Indies really are the way to go for both customers and developers if they want a better, more ethical and respectful environment. It is a risky career path, but given how many major publishers treat the developers under them, it’s not like sticking with mainstream would lead to a comfortable stable livelihood either.

Baldur’s Gate 3 really put me in a dilemma, but I think I’ll ultimately buy it because I want to support Larian Studios more than I want to avoid Wizards of the Coast. I wouldn’t trust Wizards enough to get One D&D and the likely tabletop lootbox hell they are scheming, but BG 3 is delivering a good product that deserves support. Though buying the Divinity games is an alternative if you don’t want WotC to get any money.

I’m a former game dev and I can tell you, at least from my experience, there was no golden age where developers and customers were treated fairly. It’s the primary reason why I left. Hell, I once interviewed at a place that showed off how the offices had beds in them, as if that was a selling point.

That said, I’d probably be someone who you’d consider “doesn’t care about the bad things these companies did.” I’m just too fuckin’ old to be mad about shit all of the time. If I was only going to patronize folks and companies who matched my own set of ideals and ethics, I would be more than just gameless. I would be homeless and penniless as well.

What I do is simply detach products and services from those who provide them. I can buy a thing from a person I find distasteful. I don’t have to invite them out for a drink and I certainly don’t have to avoid taking them to task for their poor or unethical behavior. Moreover, ethics and behavior are saleable. If someone comes around who offers something comparable to something from someone I find distasteful, then I can go patronize the new person instead. I have jumped ship from many service and product providers for that very reason. If you want my business, then you better ensure you’re either the only person who can provide what I want or ensure you’re the person I want to buy from.

If you’re not averse to piracy, you could go that route.

If you are averse to piracy, and have consoles to play on, buy used copies of games (where it’s even possible to) - the publisher sees no proceeds from that.

Failing that… There’s a lot of great indie games out there that aren’t problematic. I know it feels like you’re missing out if you aren’t playing whatever the current big AAA game is, but really, there’s plenty of indie games that are just as good, or that you’d get just as much enjoyment out of.

Frankly, it depends on how micro or macro you’re willing to think, and how much that personally bothers you. At the end of the day we live in multiple systems of oppression and exploitation that make it very hard - and sometimes outright impossible - to properly consume something without being unethical. From The Good Place:

“Life now is so complicated, it’s impossible for anyone to be good enough for the Good Place. These days, just buying a tomato at a grocery store means that you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labor, contributing to global warming. Humans think that they’re making one choice, but they’re actually making dozens of choices they don’t even know they’re making!”

From my personal point of view, there’s a few choices. The first is, you can just not consume. There’s more than enough indie games, as well as plenty of old-AAA games that won’t directly benefit their companies anymore. You can also pirate, if that’s not an online game.

From a more cynical point of view, your individual purchase (and, frankly, even a organized boycott) won’t make a difference to these companies. Modern capitalism doesn’t rely on genuine profit, just on the idea that an IP or corporation is profitable, and that’s enough to attract investors and investments, and inflate its share price as well as its value in the eyes of capitalists. This is a gross oversimplification, and generally only applies to the largest names, but still sadly relevant.

So at the end of the day, you have to think to yourself: Does it bother you to consume something? I won’t buy or play anything related to Harry Potter media because JKR disgusts me, but I see no issue with indirectly supporting WotC. Likewise, while the decision to not support Blizzard products is very easy (they don’t really make that many), I can’t say their scandals forced me to stop playing any more than their lack of dedicated support to their products.

There’s rarely an absolute moral good when it comes to consuming products, even indie ones; Publishers like Chucklefish and Dangen had their own share of abuse and neglect, and sometimes individual creators are just, well, assholes.

Have you tried growing up?

No, seriously.

You support more unethical bullshit buying avocados and meat than you do video games. To even give the issues you’ve mentioned as much attention as you have, while ignoring the much less ethical things you purchase far more often, shows how disingenuous and shallow your objection to those products really is, and it leads to more problems than it solves.

For example, Balders Gate 3 is a pretty fantastic game, with no micro transactions or as far as I can see any other form of end user manipulation.

They’re also one of the few studios I’ve seen recently that the devs dont seem burnt out on, which says a lot about how they were managed.

And they just license the content from wizards, to go “oh they’re tangentially related so it’s evil!” (Which you also did with hogwarts legacy) denies all the hundreds and thousands of passionate developers of a chance.

Indie games are a great alternative, true, but as others have said indies can be as toxic as the big companies when they want to be. Not to mention the long term consequences of that direction being developers can’t work together to make AAA games anymore, because according to your rules if a shithead makes it to the top everyone else’s work should be thrown away.

I’m frustrated by the current largely-unethical state of the games industry

It’s the fate of any large enough company in a capitalist system. Greed creates/incentivizes this behavior and then rewards it. Microtransactions and dark patterns wouldn’t exist if they didn’t work. Greedy people know this and the rest of us are plagued by them.

My partner is very tuned into the various ethical mishaps happening in the world and keeps me apprised of which companies are doing shitty stuff and which people/companies I should stop supporting.

Problem: the set of companies you shouldn’t support due to unethical behavior is pretty much all of them. As the saying goes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. If doing business with someone with blood on their hands puts blood on your hands, then only the hands of hermits and children are clean.

This is one of the reasons why I use free and open source software wherever possible, but very few games are FOSS and most of them were commercial before being FOSSified (e.g. Doom).

Hej, there

I can understand your frustration. Right now it feels that we small people can’t do anything to do good in the world. There are greedy capitalist everywhere. It is nearly impossible to understand what damage ones desicion could make. If our desicions even could make a difference.

But the thing is, you can’t overlook everything. It’s a gouverments job to keep an eye over Corporations.

But that doesn’t mean, that you can’t do anything. You can search for Informations and make yourself aware of those topics. You can support workers and strikes. You could limit yourself on what stuff you are comsuming.

You don’t have to boycott every major company and every Product. You just could make a list about everything you really need and what you are really looking forward to. So you can balance your need for morality and fun.

You will find a way that’s suits you. Don’t worry

I feel you, it’s tough knowing that there’s great games out there and feeling like you can’t play them. It’s even tougher when the people around you are playing them too, especially when they’re telling you how great they are.

I think your partner has the right idea with supporting indie developers, generally speaking the money stays closer to the creator, so it feels like you’re more directly supporting them. But you’ve also got to be careful because individuals can be just as vile as organizations, there’s been times that I bought a game, thought it was great, and then found out after the fact that the creator is outspokenly transphobic or something like that.

I want to mention Hogwarts Legacy as a specific example. It’s a game I don’t want to support because JK will profit from it, and she supports the erasure of people like me. I have a friend who played the game, and from his account the game itself is pretty hip. The character creator is supposedly pretty inclusive. He raised the point that JK had very little to do with the development of the game, and the development team seems to really care. Does that mean we shouldn’t support them because an evil individual profits from it? It certainly added some nuance to the situation that I hadn’t considered.

I think the best way to stay hopeful is to play games that you really enjoy. For me, it helped to educate myself on this list of dark patterns in gaming, and to find games that don’t include these features. To me that says that the creators want you to enjoy their experience to the utmost, because generally speaking the more dark patterns are in the game, the more the game is designed to profit off of you. You should be the one to profit from the game IMO.

it’s a complex issue, and it will probably end up dirty, since it’s business in the end.

I could understand why people would avoid buying Hogwarts Legacy, because how much the IP is tied to transphobic JK Rowling. But the devs on the other hand, they mostly don’t get the say on which IP to work on. I personally avoid games like that, because the same person has enough followers to keep spouting hate which could and have translated to real world bigotry and violence. And the game serves as marketing for people to follow JK Rowling.

Then there are companies with sexual harassments incidents. In that case, spreading the words and making enough noise so that some legal investigations or actions are taken, should be the way. Then there’s crunch and overwork issues, helping them to spread the word about union, not to cross the picket lines, etc.

There are many of those issues, because we didn’t address them earlier in the past few decades. But shedding the light on them and you feeling frustrated are good things, it means that we’re progressing, we’re identifying, feeling guilty, and trying to address them.

I’d say, be more conscious when purchasing games, maybe if you really really want to play Baldur’s Gate 3, then only buy it when there’s a steep discount? Nowadays I play a lot more indies and retro games, and probably would only buy a full price games once or twice a year. There’s large number of other good games out there, don’t be pressured to be FOMO, wait until there’s steep discount. And after waiting for awhile, sometimes you realize that you could just ignore the problematic game altogether.

Also, just because they are indies, don’t mean that they can’t be piece of shit. Main dev of Ion Fury is homophobic, Jonathan Blow of the Witness is misogynistic POS, Kovarex from Factorio dismissing statutory rape as SJW term

When it comes to the corporate world, your purchases are like your vote in politics. WotC has done some stuff that lots of people (myself included) don’t like. They’ve also done some stuff people really do like.

The situation around the open gaming license was the perfect example. People boycotted D&D beyond, and other directly related products, but very few boycotted the D&D movie, because people wanted to discourage Wizards from the specific license changes, but didn’t want to discourage making good movies for our niche audience.

Obviously not all companies have separate things like this. Activision/Blizzard are more monolithic, and so selectively boycotting them is harder.

All this said, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so if any boycott is costing you too much, monetarily, mental health-wise, etc., you shouldn’t feel bad for breaking it

I think your partner is on the right track-- be part of the solution, make something new.

Larian studios seems great. I would like more companies to invest in / hire studios similar to Larian. Sure, WotC sucks. But I will vote with my dollars for them to work with Larian. Maybe it means in the future more gaming companies might look like Larian. Everybody has to draw their own line, though.

Nah, games should be fun and stressing over what happens behind the scenes distracts from that. Do I know Acti-Blizz have major issues, yes, does it stop Diablo 4 being fun, nope.

They’re all big companies. They’re all shitty somewhere. If you want to play something just play it. I find the worst of them are also making games that don’t interest me in the slightest, but even Activision put out the Tony Hawks Remaster and EA put out It Takes Two so I was all over them.

If you spend all your time worrying about shitty companies, you’ll be living in a cave eating moss. It’s OK to lament the state of things and then do them anyway. It’s on the workers to unionise and shaft the management back, because without them there’s no product and no money.