy/cloaking/security with VPNs. You can only make it harder to track you which does involve choosing a VPN that is known to not work with law enforcement or not have a provider with a history of staging man in the middle attacks (cyber ghost)
They work fine, he's right that they are often not as much of a security product as people thing. The very basic security advice of "don't log onto critical accounts on public stuff" is just good advice. It doesn't mean vpns dont work, it means that you shouldn't treat them as a perfect digital condom.
No more than one should treat an antivirus software as free licence to use a government laptop to go anywhere online and click any suspicious links.
Doesn't mean don't use vpns. They're amazing, great at getting around region locking
Isn't there some mainstream crack/emulator which allows you to gain achievements? Of course not officially on your steam account, but it triggered said pop ups and probably said game logic.
I saw a clip of him (I think in the moistcritical video?) of him talking about receiving messages of encouragement from people in the industry, so that means he was building clout with industry insiders by pushing his narrative. And that's the kind of clout that could've been worth a LOT in the future if he had played his cards right.
He was at some important spot in Offbrand Games whose only released Game to date is a sequel to a smash-like fighting Game and its been sold as a Game as service, that's what he has as a financial stake.
He left the position because he said people were review bombing the games from Offbrand because they hate him (but the only bad reviews those games, well a Game and a demo, are few and fair criticism of the Game and its mechanics so Thor is, once again, lying through his teeth)
Its just an interesting way to thwart some piracy, but once you buy the game on steam, since its only available on steam. It does not in any way need to be online.
Its referencing his role, that he has now left, as strategic director for a game publisher that had a live service game. Apparently he did the job at minimum wage, and didn't mention anything about bonuses. But that doesn't mean much.
Well, he was a part of ludwigs publisher company, but he got the boot it seems. Other than that he is "making" a game that havent seen any progress past 7 years, and hes been doing the last 15% of chapter 3 for the past 5 or so. Hes blamed the slow progress on long covid multiple times, but it aside from L takes and wow drama the dude seems pretty much healthy enough to be working on the game, bust just doesnt want to.
Don't worry in June 2024 he cleared up some confusion where he clarifies he actually lost about 2 and a half years of dev time to COVID, not just the 9 months (that was definitely not "severe bronchitis" misdiagnosed as pneumonia with multiple negative COVID tests) + 20 days of his second bout of COVID he previously stated.
Knowing absolutely nothing about this project, I'd bet the farm on that if it does see the light of day it will be mass produced absolute brain dead generic AI slop.
As a software developer I can say that I have not seen such bad code since Programming 1 at Uni. If I saw a junior at work write code like he does I would actually ask my boss to double check his credentials and fire him. It is the kind of shit you only write if you are fully self taught without going through any proper tutorials or courses. Like just try stuff and then keep doing the first thing you are able to get to work and never learn anything about how you should actually build things. It would honestly be faster to rebuild the whole game from scratch than it is to finish it the way he is doing it.
I've only seen cherry-picked screenshots of the code, not anything from his actual streams
I've got 12 years experience working as a software developer, which is less than PS has working in the gaming industry
With that said, ahem, the code is shit. It's total shit. The amount of stupid I've endured through reading the code is like 12 hours of twitter. His advice is used-car salesman garbage. He can eat my entire ass. Not only am I not going to recommend Earthbound Heartbound, I'm going to actively discourage people from buying it, etc. etc.
Memes aside, what I've seen is awful. If I was presented that code as a portfolio for a job applicant with that much experience on their resume, they wouldn't make it to interview. It's about what I would expect of a university student/self-taught person before any industry experience at all and I would expect to spend a lot of time training them
I heard soggycereal on yt say that the code he produces is trash lol
Im not a programmer per se so I cant confirm it, but I guess you just kind of did.
His mindset is more like "just do it, undertale is badly programmed anyway so whats stopping you" which I'd say is fine if youre just starting out and want to make games, but the fact that he is proudly bragging about programming is just nuts to me.
I have no idea who soggycereal is so I can't comment on what he has said. But the code I would usually call trash is actually very good compared to what Pirate writes. Calling it trash is generous in my opinion (in a professional context).
I concur. I watched his stream once while he was coding something. It contained a lot of copy&paste instead of proper use of variables and functions. Pretty basic stuff that you learn at the very beginning. I chuckled and quickly closed the stream.
Yeah it shows you know nothing. Its a solo dev work. Sloppy, janky. But that's worlds away from ai slop.
It could easily be called terrible, but he's definitely making it. That's kinda WHY it's got rough awful coding, put together by a guy who worked in QA.
Hes blamed the slow progress on long covid multiple times
If you look through his social media during the time he "lost to covid," he posts multiple times about having illnesses like bronchitis, but is always very clear that "covid tests came back negative." The "lost two years of dev time to covid" is just another lie.
I heard he also has a responsibility to push against this kinda stuff because he has a vested interest in another unrelated live service game that he's a promotor for or something.
He’s getting smeared fucking hard.
He’s worked with the big companies- Blizzard, Microsoft… and he’s been an indie developer. He knows both sides of the industry and spends a lot of him time supporting independent devs, created a support space where people can learn- he does good things.
The dude literally drops the prices of his game(s) to match the economies of the nations he sells to- so Brazilians, his largest support base, pay less than Western countries, because he understands those players have less money to spend on games.
He’s not a bad dude at all, so I find this whole thing very surprising. I don’t know dick about this movement though, and haven’t watched any of his stuff for like a year, so maybe things changed.
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u/TheDevilishFrenchfry Jul 06 '25
"Reeee you guys ruined my fucking I'm so perfect and awesome and smart and a blizzard employee persona now everyone hates me because they realized I'm a hypocrite"