I tend to agree. I've never been much of a fan of his style and the events I don't need to repeat certainly hasn't made him grow on me.

But I think he's been dog piled enough. Yes he makes it worse by not backing down. But I think it's been done to death now.

He should be ignored and we can focus on the positives of the movement.

It is what saved the initiative though. It's certainly useless now, but at least it helped get across the finish line, tasteless as it may be.

Holy shit. 2 minutes hate. You just connected the dots for me.

Orwell was a prophet.

I think the movement stumbled into two potholes almost simultaneously and everyone bashing on him got it out of both of them. His discrediting and rejection of the movement didn’t help but in my opinion the far bigger problem was just the lack of advertising.

Until all of the controversy I’d literally never heard about the petitions, nor had I ever heard of anyone involved with it. I was aware of the lawsuit around the shutting down of the crew but I believe that was the extent of it. Even the likes of Lewis Rothman weren’t talking about it until about 2 months ago, so how’s a random person on the street going to know about it?

A LOT of us olds pretty rapidly saw parallels between Gamergate and SKG from very early on. The same “This is obviously something everyone should want?” on the surface that quickly gets a whole lot more complex when you think of nuance and remember that The Bad Guys are actually human beings and not kid sitcom level villains. And the constant worry that it would become about hating and destroying individuals.

Which is why a LOT of us saw this coming when Thor was dumb enough to go on record (devil’s) advocating for developers. And it became even more obvious once Ross et al decided the answer was to make their consumer rights movement all about attacking a nepo baby with a high voice who pissed off asmongold and may or may not be a furry. You are either with SKG or you are with Thor and fucking nobody wants to be with that d-bag.

For what it is worth: I am friendly with a decent number of folk in various parts of the industry and this shit is terrifying. Yes, the EU is a lot better than the US (and a lot more toothless…) but it is still asking Old White Guys to legislate on gaming and… a lot of us remember when fuckers like jack thompson and even frigging Biden wanted to Fix Video Games. Let alone the reality that this is a massive industry and bad legislature could destroy the lives of thousands of people (millions once you consider knock ons). But basically all of us agree that that is just not something you can talk about on The Internet without getting a hate mob sent your way.

He also sells a lot of his “good side” via short form videos on Tik Tok and YouTube etc. So when you only get a snippet or two of him talking or answering questions, and he seems like he’s encouraging people to learn to code or do game dev etc it sounds nice. It sounds like he’s being supportive of his audience. It seems like he’s just a dude. But when you get right down to it, that doesn’t bear out who he is, even his actual online persona in his long form content or streams.

Oh God the thing he does where he just draws random circles in ms paint drives me mental. I was trying to watch some of his videos in order to be able to form my own opinion of him, and that tendency drove me mad there’s literally no point to it.

The problem I have with him is that he just announces things, like with the stop killing games movement, he just said the movement is bad and he doesn’t support it but he never explained himself. Even to this day I don’t actually understand what his problem with the movement is. He isn’t a publisher, so I don’t understand why he cares.