Pirate Software And Stop Killing Games; A Measured Response

 The internet loves a punching bag and when one man with a sizeable platform goes after a darling cause while already being unlikeable, then we have our main character of the week. Does Jason Thor Hall deserve the smoke or he being burned at the stake?

I've you're blissfully unaware then here's the TL;DR: Streamer, CEO of Pirate Software  and game developer Jason Thor Hall (who goes by Thor online) was vocal about his disagreements with a campaign to prevent publishers from breaking down videogames post-release, dubbed Stop Killing Games. I am of the opinion that Thor was unfair in a lot of his criticisms and took the petitions goals to an unreasonable extreme, and it seems most of the internet agrees, including the campaign's founder, Ross Scott. Thor didn't merely lay out his disagreements and call it a day, he put out two videos on the matter which concluded in him encouraging others not to support the campaign as well. Not merely a call for amendments of the terms, not merely a call to reconsider, Thor clearly stated his disdain for the campaign as well as how he had no intention of having any conversations on the matter. He wasn't open to changing his mind, he wasn't going to listen to dissenting opinions, he didn't support the damn thing and he didn't think you should either.

This rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. And I want to be fair to him here, Thor is perfectly entitled to feel this way and make his opinions known. He isn't holding anyone at gunpoint, no law requires him to hear us out on Stop Killing Games, he doesn't agree with it and whether or not any of us deem those criticisms fair, he can say whatever he wants to about it.

Other people have taken to tackling his criticisms, I'm not here to argue the minutia. I'm also not here to defend Thor's honour, but in the wake of this an entire cottage industry has shown up to take this man down a peg or twenty. Stop Killing Games might have more videos about Thor than it does about the actual campaign. What is it about Thor that pisses in everyone's cornflakes?

 For starters, Thor worked at Blizzard. It's not just that he worked at Blizzard, it's that he got a job in QA very young and has, ever since, not stopped bringing it up. It's a crime to talk a lot about a job you loved but speaking for myself here, it gets a bit much. Thor will tell you unprompted about his days at the World of Warcraft company, and like that guy who peaked in highschool, eventually the mere mention of his winning plays starts to work on your nerves. Thor is, by normal standards, a smart guy. He's not an astrophysicist but he's smart enough to throw together a videogame by himself. Problem is, Thor knows it. There are better coders, better World of Warcraft players and people more knowledgeable but Thor has a bad habit of talking authoritatively on pretty much anything he knows anything about, even if that knowledge is incomplete. There's also some beef people have with how he streams. A minor controversy about looking up a guide or a let's play and then saying he doesn't do that kind of thing, a poor play in a hardcore World Of Warcraft server where he got mad at everyone else but himself, when he actually bore a lot of the responsibility for the trainwreck that ensued, all lots of little quibbles that add up.

If you already didn't like Thor from years of him being mildly abrasive, Stop Killing Games is the nail in the coffin. Persona non grata. You don't have to go home, Thor, but you can't stay here.

Being the villain of the week leaves you open to be scrutinized. Leaves everything in your life open to scrutiny. People will pick you apart and stockpile ammo to throw back in your face if you dare come here. Some developers have started to review his code; And I'm sure it's a unique spaghetti mess in there. Clean code is for Leetcode, fully fledged projects contain bodges and technical debt from poor decisions made early in the lifecycle. Anyone who has ever actually shipped a game knows that by the end, you do whatever you have to in order to get the thing out the door. This is my first quibble with some of the backlash; Thor's code might be a hot mess, and if you build in public you'll get critiqued in public, but some of you are not engaging in good faith. This isn't about improving code, it's about taking Thor down a peg. No one learns anything, we're here to dunk on the guy everyone hates for internet points, and that rubs me the wrong way. Imagine you're a beginner coder; You start watching one of these code reviews and the talking head starts crucifying Thor for doing something the exact way you'd think to do it. Wow, isn't Thor such an idiot? Such a poor coder? He should just quit. Don't ever cook again. You're bad at coding. You're not even using VIM, you piece of shit. Oh, what's that, you can't use VIM with Game Maker? Why aren't you making your game in Assembly, poser? Go away, we don't like you.

That'd sting. Enough to make you uninstall your engine of choice. Makes you feel like you're not one of the chosen few. Like you're not worthy of VS Code and all its beautiful extensions. And that's not true. For all Thor's faults, his crusade to at making game development accessible is something I deeply agree with, find commendable even. You should make games, if that's what you want to do. Don't let your project linger in early access for seven years, Thor is guilty of that, but making games is for everyone.

I'm not saying don't critique Thor's code, I am saying do it constructively. If there's a better way to do something, make it a teachable moment. And I'm not saying that Thor shouldn't catch flak for Heartbound being in early access from 2018 until now, he should catch flak. Trust me, the steam reviews are doing plenty of that right now.

Heartbound Steam review graph, with a massive negative spike in the middle of 2025

 

Fellow gamers, fellow devs, fellow internet denizens... Jason Thor Hall is guilty of a lot of things, but I ask that we direct our outrage to where it really matters.

Stop Killing Games.

Ross Scott deserves our support and the man is overworked and underappreciated. Our games deserve to live on, and we deserve the piece of mind that our games won't break irrepairably because a server shuts down somewhere while the whole actual game still sits on our hard drives. We're not asking for much, we're not asking for it to be applied retroactively.

We're just asking that if you can't keep the lights on, at least let us still play the game you made in some way. Your great grandkids don't have to keep supporting World Of Warcraft, but you can let us run around an empty map when you're done with it, or better yet, let us set up community servers. We want to do the work, and we'll do it for free, just let us.

We can be mad at this one dweeb who tried to kill the campaign, or we could redirect that energy to actually building something. Hate is easy, change is hard. Thor made his bed; He'll forever be the guy who doubled down on the wrong horse because of an overly pessimistic misinterpretation. And negative emotions are good and necessary, but negative emotions shouldn't drive negative actions.

That's all I have to say, and you're free to agree or disagree with me, either way, thank you for reading.

 From Luna, with love.