There’s been an interesting reaction within the Destiny 2 community following news of mass layoffs at developer Bungie earlier this week. While 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:what happened at Bungie is not at all uncommon in the game industry, especially this year, fans of Destiny 2 feel compelled ꧒to react to the news in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen before with similar situations. Throughout this week many Destiny 2 players have been posting their refunds requests for The Final Shape in solidarity with the developers that were unceremoniously let go, and some are calling for a boycott in order to send a message to Bungie that they can’t get away with treating workers this way.
Many will argue that this kind of consumer activism is pointless, and that you shouldn’t participate in them because they don’t work. Whenever I’ve written about video game boycotts before, like with the release of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hogwarts Legacy earlier this year, I have always taken the position that boycotting a product will not change anything, but you should still do it if that’s what your personal ethics demand. We did not cover Hogwarts Legacy here and I encouraged others not to play it, not because I thought we could send a message to the game industry, but because I believe enriching ♛J.K. Rowling while she funds and serves as the figurehead of a hate movement is a bad thing to do.
There's No Justifying The Callousness Of Bungie's Layoffs
Corporations like Bungie would like us to believe that layoffs are a natural function of doing business and that casual crueltꦰy is necessary.💎
There are shades of Hogwarts Legacy discourse in the Bungie Boycott conversation too. If you no longer want to give your money to a company that mistreats its employees, then you shouldn’t. But, you also shouldn’t withhold your pre-o𓃲rder because you think it will have some kind of impact on the way Bungie does business. I understand feeling like you need to be proactive when something like this happens, and I respect the desire ꦇto help, but the reality is nothing you can do is going to move the needle in this situation. If you decide you’re done with Destiny over this, make that decision for yourself.
By the same token, the people who believe boycotting will only harm the game are also grossly overestimating the amount of influence customers have. We heard the same arguments with Hogwarts Legacy, when people claimed that not buying the game would hurt the developers who have no responsibility for Rowling’s action🔯s. Now they argue that if the layoffs happened because Destiny 2 is missing its projected annual revenue by 45 percent as it is claimed, then refusing to buy The Final Shape will only lead to more developers losing work. How does that help?
You do not have a responsibility to keep Bungie or any other studio in business by buying their ♑games. If that were the case, you would be harming developers every time you don’t buy a game, and that’s absurd. Only Pete Parsons and the executives that run Bungie’s business are responsible for Bungie’s developers. They decided to conduct layoffs, and they failed to run their business in a su🤡stainable way. The players did not fail the developers here, and I assure you buying more Silver would not fix the problems Bungie faces.
The individual impact anyone can have over a business like Bungie is equivalent to nothing, and even if the entire online community for a game like Destiny banded together and all agreed to to abstain from pre-ordering The Final Shape, we would all still only represent a minor fraction of the total Destiny community, many of whom aren’t even aware that layoffs occurred, and may never know. The world is simply too big for us to ever vote with our wallets i🦩n these situations, especially when it comes to something as normalized as layoffs in the game industry.
Again, don’t give Bungie your money if you no longer want to support the company, but don’t ever expect an outcome from the decision. The only thing that will protect developers from greed and mismanagement ꦉis a union. That may seem like I’m handwaving the problem, but unlike a boycott, you actually can have an impact here.
Game Workers Unite is a great resource if you want to learn more about unionization efforts in the game industry. Here's about how to get involved.
There’s a cultural shift happening in favor of unions, which have been weakened by decades of effective anti-union propaganda from conservatives and big corporations. By educating yourself about unions and vocally supporting unionization at studios like Bungie you can contribute to a broader social understanding a🔥nd acceptance. Believe it or not, there’s a lot of industries that could benefit from things like collective bargaining besides the game industry, maybe you work in one of them. Posting your refunds on Twitter probably isn’t going to help anyone, but supporting unions will help pretty much everyone. Just imagine how mad Parsons would be in Bungie unionized, wouldn’t that feel a lot better than denying him your $60 pre-order?
