This. Big companies SHOULD be held to higher standards--because they have more power.

NOT because the indie community is morally superior, because boy howdy, it is not. The worst abusers I've known of weren't employees of big companies... https://twitter.com/TheDovetailor/status/1318046027815874560

...and indie devs are just as likely to protect abusers as devs at major companies.

They just have less power to do so (and to freeze out victims from opportunities). But that doesn't mean they're not trying.

It's easy for "we need to put pressure on big game companies to make gaming safer, give marginalized people opportunities, and stop sheltering/rewarding abusers because *they have the power to change things*" to become "they're terrible and the people criticizing them are good."

But criticizing a bad actor doesn't automatically make *you* good. You can absolutely be a marginalized person who's right about criticizing institutional power structures and who also abuses your own power over other people.

Like, if experiencing oppression automatically made you a good ally to other people experiencing oppression, we wouldn't need the term "Karen."

And while, yes, people gotta eat and there's nothing wrong with self-promotion, and your criticism of a big competitor shouldn't be automatically dismissed just because they *are* a competitor...

...I do side-eye people who are like, "this big game company is trash because XYZ, so you should play my indie game instead of their game!"

like, cool, no, you might be right about the company being trash but you just soured me on ever playing your game

And I do think that while a lot of the anger comes from righteous places, there's some ugly truths about small industries with blurry lines between fans/hobbyists and professionals, and one of those is a *strong* scarcity mentality.

I saw it in the early days of the ARG community, when ARGs were trendy and lots of companies wanted to try them, and I see it in the TTRPG community.

You have a situation in which most people making games and game content are amateurs, in the true sense of the word of making things for love, and the community is small and people know each other and there are community faves.

And there are also a *handful* of Real Jobs--full time, health insurance, all that jazz--with big companies who have the only name recognition to the larger public.

It gets ugly *really* fast in this setup--there's a whole "sellout" contempt vibe if someone who was an indie creator gets one of those jobs, and other people will swear up and down they never wanted to work for The Man but be nasty as fuck to former colleagues who do.

Not most people in the community, obviously, but it doesn't really matter that it's not most people.

And, I mean, I get why. You discover something you love, you labor hard making it, and then you learn that it could actually be something that pays the rent.

That same scarcity mentality is *everywhere,* though, not just on the indie/freelance side. It's actually among employees of the big companies, too. There aren't enough full time jobs, and they are *anything* but secure.

And so the same scarcity strain that often leads people who don't have those jobs to go into a feeding frenzy at any sign of weakness from big companies (whether it's at the company itself or an employee) actually contributes to nepotism and protection of bad people.

Because whether you continue to have a job, or can find another one if you lose your current one, is VERY much about who you know, which makes it very dangerous to call out anyone.

Like, I dunno, it's a microcosm of the way capitalism fucks us all up, but because it's TTRPGs--the amateur-iest of industries, in which most people are not particularly subtle or smooth or *good* at politicking--the self-interest is a lot more obvious.

I'm not really interested in blaming anyone here--ultimately, all of this is driven by artificial scarcity which very few people who aren't executives have any power to change--but it does make me profoundly distrustful of everyone in the industry--fan, pro, indie, etc. alike.

And it's not because I think most of the people I don't trust, which is most people in TTRPGs, are bad people. Most of them aren't. But most of them are people under strain, and insecurity makes people willing to throw others under the bus.

(As unfortunate as it is, the people in TTRPGs I'm least leery of are creators who have full-time jobs in other industries and no desire to ever make games a full-time job.)

And as I've also said a million times, if you're inside a big company and trying to change it, don't shit on people outside it criticizing it. And if you're outside, don't shit on people inside trying to change it.

The only way things change is a pincer action from both.

Whichever position you're in, the other one isn't your enemy. They're the wall you push the company against to get it to change.