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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

I think of it like this: my own personal boycotts do nothing individually, but I am doing a very small something by refusing to be a bridge to grossly evil companies into my communities, and raising the ethical concerns with egregiously bad corporate cultures and business models. And for my own personal comfort, I just can’t engage with products that fill me with disgust due to the taint of who will ultimately profit from my purchase.

On that, when my personal attachment to a creator, studio, or individual game supercedes my disgust or frustration with a publisher’s business models or revenue streams, I try and keep that in the conversation. I play a lot of Warframe, which has some mildly manipulative monetisation like algorithmic discounts and crippleware elements; and PSO2 which is published by a corporation with a large gambling revenue stream, and the game itself has gambling elements in it, albeit surprisingly low on the evil anti-player scale.

And that’s the thing, sometimes I love something enough that I can’t bear to part with it. I find Yoshi-P’s transphobia and support of NFTs to be sufficiently revolting that I can’t play FFXIV anymore, nor will I ever buy anything or even positively talk about anything associated with him ever again; but I’m still subscribed to FFXI. I still plan to buy new mainline Dragon Quest games despite the fact that Square-Enix treats its customers with absolute contempt and has committed to a path of ecological violence against the Pacific.

That said, I think it is a good mental exercise to get in the habit of thinking about who you’re giving your patronage to. Do they have good working conditions? Where do they make their money? Are the leaders shitheads? These things become part of a disposition, and you become part of a cultural conversation, one that’s clearly starting to engage more and more people. Start talking about good developers and especially workers’ coops like KO_OP (handily named) and Motion Twin; or studios with excellent working conditions like Supergiant, Hello Games, or Monolith Soft.

That said, this is all still part of the infamously ineffectual practice of lifestylism. At the end of the day I believe it’s about cultivating a particular set of values and trying to broach them to as many people as possible, and learning to effectively and respectfully communicate them. If you ever do get in the industry or can support people in the industry, that’s when you can actually do something material.

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/

I really thought this was going to be about gamergate and I was ready to just burn down the entire Internet

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.

There is no ethical consumption under this system, and there’s absolutely no hope for it.

The only thing we can do is set our own little moral lines so our hands feel a little cleaner, but it’s absolutely impossible to exist in this society while also caring about everything awful going on. There’s just too much of it. If I gave one dime to every cause that should be important to me (based on how I see myself), I would drain my bank account into the deep negatives. You absolutely must prioritize your time, money, and attention to a few specific things that you absolutely can’t sleep at night knowing you’ve supported.

For example, global warming is totally fucked. There’s literally no way to not fuck up and strip away most of the planet’s biosphere, even if everyone woke up tomorrow and said “Shit, we have to go 0 carbon right now!” and accomplished it before lunchtime. It’s too late. We’re just fucked. The best case is we’re fucked well after I die, but even that’s not looking particularly likely. So there’s no point in me moderating my purchases around so-called “environmentally friendly” companies, because there’s no such thing and, if there were one, it wouldn’t matter.

But LGBTQ people (like me) exist right now, and will continue to exist right up until we trigger the greenhouse gas cascade that turns Earth into Venus, and since I know we only have so much time left here, it’s very important to me to not support people who want to make sure LGBTQ people suffer as much as possible in the interim. Fortunately, the organizations that hate gay people are about as subtle as people who do CrossFit, so it’s easy to see them and not give them any money. Am I still giving money to crypto-facists who keep their mouths shut about it in public? Probably, but at least I’m kind of rewarding the behavior of “shutting the fuck up”.

Meanwhile, I financially oppose WotC’s bullfuckery only insofar as it affects me, personally. If One D&D weren’t a giant tire fire that grows with every UA playtest release, I’d probably suck it up and buy it. But since they’re also trying to shoehorn their virtual tabletop with AI DMs as the exclusive method by which people play their game, like some kind of half-assed MMO, I won’t. Not because I can be assed to care about AI or anti-consumer practices, but because it’s obnoxious to me and not fun to me and costs me money for shit I won’t enjoy as much. I simply don’t have the energy to care about WotC’s happy relationship with the Pinkertons, if for no other reason than literally every major company in the world also pays the Pinkertons to do fucky shit all over the globe, and if I care about one company doing it, I have to care about all the other companies openly doing the same thing, and then I’d have to, like, start making my own soap and stuff. Which I just don’t have the energy to do.

What it ultimately comes down to is this: honor is an expensive luxury that the vast majority of us simply cannot afford. Buy what you need to survive, spend the extra on whatever bread and circuses allow you to cope with the impending doom of society, and prioritize your moral focus on only a few things that loom the biggest in your mind, the ones that produce the largest amount of shame and guilt for supporting.

Everything is going to produce some amount of guilt, because it’s all fucked. You just have to learn to set a guilt-filter in your brain, so guilt below a certain threshold doesn’t register anymore. There’s literally nothing to be done about it: Even death can’t absolve us of supporting oppression and environmental destruction. After you die, someone’s going to give shady religious conmen money from your deceased wallet to dig up a big rock, scribble some words on it, put you in an unnecessary coffin, bury you with heavy diesel equipment, tell lies about a bigot-god over your corpse, and then hire someone for minimum wage (at best; more likely, they’ll exploit an ethnic minority from another country to do it for pennies) to mow the grass on top of you for the rest of society’s existence. Or the other option, which involves exactly as many shady religious conmen, but switches out the long-term grass-mowing for a short, massive burst of fuel and carbon to turn you into ashes, the button for which is probably also being pressed by an oppressed wage slave making a few nickles an hour.

BUT, there’s always the possibility that I’m wrong, and that things aren’t eternally and irrevokably fucked forever. As a hedge against that, I do two things: I stay employed and budget my money (so I won’t be the guy standing naked in a cornfield waiting for whatever apocalypse or second-coming that doesn’t happen, thus making myself well and truly fucked), and I vote in every single election I ever hear about, from the Presidential election to the August special election to replace the town dogcatcher.

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