I just wish it wasn’t literally the same story of overambition and hype, like, every single fucking time
I can’t help but imagine an alternate history where the Witcher 3 wasn’t the massive blow up success and CD Project remained a mid size developer. Producing interesting Euro RPGs as an alternative to large US and Japanese developers. That underdog success story evaporated so rapidly.
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It’s such a constantly-repeating story of ego and exploitation and managerial incompetence and this one also has all the transphobia and racism stuff that many large articles forget about. It’s just gross.
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If someone ever offers you $700 a month as a junior programmer stand up and just laugh as you walk out the door.
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It won’t stop until the audience makes these stories translate into financial repercussions for these companies.
This includes people on this forum. Yes, this is a callout.
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Couldn’t disagree with that view more. It’s not the responsibility of consumers to police the management of companies.
There needs to be actual legal ramifications for poor management. Across all industry the managerial class make all the money and make all the mistakes with zero accountability.
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Never said I was against legal ramifications, obviously those need to happen too.
The audience, however, does bear some responsibility.
If this forum wants to collectively boycott CD Projekts future games and we genuinely all think it will make an impact then this is me publicly stating that I’ll join in that endeavor.
However, I’m really skeptical of consumer side activism. How do you organize something of that scale? At a size big enough to impact the bottom line of a big corporation? Unless people working at these places decide to unionize and call for a boycott to coincide with a walkout our something of that nature I just don’t see how simply not buying a game is going to change this. I think it’s a fine but ultimately empty moral gesture.
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What’s wrong with an empty moral gesture? What’s wrong with taking an ethical stand even if it won’t directly or immediately result in change?
Again, I’m not trying to say consumer action should be the only action, nor am I saying it is even an effective action.
However, I am saying that I see a fair amount of folks on this forum justifying their purchase of a game they knew to be made unethically.
People have different reasons for playing a video game outside of just playing a game for enjoyment. Some people have an academic interest in playing the game, either because of their interest in video games as a medium, or in cyberpunk. Some people are journalists and want to, or feel they need to, cover the game for their job. Some people who played it may not have even purchased it. Pigeonholing people on this forum and attempting to get them to feel bad in order to drive them to make a change that might ultimately prove fruitless seems counter productive to me.
Nothing. If, as an individual, a person wants to not buy a game because it was made unethically, or not play it because it was made unethically, that’s fine! That’s okay. I get it, not buying the game is a thing you can do that makes it feel like you’ve done something about this very big, hard to untangle problem. I just don’t understand directing energy at people who played it on this forum, instead of at the people who made it unethically. Yeah, the people on this forum are more directly accessible, but the effort is misplaced.
I’m not telling people to not boycott this or any other CDPR game, but I do think encouraging people to continue to advocate for things like unionization and better working conditions is a more helpful approach than shaming people for being curious about a game.
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Well, historically there’s only really been one way to drastically improve working conditions long-term all over the board (Week-ends, work day reduction, legal protection for workers etc), or specific industries. Still, a period of capital reaction swiftly followed, is continuing to this day and has been spectacularly successful.
This suggest there’s really only one to do away with all of this shit for good. I know I’m preaching to the choir (at least for many on this forum), but I mean that as understandably frustrating as it may be for people to imagine (I’m no exception), our choices are that we either accept our shitty lot and maybe do some call-outs here and there, try to sooth our conscience with gestures, while continuing to pray for benevolence or take seriously the reality of the society we live in, which is a class society.
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People who play video games aren’t a unified enough community for a boycott to work, if “working” is defined as hurting the sales of the product or the overall revenue of the company. Hell, boycotts in general have an uphill climb to actually accomplishing anything of that nature.
Boycotts are more for hurting the reputation of the company and keeping the company’s actions in people’s minds. In a sense it doesn’t matter if an individual has purchased the game. Someone who knows about all the problems and didn’t buy the game but doesn’t ever talk about the issues is less impactful than someone who did buy the game but won’t shut up about how terribly CDPR has acted.
Sure it might seem personally hypocritical but the amount of money we’re talking about on an individual level is trivial when it comes to the scale these companies are now working at. They don’t really care about one person’s $60. They care about getting delisted from PSN. They care about the endless stream of bug videos getting posted. And they care about their workers unionizing and countries passing pro-worker legislation.
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And that share price dropping so heavily happened irrespective of the number of sales or at least from what I’ve been led to believe.
