The idea that if you don't buy/promote a game you're guilty of making passionate good people lose their jobs is what corporations want you to believe because it means they can do whatever they want.

It's absolute bullshit.

First off, the idea that customers are responsible for keeping developers employed is absurd and doesn't even hold up in practice because the revenue from a game goes to its distributor, not its developers.

Even if a game is successful, that doesn't guarantee that the same developers will be contracted again, or if it's an internal studio, that the people who worked on it keep their jobs. People get fired after every major AAA production.

There will always be games that fail to make revenue, there will always be developers that lose their jobs, that much is inevitable.

It only becomes a supposed moral question to people when you have an actual reason to not support a game or a company.

If you "don't feel like buying it" you're in the clear, if you "don't want to support an abusive company" you're suddenly the one pulling the trigger on nice passionate developers' careers.

People boycott things because they know the only way a corporation will listen to something is if it has a major effect on their revenue, as that leads to potential shareholder drops.

Unless you literally buy every game ever made, this approach should not bother you.

But let's assume for a second that boycotting a video game does explicitly lead to decent people losing their jobs.

I would rather see an entire company die than see its powerful members abuse those same decent people and I will explain why.

There's always people who lose their jobs.

People can get new jobs.

There's always games that don't do well.

People can make new games.

But when there's abuse, you know what people can't do?

They can't be un-abused.

I would rather see every single person at Ubisoft lose their job if it meant one less person had to suffer violent and sexual abuse from one of its core staff members than I would seeing one more report of such abuse.

And that's if we're working on the hypothetical scenario that boycotting a company truly does tear it apart like that.

If it did, people would do it all the time. And yet there's no precedent for such claims.

I refuse to buy games from a company that has recent reports of abuse and I believe video game news blogs who promote the games of those companies are abuse apologists.

You might disagree with that, but it's my stance.

If you really care about developers losing their jobs then you wouldn't be arguing with people who just happen to not buy a video game.

You're doing that because you want to justify to yourself that you're not bad for buying said game.

Note that Ubisoft has not fired a single person over these reports of abuse so far.

They've had several members resign, yes, keeping their professional reputation in check and allowing them to just keep on pursuing other positions in the industry.

I bring this up because the only alternative solution people have to boycotting is "awareness."

Ubisoft has done this forever, while more information came to light two months ago it did not come out of nowhere. The same goes for other companies.

I'm sorry, but as important as "awareness" is, it gets you nowhere without action.

Everyone is aware of this abuse by now and Ubisoft is back to being reported on with the same positive attitude as any other AAA company in video game press.

This is why I'm so adamant about calling out video game press whenever they promote Ubisoft games.

If they stopped promoting Ubisoft's games while repeatedly talking about their abuse it would actually have a major impact.

But no.

IGN had a genuine "sponsored" video promoting an Ubisoft game today. Confirming that Ubisoft sees IGN as a vital face outward.

IGN is my go-to pick here because they do it more than anyone, but all the major video game press sites do it.

Will boycotting lead to anything?

Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on how many people and websites actually care to go through with it.

But at least my conscience is clean as I'm not knowingly funding an abuser's wallet.

So right after I made this thread there was confirmation that at least one of the abusers who left Ubisoft was actually fired.

So that's one good thing.

It might have been confirmed earlier, the report I saw was 20 minutes after I ended the thread.