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.
Have you tried growing up?
No, seriously.
You support more unethical bullshit buying avocados and meat than you do video games. To even give the issues you’ve mentioned as much attention as you have, while ignoring the much less ethical things you purchase far more often, shows how disingenuous and shallow your objection to those products really is, and it leads to more problems than it solves.
For example, Balders Gate 3 is a pretty fantastic game, with no micro transactions or as far as I can see any other form of end user manipulation.
They’re also one of the few studios I’ve seen recently that the devs dont seem burnt out on, which says a lot about how they were managed.
And they just license the content from wizards, to go “oh they’re tangentially related so it’s evil!” (Which you also did with hogwarts legacy) denies all the hundreds and thousands of passionate developers of a chance.
Indie games are a great alternative, true, but as others have said indies can be as toxic as the big companies when they want to be. Not to mention the long term consequences of that direction being developers can’t work together to make AAA games anymore, because according to your rules if a shithead makes it to the top everyone else’s work should be thrown away.
You know why I hated on hogwarts legacy?
I hated on it because it had denuvo and was performing like ass unless you had high end hardware at the time
Ah, disregard my last comment. You’re clearly in bad faith, there’s no discussion to be had with you.
I appreciate your thought-out response. I’m going to respond as best I can to your points.
I struggle with moral/ethical conundrums in all areas of my life. The current discussion is games, but I really do consider the harm I might be causing any time I buy things. There are some harms that I cannot avoid, such as the purchase of gasoline (my current income is low and I cannot afford a greenee car). Others, such as food purchases, are limited in what I can do… But I try anyway. I have an app for telling me about ethical sourcing by company/product which I use at the store. Clothing, sadly, tends to be unethical no matter what, unless I make my own clothes - I sadly don’t have the time or money to do so.
With video games, which are themselves a luxury, I have so many choices of what to play that I feel I have much more ability to decide what not to play, based on how I feel about where my money is going.
I should also acknowledge that I don’t think any of these games/developers will suffer as a result of me not purchasing them. Developers/programmers also do not make income based on sales, and layoffs happen after the release of many major AAA games, simply because they don’t need that large team anymore (I don’t agree with this practice at all, and I think it’s horrible to do to people who already don’t make enough for their work, but it’s relatively industry standard). The gaming community is also waaaay too large for any kind of boycott to be effective. I’m just trying to be mindful about my purchases based on my own feeling.
I think you raise a fair point about indie games. I think it’s a good reminder to me to look into those as well. As long as there’s no major publicized controversy surrounding an indie company, however, there’s no information I can use to steer me away from it. But, I appreciate your reminder not to blindly purchase indie games just because the company is “indie.”
Overall, I appreciate you taking the time to respond to me. I will be considering your points as I move forward.
As far as I know, Larian is not such a company like you mention. Everything they’ve done or said so far, to my knowledge, both referring to BG3 and their previous games is classes above the average for the industry.
Of course it’s your decision to not buy their game based on the fact they had to use WotC’s IP, but you’re punishing an actually good developer for something they did not have a choice on (WotC’s ethics and way of running things).
Truth is like that you’re not hurting them, and most importantly not hurting WotC who’d get a small percentage of a small percentage of your sale. Couple of bucks at best is nothing to WotC’s bottom line.
But that’s your prerogative and that’s fine. However, I do suggest you play the game, cracked if you must because so far with about 20h in, it’s an amazing game from a great company. Maybe it won’t make you buy it, but at least it might make you consider supporting their other, or future, games that are not connected with WotC. Because the last few years we’re fast to point fingers to others, but forget to reward the few that do things properly.
while ignoring the much less ethical things you purchase far more often
OP did not indicate anywhere what kind of food they buy. You are judging them without knowing their habits.
You’re right I am, but I do stand by it.
Mine is simply a more specific example of the “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” argument that has been repeated here many times.
It was a reasonable to assume OP frequently purchases food
It was a reasonable to assume OP frequently purchases food
You specifically mentioned avocados and meat. I know some people who only buy local food and do not buy meat. Your reasoning would not apply to them.
Mine is simply a more specific example of the “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” argument that has been repeated here many times.
You mean the argument saying we cannot fix the system without abolishing the system? You’re using it to instead justify the inequities of the system and henceforth ignoring them because you completely missed the point of the phrase?
You could make the same argument for voting. What does your little drop in the vote bucket matter? Do you believe voting is a waste of time too?
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.
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.
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.
