After reading today EA’s takes on AI and strategies about boosting user monetization promoting and exploitation of user’s gambling addiction, I asked myself “How can someone defend those company agains boycotting and piracy?”.
So here I am: is there somewhere a curated list of VG companies to absolutely avoid giving money too? If not, do you thing we should do it? It would be nice to have a list with arguments and sources in order to make more publicly relevant the ethical and strateical reasons behind piracy.
p.s.I think it’s ok if you pirate things even without a moral stand behind, especially if you can’t afford games and other media at all, but the arguments still apply
High on the list for sure, near Nintendo BTW
I’m already not much of a Ubisoft fan, but wasn’t this just a response to a question about what would need to happen for subscriptions to take off? What should have been said? In context, it’s more of a hypothetical than an imperative.
Context doesn’t make for good clickbait, though.
Context is that Ubisoft is pivoting their entire business model to subscriptions, so this isn’t merely “a response to a question”, but their actual expectations of their users for their business model to succeed.
For simplicity, I have it in regex format
.+Jokes aside, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Activision-blizzard and Nintendo are the ones that come to mind.
If indi and plays well on deck, I’m generally on paying.
Don’t forget Nintendo.
If it’s publicly traded, just don’t.
The one exception I have is id, but I also don’t preorder, so if they fuck up the next Doom or Quake, I’ll know before I buy anyway.
This, publicly trading means your company is now the product, games are just a way to make the stock price go up, so they need to sell gazillions and have the broadest possible audience.
This inevitably leads to flavour of the month design by committee garbage gameplay, enshittified business models like “live service”, and writing catering to “global audiences” with cookie cutter quips and insufferable millennial “humour”.
All that or whatever the fuck cod writers are mainlining alongside taurine and the tortured soul of Chris Benoit.
Also Ta**Two/Rockstar
Warner Bros
For me its Ubisoft, EA and Nintendo.
Do you not know about Sony’s sordid past?
Google ‘Geohot ps3’. Then google ‘Sony rootkit CDs’.
George Hotz was the first person who jail broke a ps3. and taught others how to do it, until Sony sued him. Then anonymous fucked Sony, hard. like really hard.
Then google ‘Sony rootkit CDs’.
I get so excited anytime someone else remembers this shit. Thank you.
Never forget, Sony CEO response was basically “The people who had a rootkit installed on their machine don’t even know what a rootkit is; why should I care.”
Well, fuck around and find out.
Makes you feel old dunnit? 😂
I’m not a fan of any corporation, so they can get fucked too I won’t buy sony hardware but if they port a game to steam I want I’ll get in on sale.
I support valve with purchases on steam as it supports linux. There was also the fact that sony took the linux install option away from the ps2 (or was it ps3) .
Weren’t they the people who hid threats in the code aimed at geohot?
Add ActiBlizz and Epic for me.
What’s wrong with epic?
Sent from my pile of free epic games.
From a Linux user’s point of view, Epic refuses to support Linux. They also refuse to support their own games using EAC on Linux (via Proton) despite EAC being Linux-compatible.
EDIT: Grammar.
Additionally, instead of actually trying to compete and gain users but making a platform that isn’t trash, they insist on instead trying to trick users with temporary free game offers. And if that doesn’t work, they try to strong arm users into going to their platform by buying exclusive sales rights to games, bringing exclusives to the PC gaming space.
Their CEO is a loud clown who is always spouting nonsense on Twitter. They buy games studios and rip their games off of the platform where users bought them (see Rocket League), and discontinue mac/Linux versions that were fully functional.
Their flagship game preys on children via micro transactions. They lack so many features on their platform that (I believe) they have endorsed using Steams community features for games bought on Epic.
I could probably go on, but I think that’s probably sufficient.
To each their own, but Linux makes up 4% of PC OS market share. Can’t blame a company for not supporting such a small percentage.
Fair but you also can’t really judge someone for not using epic and disliking them when they can’t use epic because they won’t support their OS. Also the percentage is growing, steam is supporting and improving, and Epic is going to be far behind when they realize they should have supported linux too.
Not allowing reviews on the storefront seems minor, but is in fact an aggressively anti-consumer move given the standards of the industry. They’ve got other issues too, but that one gets ignored way too often for me to not mention
Change your passwords lawl
I have a bunch, but off the top of my head: Ubisoft, EA, Microsoft, Tencent, anything that’s Epic exclusive. I should really have Take-Two on there as well but realistically I’m never not going to play Civilization so my principles fail me there.
So, all of the triple A publishers. Got it.
Pretty much lol
there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. you kind of have to make your peace with that and steal when you can
This is what I’ve tried to remind myself of when I’m debating purchases. Usually I’ll wait to buy something on a steep sale or second hand. Or I’ll pirate it if I think the company is doing something shitty. But at the end of the day someone, somewhere down the line is getting screwed over. It all floats up to the top. There’s no trickle down
EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Sony(particularly, Sony if youre buying digital, Sony doesnt give a shit if your purchases suddenly go ”missing")
Unless it’s a structured, concentrated effort, I’m afraid that individuals boycotting won’t do much except saving you a few bucks. I don’t see that happening, considering the track record of gamers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI6BNvxmWD4
If you live in Europe/Australia and bought tne Crew, there’s something going on about creating a precedent that would forbid games as a service getting killed by Ross Scott.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=tI6BNvxmWD4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
That would be a pretty long list and also highly subjective. I’m a big fan of Paradox Interactive but can see how many feel their business model of multiple paid dlc, for what are often core features, to be highly predatory. The obvious ones being EA, Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard spring to mind though.
For me, its almost all the big studios.
One exception being FROM, and a few of the Sony owned studios.
I think Za/um should be in such list
I literally don’t buy anything I can get for free.
If you only consider monetary cost, you can get anything free.
If you consider risk, opportunity, and effort, nothing is free.
For your statement to be literally true, you must either buy literally everything or literally nothing depending on your perspective.
Based and petrol siphon pilled
Or A really rich friend that wants to play games with you
Sugar daddies fall under “effort”…at least if you want them to keep paying for your games.
YARRRR
Do you really need a list to tell you what to buy and not buy?
I mean it really doesn’t take that much effort to avoid those companies you don’t like.
Keeping a community list seems stupid, everyone has different things they like and don’t like, and the gaming community isn’t a personal army, despite what others might think.
Eh with the amount of bs companies do it gets pretty hard to keep track of
Plus most people don’t really have the time to dig into all of that
I think the point I was more getting at is that the bullshit that companies do is extremely subjective, and everyone has their own different things that they feel are important issues. But you’re not wrong. There is a lot of BS to keep track of.
And I’m thinking that if it’s related to something you do actually care about, you should be digging into it. Plenty of people are trying to mislead people all the time, and it’s so easy to get swept up in fake outrage if you don’t actually stop to question things.
That’s why a bunch of people are angry at a consulting firm for a bunch of different game studios right now. Because somebody literally just made a list of things for people to be mad at.
Damn, man. Are you alright? Why are you so stressed?
