1y ago

Rant: Frustration Related to Ethics of Games Companies

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.

6 comments

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.

@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.

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.

My advice is work out where you draw the line, and don't cross it.
I'm gonna be honest- if you're buying games through Steam, you're already giving money to a deeply unethical firm: Valve. Valve takes a 30% cut of all transactions on Steam. Valve is also the studio that introduced lootboxes and similarly predatory microtransactions to the western market, and continues to profit from them to this day.
Where I draw the line is when a studio drops below the already low bar set by the industry. When a studio sexually harasses an employee to the point of suicide. When most of the game's development cycle is pure crunch. When a studio puts predatory microtransactions into a singleplayer game.
I also draw the line when a game (or any other work of media, for that matter) is directly giving money to bigoted scumbags. If a studio employs bigoted scumbags, that person is getting paid whether or not I buy the game. But if a studio is making a game based on the IP of a bigoted scumbag, they're getting a cut of each sale. When a copy of that game is brought, they're getting a bit of money they wouldn't have got if the game wasn't brought.

6 comments