Seriously, it's not that deep, we are not talking about complex geopolitical issues or other which would required deep advanced inner knowledge before you can form an opinion.

In short :

- Peoples started noticing a common consultancy firm being involved in multiple games that they had issues with.

- Some Brazilian dude made a Steam curator list of the games this firm (SBI) worked on (information that was publicly available on their own web site)

- One employee of SBI had a breakdown and acted like a toxic ass on Twitter/X and started calling for for said dude to have both his curator list and Steam account banned.

- It didn't work because there was nothing against Steam TOS so he and other from SBI employees doubled down, calling everybody Nazi, bigots and other typical buzzwords, and played the victims.

- Peoples started looking at past tweets, interviews, conferences of SBI and it's employee and, on top of them acting like asses most of the time, they found some inconsistencies between the lack of impact the pretend to have on games and what they brag about in said interview / conferences.

- Of course gaming "press" jumped on it hopping to find another imaginary boogieman they could milk for years like one they had in 2014.

And that's basically it, The thing that Kotaku and other totally "missed" (or more likely chose to ignore) is that 99% of this mess (or at least the state it is in now) is not even really linked to what SBI did or didn't do to games but more on how immaturely and toxic they acted.

If they acted like adults and just ignored the curator list, some peoples would still have blamed them for Suicide Squad KJL and other games crappy writing and changes but it would have most likely died down rapidly. But no, they had to throw tantrum, called for peoples to be banned, called peoples all sort of names, which of course fanned the flames, caused peoples to look deeper, and caused this whole thing to explode.

Honestly when I first heard about SBI I thought they were just some consultancy firm using some current day politics buzzwords, that they were just a scapegoat but not the real issue. But after looking at how their employees and higher up acts I would say that regardless of their real or imaginary influences on games I would be very very happy if they were never able to work on any games ever again.

this whole chain of events starts and ends here.

eg: the folks who made the list, et al, were seeing a boogeyman where there simply wasn't one.

you're welcome to disagree [i see in the rest of your post that you do just that.]

but the ENTIRE fiasco is just a conspiracy theory where there shouldn't be a conspiracy theory.

the conspiracy theory does a number of things, but one of the kind of silliest is that it attributes WAY too much power to sbi. sbi simply does not have the power that the detractors believe it does. they're 16 people. their methods are opt in. i'm not sure how the detractors even think that works, but it is - not to put too fine a point on it - ridiculous.

i think the barometer for this is likely cumulative?

as in: i didn't watch to see how well horizon: zero dawn did, and it might be worth trying to find it [and other sony exclusives] in the list, because it's relative position might be useful as a data point for whether or not sony keeps doing this particular experiment.

sure. 66 seems low, i guess? but out of 194 pages of games, that's in the top 34% of all games, ever [and it'll likely keep floating upward for a little while as long as it's a new game.]

my hope is that for sony, that's a reasonable enough number and they'll KEEP adding more games to the pile, here.

[edited to add: lol. looking for specific games on particular pages in that list is 100% like looking for a needle in a haystack, you folks have WAY more patience than i do.]

Nah, I have written a script for querying the GOG API. Finding the exact place (and not just the page) of a game on the list just requires me to type "gogrank "horizon zero dawn" " into a shell. :-)

FYI, Horizon Zero Dawn is currently at place 248 and God of War is at place 3205 in the all-time bestselling list on GOG.

ah. that's pretty awesome. thank you for the reply.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. You're way too focused on the SBI has too much power part. It may be true or it may not be true. Honestly I don't know and frankly it doesn't matter. The biggest issue is that employees of said company started a campaign to try to get someone who criticized them banned from Steam - essentially being happy they would prevent him from accessing his library of games. I don't know about you but that's something that infuriates me. Sure, I don't buy games on Steam all that much anymore (and only because someone gifted me a Steam card) - I can download all the backups I want with Gog. If my Gog account was banned I would be pissed - No matter how DRM-free it is I can't get updates without an account.

My point is that if the SBI employees had succeeded in their endeavor then some might see that removing someone's games is somehow justified for disagreeing with their opinions. Sorry, I just can't let that stand. It would be a terrible precedent for gaming in general.

You might not believe that the entire thing happened. I didn't either at first until I went to twitter/x and saw the entire thing unfolding. It was rather surreal that SBI would care so much about what seemed like such a minor thing to direct a harassment campaign but here we are. There are plenty of screencaps that show what happened out there on the web if you still think that part didn't happen. Otherwise, if you're okay with them being toxic bastards then I have to strongly disagree with you.

Exactly. No matter what anyone's position on this is (political or otherwise), this is absolutely inexcusable and should say everything you need to know about what kind of a company SBI is. Funny how most of the "mainstream" media conveniently forgets to say how all this started and went straight to "harassment campaign". Where have I seen that before... hmmm.....

It is a bomb entirely of their own making, which they chose to explode and then got surprised there was so much damage. This would not have even been happening at all if they just remained silent. But the ego would not allow it, so here we are.

It is really simple! You are right. And no need to "dumb it down" for anyone.

This is the sequence of events so far:
1. You have acategorically dismissed the Kotaku article due to it being from Kotaku.
2. You claimed (many times) that everyone knows it's unreliable, inaccurate and without journalistic integrity. You claimed there is a proven track record of this.
3. I asked, that since it's proven and established, where is the proof? What are you basing this on? What are for example the factual inaccuracies in the Sweet Baby Inc. article?
4. You provide nothing to back up what you said, instead doubling down, and repeating (with CAPS!!!) the same words, as if speaking louder will make me understand it better.

Do you maybe see now why I asked you those eight, admittedly slightly leading, questions? No? Well let me "dumb it down" for you. It was to expose the fact that your own prejudice completely took over you and in a knee-jerk reaction, you went ahead to boycott anything a media source says, based on what you've heard in alternative sources that do conform to your beliefs. As I suspected, you have not used any critical thinking to evaluate the article and source yourself. To be honest, at this point, I seriously doubt you ever even read the article, as you nerd-raged frothing at the mouth crusading against "wokeness".

I would have absolutely no issue here, if you had at least read the article, and argued how badly written it was, how lopsided the portrayal of the issue was towards one "side", how there were factual inaccuracies or that you found plenty to contradict what Kotaku or Sweet Baby Inc. were saying. However, I do object to people boycotting a source outright, based on hearsay, and no critical thinking. Just jumping on the hate bandwagon, because it's popular and populist and cool, and you relinquish your ability to assess a source yourself. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why I am taking the effort to respond to your walls of text.

It is especially baffling, how people won't even read an article from a source, yet talk about learning about the issue from "both sides". Hell, even I don't dismiss Fox News or the Daily Caller outright, even though they both at the very least portray the issue one-dimensionally, and usually (especially the latter) are full of misinformation and propaganda. It is completely against my beliefs, which follow that everyone should keep learning, and practicing their critical thinking skills.

The rest of your post is full of you going line by line, being contrarian to every single sentence, whilst inserting CAPS for every third word. Which is what you do. Which is fine. It's a free anonymous forum. Who cares. But I won't be doing the same "courtesy" to you. Be thankful!

We probably will never circle back to my original eight questions, which is a shame, but I don't really mind if the discussion goes forward.

i'll play along with you for a second:

that's entirely on valve. it is not on sbi. the reason i say that is because valve could [if it wanted to] divorce forum posting/curatorship from game accessing. they have not, and here we are.

all valve would have to do is to say, "hey, these two things are separate. if you do something dumb on the forums, you lose your ability to post on the forums, but you still have access to your games. however, if you do something dumb in game, then...well..."

here's the thing: if we're going to talk about "harassment campaigns," then i think we should start at the bottom:

i SERIOUSLY doubt that sbi were involved in a harassment campaign. what likely happened is that sbi wanted to draw attention to sbi detected - i'll wager that sbi themselves did this because valve are NOTORIOUSLY slow to move on some issues. they may have attempted to do this quietly and may have attempted to ask valve to deal with the issue and valve did not, so they figured they'd put some more public pressure on valve via twitter.

is that the right thing to do? maybe not.
buuuut, let me tell you, i kind of sympathize with them in a way. i, too, live on the modern internet and i, too, have struggled to get customer service. sometimes, you get exasperated and you post that stuff on social media.

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on the other hand: if we're going to talk about harassment campaigns, then the RESPONSE to sbi's issues were...swift and kind of immediate [and yes, basically awful], because if you want to talk about the one campaign, you should certainly bring up the other. sbi have been harassed, themselves. that's not much fun.

[and, along the way, if there were MERITS to sbi detected's claim then the starting point for all this should have been, "hey, let's talk about this" not, "lets IMMEDIATELY start harassing and intimidating sbi." but subtlety is just not a feature of the internet.]

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gersen: i apologize, i initially tagged you here. i did that in error. it has been corrected.

And it would have ended here (or at least wouldn't have exploded the way it did) if it wasn't for SBI own stupidity.

As I said in my post whatever real or imaginary power SBI had over the games they worked on is not even that relevant anymore. It has been months since SBI was first mentioned and it was just some background noise, this whole thing only started to blowup after a SBI employee started calling for the curator list creator to be banned, it's this same action that also caused said list to gain overnight multiple times the number of followers and popularity it originally had.

It's not just a question of a usual Internet conspiracy theory, and limiting it at that is IMO dishonest, but more of a company and its employees that are so blinded by their imaginary self righteousness that they think that they can act like an average toxic 4chan poster, call for peoples to be banned/silenced, insult everybody (even got one of those employee banned on X for some time) and still play the victim when their actions trigger backlash.

this is just skating RIGHT past the notion of sbi detected itself.

in and of itself, sbi detected /could/ read [and seem like] a harassment campaign of a sort. it was literally a curated list of games sbi worked on so that other people could steer clear of them for "reasons." [all of which, i'd wager, were not really on the up and up.]

[urgh. i had to do some googling and now i feel gross.]

sbi detected is exactly what it seemed like on the tin from the small amount of googling i just did.

that's not ok.

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sbi had/has every right to not want to be associated with sbi detected. sbi had/has every right to ask valve to remove the group from it's service.

again: maybe sbi didn't do this in the right way, but i'd wager that this was just inexperience on their part. they simply didn't realize what sort of traction this issue would get and simply didn't realize how it would go nuclear.

that's frustrating, but i see where they were coming from.

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a belated edit: i'm going to time myself out of this conversation again.

every time i have to dip myself into the pool of sbi detected itself, i come back up feeling extra very gross.

i understand there's a lot of you that simply don't see this the way i see it. that's totally ok and at some point, i hope you reflect on why you feel the way you do.

until then, thanks for the conversation. be safe.

Now you are overdoing it.
Sealioning and concern trolling is skill to be done in moderation.

I don't know why some are engaging so intensely with this guy in this thread, his framing of the situation has been entirely and deliberately dishonest, not to mention patronizing.

Dude they asked for the list and the it's creator to be reported for harassment. Don't tell me that saying "and report the creator since he loves his account so much" with a screenshot of said account was not to try to also get it banned too...

Public pressure to do what ? remove a curator list that did nothing except list the game they worked on, information that was publicly available on their own site ?

That's not how it is supposed to work, you are not suppose to declare something as "harassment" and ask for it and it's creator to be banned just because you don't like it. If this list called for peoples to attack or harass SBI and its employee then yes, and I guess it would have been banned by Steam at that point, but it wasn't the case and before their tantrum the list only had a bunch of followers.

There is curated list of all games using Denuvo, so that peoples could steer clear of them for "reasons.", same thing for game being limited at 30Fps or Games that were badly ported, etc... , So I guess all of them are also harassment campaigns and are "not OK" ?

So with this logic then Denuvo should also can ask Steam to remove the "Denuvo games" curator list and ban its author for harassment, same thing for the devs of games in the "Badly ported Game" or "30fps games" list, and all the other similar "do not purchase those games for reason X,Y or Z" curator lists that exists on Steam.

And I also hope that at some point you will reflect on why you are so adamant to ignore and brush off any criticism of SBI while at the same time assume the worse and feel grossed out by anybody criticizing them and their actions...