In spite of all the hate, I like that Blizzard's games don't use super nasty DRMs (like Denuvo, which EA, Ubisoft and many others use), all their games work perfectly under Linux (Wine/Proton), and they still host live download links to a game that's nearly three decades old (Diablo 2). Like literally yesterday I set up a new Linux laptop and was about to install Project Diablo 2 under Steam, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the HTTP links to the original D2 and D2 LoD setups were still alive, and the Win 9x-era downloader+installer still works just fine. I mean, how cool is that. And I could even log into battle.net and retrieve my CD keys too. For a 26yr old game.

It's actually extremely logical if we will step away for a minute from the maximalist black and white, all or nothing worldview. Of course there worse entities out there. This doesn't mean that it is bad/pointless/ineffective to pick a battle with a smaller evil. In fact, it is better to pick a smaller evil.

Can you boycott Palantir? Well, no. Not really. No regular citizen can (to any definition of getting a result). It's like 100% ineffective. But boycotting a much small, consumer facing shitcorp in a highly competitive market is in fact effective and can often work. The efficiency is somewhere between 1% to 99%, which in all scenarios objectively better than 0%.

Same with boycotting some Chinese brands for example. Sure, the defeatist argument goes that because most everything is made there we can't really boycott those wares. But who exactly set these "fair play" rules and do humans need to one-sidedly abide by them when facing corporate abuse? I can buy Chinese something and at the same time boycott Chinese something else and it is fine. I literally don't care if some megacorp would consider that "unfair" or "hypocrisy". And neither should any individual human be concerned about corporation's opinions, ever.

The gaming community likes to be extremely dramatic.

Grave danger of integer overflow (underflow?).

EA lost FIFA a few years ago. The games are now "FC". They still sell though.

>They're buying influence.

Buying EA for influence? With the reputation EA has in gaming? They're a joke - they're not influencing anything. Its like buying a violin to fix a flat tire.

So we can expect Battlefield: Iran sometime soon?

Starting the propaganda for a ground invasion. I wonder if this one one of the crowd-sourced ideas submitted to the DoD?

Didn't realize gameswashing was a thing like sportswashing, but here we are

This. See Bobby Kotik and the Epstein files.

I meant in the videogame industry.

What? This is JP Morgan on the hook for it if the loan goes bad.

I do like it.

Don't @ me until they bring back Sid Meier's SimGolf

Bundled with a revived Streets of SimCity please and thank you