Hi, everybody! Sorry for the rant!
I’m just posting this as a combination of question and vent. Does anyone else here feel frustrated by the current ethical dilemmas of purchasing games from certain companies? My partner is very tuned into the various ethical mishaps happening in the world and keeps me apprised of which companies are doing shitty stuff and which people/companies I should stop supporting. This is important to remember, but it is also frustrating to see how many companies out there are doing bad things.
This is a very “first world problem,” but it’s frustrating just how many games out there look cool, but I can’t play them because it’d be giving those companies/people money. The biggest examples are Activision Blizzard, J.K. Rowling, and Wizards of the Coast. I think Baldurs Gate 3, for example, looks so awesome, but I don’t feel comfortable playing it because my partner has alerted me that some of that money would go to Wizards. I feel somewhat frustrated that the discussion around these issues has evaporated when the games are released; it’s as though people stopped caring about the bad things these companies/people did. To be entirely honest, I’m not sure if I myself would be able to keep myself accountable if my partner doesn’t remind me of it; I think I may have bought the games like everyone else because of how fun they look, and how much they remind me of games I grew up on.
On a similar note, as my partner is working on becoming a game developer, he follows the state of game development and tells me about it, which seems bleak. I mourn the old studios that I used to have a lot of enjoyment for, like BioWare and the others that EA ate up.
Thanks for reading all of this. :) I wish things were more hopeful, I suppose. My partner urges me to support indie developers, so I’m trying to move in that direction. Does anyone have any recommendations on staying hopeful, given the current state of entertainment?
TL;DR: I’m frustrated by the current largely-unethical state of the games industry and want to know how I can regain some hope about it.
Indies really are the way to go for both customers and developers if they want a better, more ethical and respectful environment. It is a risky career path, but given how many major publishers treat the developers under them, it’s not like sticking with mainstream would lead to a comfortable stable livelihood either.
Baldur’s Gate 3 really put me in a dilemma, but I think I’ll ultimately buy it because I want to support Larian Studios more than I want to avoid Wizards of the Coast. I wouldn’t trust Wizards enough to get One D&D and the likely tabletop lootbox hell they are scheming, but BG 3 is delivering a good product that deserves support. Though buying the Divinity games is an alternative if you don’t want WotC to get any money.
Sadly indies are not insular to those issues, here are recent examples:
- Ion Fury’s dev being straight up homophobic
- Jonathan Blow of The Witness and Braid being absolute misogynist, also antivaxx
- Kovarex of Factorio straight up dismissing statutory rape as ‘new SJW term’
The thing is that, there’s always a right wing crowd swarming those communities that they’d downplay, gaslight, and of course play a part in the gaming → far right neo nazi pipeline
I’d say do it in case per case basis
Yeesh! I had heard some of that but not the Factorio one. Yeah unfortunately not all indie devs are cool.
Bizarre to see how gamers are lured into conservatism when conservatives keep throwing games under the bus when gun violence is mentioned.
I’m a former game dev and I can tell you, at least from my experience, there was no golden age where developers and customers were treated fairly. It’s the primary reason why I left. Hell, I once interviewed at a place that showed off how the offices had beds in them, as if that was a selling point.
That said, I’d probably be someone who you’d consider “doesn’t care about the bad things these companies did.” I’m just too fuckin’ old to be mad about shit all of the time. If I was only going to patronize folks and companies who matched my own set of ideals and ethics, I would be more than just gameless. I would be homeless and penniless as well.
What I do is simply detach products and services from those who provide them. I can buy a thing from a person I find distasteful. I don’t have to invite them out for a drink and I certainly don’t have to avoid taking them to task for their poor or unethical behavior. Moreover, ethics and behavior are saleable. If someone comes around who offers something comparable to something from someone I find distasteful, then I can go patronize the new person instead. I have jumped ship from many service and product providers for that very reason. If you want my business, then you better ensure you’re either the only person who can provide what I want or ensure you’re the person I want to buy from.
If you’re not averse to piracy, you could go that route.
If you are averse to piracy, and have consoles to play on, buy used copies of games (where it’s even possible to) - the publisher sees no proceeds from that.
Failing that… There’s a lot of great indie games out there that aren’t problematic. I know it feels like you’re missing out if you aren’t playing whatever the current big AAA game is, but really, there’s plenty of indie games that are just as good, or that you’d get just as much enjoyment out of.
I’d recommend against piracy in either case. Part of the action you take as a consumer is not just refusing to give Bad Company A your money, but you’re also giving Bad Company A’s product less attention and mindshare while spending money and attention on Good Company B’s product, encouraging more of Good Company B’s product to be made. The likes of Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard, etc. used to be the companies that made games that a lot of us loved, but they trimmed their portfolios of their less profitable (note that I didn’t say “unprofitable”) games, which means they’re not scratching all of the itches they used to scratch, and they’ve diluted a lot of the games that we still enjoy with business models that encroach right up to the point where they annoy or anger us. So if the business models they’re using now piss you off, it’s important to stop supporting those and instead show that buying a great product at a fair price is what we as customers want.
For me, if a game requires an internet connection instead of letting us host our own servers or run a LAN or run local play totally offline, I don’t buy it, I don’t pirate it, I don’t play it. I just move on to games that respect their customers.
You know, it’s funny, I used to feel big FOMO when it came to games I wanted to play. Then the Epic Game Store came along, and started paying for timed exclusives, and I adopted the philosophy that I’d just wait for the games to get a Steam release.
There’s only been a handful of instances where I even bothered buying them once they came to Steam; turns out that by not buying them when they’re being hyped by all of the new release marketing, I’ve mentally moved on to other things by the time they come to Steam, and I just don’t feel the need to buy them anymore. I just needed help getting past that initial mental hurdle.
The same applies to companies whose philosophies I object to; as long as I have a reason to mentally justify not buying them initially, I just lose interest in the products entirely very quickly.
People would often respond to me with the sentiment that “games aren’t fungible”, which is true, but there’s so much good stuff out there that something else will be pretty close to the itch you’re looking to scratch, great in its own ways, and you don’t have to feel lousy about supporting it. Like if Diablo IV feels scummy, I hear Grim Dawn is great. That kind of thing.
Frankly, it depends on how micro or macro you’re willing to think, and how much that personally bothers you. At the end of the day we live in multiple systems of oppression and exploitation that make it very hard - and sometimes outright impossible - to properly consume something without being unethical. From The Good Place:
“Life now is so complicated, it’s impossible for anyone to be good enough for the Good Place. These days, just buying a tomato at a grocery store means that you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labor, contributing to global warming. Humans think that they’re making one choice, but they’re actually making dozens of choices they don’t even know they’re making!”
From my personal point of view, there’s a few choices. The first is, you can just not consume. There’s more than enough indie games, as well as plenty of old-AAA games that won’t directly benefit their companies anymore. You can also pirate, if that’s not an online game.
From a more cynical point of view, your individual purchase (and, frankly, even a organized boycott) won’t make a difference to these companies. Modern capitalism doesn’t rely on genuine profit, just on the idea that an IP or corporation is profitable, and that’s enough to attract investors and investments, and inflate its share price as well as its value in the eyes of capitalists. This is a gross oversimplification, and generally only applies to the largest names, but still sadly relevant.
So at the end of the day, you have to think to yourself: Does it bother you to consume something? I won’t buy or play anything related to Harry Potter media because JKR disgusts me, but I see no issue with indirectly supporting WotC. Likewise, while the decision to not support Blizzard products is very easy (they don’t really make that many), I can’t say their scandals forced me to stop playing any more than their lack of dedicated support to their products.
There’s rarely an absolute moral good when it comes to consuming products, even indie ones; Publishers like Chucklefish and Dangen had their own share of abuse and neglect, and sometimes individual creators are just, well, assholes.
I’m frustrated by the current largely-unethical state of the games industry
It’s the fate of any large enough company in a capitalist system. Greed creates/incentivizes this behavior and then rewards it. Microtransactions and dark patterns wouldn’t exist if they didn’t work. Greedy people know this and the rest of us are plagued by them.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 12•11 months ago
My partner is very tuned into the various ethical mishaps happening in the world and keeps me apprised of which companies are doing shitty stuff and which people/companies I should stop supporting.
Problem: the set of companies you shouldn’t support due to unethical behavior is pretty much all of them. As the saying goes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. If doing business with someone with blood on their hands puts blood on your hands, then only the hands of hermits and children are clean.
This is one of the reasons why I use free and open source software wherever possible, but very few games are FOSS and most of them were commercial before being FOSSified (e.g. Doom).
Hej, there
I can understand your frustration. Right now it feels that we small people can’t do anything to do good in the world. There are greedy capitalist everywhere. It is nearly impossible to understand what damage ones desicion could make. If our desicions even could make a difference.
But the thing is, you can’t overlook everything. It’s a gouverments job to keep an eye over Corporations.
But that doesn’t mean, that you can’t do anything. You can search for Informations and make yourself aware of those topics. You can support workers and strikes. You could limit yourself on what stuff you are comsuming.
You don’t have to boycott every major company and every Product. You just could make a list about everything you really need and what you are really looking forward to. So you can balance your need for morality and fun.
You will find a way that’s suits you. Don’t worry
I really appreciate this response. It balances the want to do good and make ethical choices with the reality that I can’t do everything perfectly. It’s important to do the best we can and also leave room to enjoy ourselves :)
When it comes to the corporate world, your purchases are like your vote in politics. WotC has done some stuff that lots of people (myself included) don’t like. They’ve also done some stuff people really do like.
The situation around the open gaming license was the perfect example. People boycotted D&D beyond, and other directly related products, but very few boycotted the D&D movie, because people wanted to discourage Wizards from the specific license changes, but didn’t want to discourage making good movies for our niche audience.
Obviously not all companies have separate things like this. Activision/Blizzard are more monolithic, and so selectively boycotting them is harder.
All this said, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so if any boycott is costing you too much, monetarily, mental health-wise, etc., you shouldn’t feel bad for breaking it
I once heard “when you vote with your wallet, people with more money get more votes”, and that really helped me internalize how unlikely it is to expect occasional boycott to beat executives investing millions in marketing to lure entire audiences of well-off customers might not even be informed of the issues going behind the scenes. You can boycott for your moral satisfaction, but to enact actual change, it isn’t enough.
it’s a complex issue, and it will probably end up dirty, since it’s business in the end.
I could understand why people would avoid buying Hogwarts Legacy, because how much the IP is tied to transphobic JK Rowling. But the devs on the other hand, they mostly don’t get the say on which IP to work on. I personally avoid games like that, because the same person has enough followers to keep spouting hate which could and have translated to real world bigotry and violence. And the game serves as marketing for people to follow JK Rowling.
Then there are companies with sexual harassments incidents. In that case, spreading the words and making enough noise so that some legal investigations or actions are taken, should be the way. Then there’s crunch and overwork issues, helping them to spread the word about union, not to cross the picket lines, etc.
There are many of those issues, because we didn’t address them earlier in the past few decades. But shedding the light on them and you feeling frustrated are good things, it means that we’re progressing, we’re identifying, feeling guilty, and trying to address them.
I’d say, be more conscious when purchasing games, maybe if you really really want to play Baldur’s Gate 3, then only buy it when there’s a steep discount? Nowadays I play a lot more indies and retro games, and probably would only buy a full price games once or twice a year. There’s large number of other good games out there, don’t be pressured to be FOMO, wait until there’s steep discount. And after waiting for awhile, sometimes you realize that you could just ignore the problematic game altogether.
Also, just because they are indies, don’t mean that they can’t be piece of shit. Main dev of Ion Fury is homophobic, Jonathan Blow of the Witness is misogynistic POS, Kovarex from Factorio dismissing statutory rape as SJW term
Thank you for your response. I also think it’s good that people are becoming more aware of these issues and doing what they can to address them.
I also think your point about FOMO is a good one; it becomes much less frustrating when I look at my backlog of games I’ve already purchased and have thousands of hours left to play. There will always be new games, and they won’t always be made by people that make me feel uncomfortable.
As others have stated, you make a good point about indie game devs. Jonathan Blow is one that my partner brings up regularly. I didn’t know about Ion Fury or Kovarex but that’s disappointing. It’s hard to keep track of it all, but when I find out about things like this, I’ll do my best to consider it when making future purchases.
I feel you, it’s tough knowing that there’s great games out there and feeling like you can’t play them. It’s even tougher when the people around you are playing them too, especially when they’re telling you how great they are.
I think your partner has the right idea with supporting indie developers, generally speaking the money stays closer to the creator, so it feels like you’re more directly supporting them. But you’ve also got to be careful because individuals can be just as vile as organizations, there’s been times that I bought a game, thought it was great, and then found out after the fact that the creator is outspokenly transphobic or something like that.
I want to mention Hogwarts Legacy as a specific example. It’s a game I don’t want to support because JK will profit from it, and she supports the erasure of people like me. I have a friend who played the game, and from his account the game itself is pretty hip. The character creator is supposedly pretty inclusive. He raised the point that JK had very little to do with the development of the game, and the development team seems to really care. Does that mean we shouldn’t support them because an evil individual profits from it? It certainly added some nuance to the situation that I hadn’t considered.
I think the best way to stay hopeful is to play games that you really enjoy. For me, it helped to educate myself on this list of dark patterns in gaming, and to find games that don’t include these features. To me that says that the creators want you to enjoy their experience to the utmost, because generally speaking the more dark patterns are in the game, the more the game is designed to profit off of you. You should be the one to profit from the game IMO.
He raised the point that JK had very little to do with the development of the game, and the development team seems to really care.
The development team got paid regardless of how well the game sold, and unless the company operates a system of employee profit-sharing, they’re not going to see any of the benefits of the game doing well. So the “buy it to support the devs” argument doesn’t really hold any weight, save in the hypothetical scenario that they’ll get a payrise for working on the studio’s next title.
That’s a good point, I never really considered that. The argument does hold some weight for the live-service model, but to my knowledge that’s not really how that game operates.
But there’s plenty of support besides financial too. I’d agree that as a developer I do care most about being paid for my work, especially if I’m going to work on a AAA game. But for my own projects, I mostly care that people play my games and enjoy them, even if that means piracy or streaming.
I dunno, sometimes “supporting the devs” these days just means not sending them death threats. But I also think that if we look at financial support as the only way to support a game then we risk dehumanizing the people who work on our toys.
Larian studios seems great. I would like more companies to invest in / hire studios similar to Larian. Sure, WotC sucks. But I will vote with my dollars for them to work with Larian. Maybe it means in the future more gaming companies might look like Larian. Everybody has to draw their own line, though.
Nah, games should be fun and stressing over what happens behind the scenes distracts from that. Do I know Acti-Blizz have major issues, yes, does it stop Diablo 4 being fun, nope.
They’re all big companies. They’re all shitty somewhere. If you want to play something just play it. I find the worst of them are also making games that don’t interest me in the slightest, but even Activision put out the Tony Hawks Remaster and EA put out It Takes Two so I was all over them.
If you spend all your time worrying about shitty companies, you’ll be living in a cave eating moss. It’s OK to lament the state of things and then do them anyway. It’s on the workers to unionise and shaft the management back, because without them there’s no product and no money.
You can choose to not buy if you want, it won’t make a lick of difference.
https://gamerant.com/hogwarts-legacy-2023-sales-zelda-diablo-competition/
Yes, it will.
First, you won’t spend that money, you can spend that on other things instead.
Second, you can spend the money you have saved this way on products of better companies. For games this may be good indie developers and smaller studios (is that a thing?), but generally for software there is usually a wider range of options, and I mean even actual alternatives.You could argue that me not paying for youtube premium won’t change a thing. That may sound true, but it isn’t necessarily: if you instead support your creators trough Liberapay or Patreon, then not only Google will get less, but the crearor and toss other platform will get more money, so they can improve their services and keep the lights up. Or like choosing to pay for Cryptpad instead of Google Drive will again besides having Google and their investors getting less, Cryptpad devs (who are very resource constrained, just as mostly any users-first software project because of not being known) will get more.
Let me put it this way… I haven’t bought an EA product since 1998. Can you tell? LOL.
EA’s portfolio has been so thoroughly undiversified that they’re looking for a buyer, just like Square Enix, Zenimax, and Activision have been. In that time that EA became enormous, smaller publishers like Embracer, Paradox, Anna Purna, and Devolver have grown as they reached that neglected customer base that EA left behind. Larian has grown by making really good games in a style neglected by EA. EA owns BioWare and got further and further away from making the Baldur’s Gate 3 that Larian just made. So yes, it makes a difference.
I really admire your response here as you put my thoughts and feeling about this more eloquently than I could. I really want to incentivize the good work people are doing, and while my dollar going somewhere else might not mean much to EA or Blizzard, it means a lot more to smaller groups who are trying to do the right thing with less resources. It also just feels nice to spend money on something good :)
@emeraldheart I’m not frustrated, because it’s not a dilemma to me.
Blizzard’s glory days are long gone, WOTC does whatever, I had my fun, and J.K. Rowling is a more complex topic. But assuming she’s “bad” I’m fine with that too.
The games industry is only bleak if you omit the #indiedev scene. there are *so many* cool, new games.
E.g. In the last 12 months I have had a blast with Against the Storm, Phantom Brigade and Mechabellum.