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.

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.

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.

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

I have posts being critical of it from over a year ago. I'd assume most people who have criticism don't leave a comment because it'll get you massively downvoted and your inbox will be flooded with angry replies.

Not at all.

More attention means more people see it, so even if the percentage of complainers haven't changed, there are more people who know.

On top of that, there was criticism before. There's that streamer who was mocked relentlessly in comments and some defending him, there were articles about game developer lobby groups complaining that were posted here, etc.

Why would they? Most people didn't know about the petition until a few weeks ago, and I think people are largely knee-jerk supporting their favorite streamer (in this case, PirateSoftware). I don't think there's a concerted effort here to kill it, just people coming out of the woodwork now that it got a lot of attention.