Our recent Daily Grind topic about boycotts got me thinking about how boycotts are actually supposed to work, which is ironic because what prompted the topic in question wasn’t actually a formal boycott at all. Seriously, that’s the funniest part of the whole story. There was not a real boycott; there was the imagined possibility of a boycott that got the right people turbo-spooked before any boycotts could actually materialize. Which is kind of hilarious.
But that got me thinking about boycotts because a lot of people do not really understand how or why boycotts are supposed to work. It’s the real cause behind the whole “boycotts don’t work” mentality because if people who don’t understand what a boycott is meant to do on any level are running a boycott, then it’s not going to work effectively. As a bonus, this also works well if you want to think about how to manage boycotts of anything else, so it’s not specific to MMOs and gaming, but it does cover them.
At its base level, a boycott is very simple, and it’s that simplicity that tends to trip things up. Boycotts are functionally a form of denial. As long as you’re doing the Bad Thing, you can’t have any pudding, which in this case is using “pudding” as synecdoche for money, attention, etc. The problem is that all of that simplicity tends to either wind up pushing the actual subtleties out of the discussion or it winds up in that space of being so simple that it’s prone to misunderstanding.
So let’s start with the first point. A boycott needs to have clear, communicated goals. They don’t need to be communicated directly to one person or anything. If you are boycotting Guild Wars 2 until such time as it adds a bard-related elite specialization to one of the game’s professions, you do not need to deliver your hand-written petition to Mike Arenanet in his home, but you do need to communicate it somehow.
If you’re saying that this makes a one-person boycott almost completely pointless… yeah, sorry, it kinda is. Mass movements of the people require mass. It’s unfair, but it’s what we gotta live with. I ain’t thrilled about it either, buckaroo.
Second, a boycott doesn’t work at all if there’s no actual boycotting to do. For example, I cannot boycott World of Warcraft right now. I simply cannot do it. I am not playing the game. I cannot plausibly unsubscribe because I am not subscribed. If a member of the staff wore a particularly offensive hat (I would make the obvious joke, but Ashes of Creation actually made those hats, and now you know how I feel about that game), there would be nothing I could withhold in order to alter behavior.
This leads to a valid third point, which I am going to stress in text: Boycotts work only if there is an end condition.
My point here is not that the end condition is particularly likely; it’s just that it must be achievable and that the boycotted company has to believe that it will lead to a change. If I get a large chunk of players to boycott Final Fantasy XIV until au ra women are given a height slider reaching up to six feet in height, we have to also be ready to resubscribe if that happens and be believed that we will do so. If the height slider is added but we say “now it needs to be seven feet,” why in the heck would anyone listen to us? We requested a condition and then went back on it.
Fourth and last on the list, a boycott requires some personal sacrifice on your part. I don’t mean that in any kind of moral sense but in the sense that if you don’t have skin in the game, you don’t have credibility, and that pressure needs to be applied in the right direction.
FFXIV had a “healer strike” at one point that was incredibly ineffective because it was run by people who insisted that they were going to show CBU3 that healers weren’t going to put up with changes by… not queueing up for content. Not only did this fail to achieve buy-in from other players who might be enticed to boycott, but it wasn’t even aimed in the right direction. On a basic business level, the developers are fine if you pay your subscription and stand around in a city pointedly not queueing for content. That is not their problem.
“So if all of these conditions are true, a boycott will be successful?” Oh heck no. These are base conditions. Whether or not it’s going to be successful is another story altogether because the whole point of a boycott is that you are trying to apply pressure from the bottom to the top. This is kind of hard to do! It’s why boycotts are kind of a last resort most of the time: You have a pretty decent chance of accomplishing nothing, but sometimes you’ve got no alternatives.
With any kind of consumer product, you have a highly asynchronous relationship in which an audience is buying a thing (or failing to do so), and it’s really hard to sort through the signal of when people aren’t buying the product because of Pet Reason X or something else. It’s the reason why, say, Splitgate 2‘s studio can have a CEO who insists that his grating and unpleasant political statement that he insisted was not political has nothing to do with why players are staying away… and you can’t prove him wrong. He could be right that if the game were great, nobody would care that much.
This is compounded when it comes to video games because a lot of the time, the “problems” come from inside the house, so to speak. For example, I think it would be entirely valid to say that Microsoft’s leadership in the gaming division is the reason why the company is a complete trainwreck, and thus those leaders should be cut and replaced. The problem is that the people who would be making that decision are also the people who would be losing their jobs. So while I could boycott Microsoft consoles theoretically (not practically, for reasons we’ve already covered), the net result is unlikely to end with those leadership changes.
Do I think it’s still better to not give the company money if I can avoid it? I… don’t know. It’s a complicated situation. I don’t want to be playing Overwatch 2, and so it’s pretty easy to avoid really thinking about the morality of boycotting the game because I’m not playing it anyway. At the same time, I don’t know if my boycotting it would be likely to have the effect I want even if it were an option. As with everything in the world, it’s complicated and hard to sort out.
But that’s life, and I think it’s important to engage with the world as it is instead of how we want it to be. And that includes recognizing that there are right ways and wrong ways to do a boycott in the first place. That’s not saying that every boycott or even most boycotts work – just that you have to at least start from the right place if you want a chance of achieving something.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
