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.

Attention work both ways.

People who were not aware, now are. From all sides.

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.

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

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.

I don't find the absence of criticism suspicious. The petition makes sense. It aims to solve a problem that affects many individuals and a significant part of human culture.

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.

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 (or the son of the ultimate WoW neckbeard) said about it.

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.

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.

The bot farms and clout grasping social climbers don't care about things until they reqch a certain size.

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.

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.

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.

Well certain EU politicians support SKG, so yeah it's making a lot of corpos uncomfy

Maybe not specifically this comm, but I had been sporadically arguing with people on various places on lemmy about SKG before Ross even dropped 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 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.

what right do you have to stop me from killling your games?

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.