cosmicdwarf:

kaeebonrai:

the-spoopy-ghost-of-raejin99:

kaidaned:

kaidaned:

kaidaned:

kaidaned:

i don’t want any more games from bioware until i know definitively that the developers are working in a happy healthy work environment

the knowledge that my favorite games were made by people who were under such enormous pressure that they needed to take multiple month long stress leaves because they couldn’t handle the development process is horrifying and frankly, pisses me off

i have been a bioware apologist for too long. no matter how much i loved andromeda, i can’t support bioware’s future until things have changed.
developers livelihoods matter more than the bioware brand. because bioware means nothing without those devs.

oh and ONE LAST THING.
FUCK anyone who harassed those developers. fuck you. fuck you fuck you. fandom is just as guilty.

I think part if the issue is, and I don’t mean this as an excuse for Bioware and EA, is that this type of crunch-based corporate culture is endemic to the entire gaming industry. While we definitely need to put pressure on Bioware and EA to improve, nothing will change unless we put similar pressure on the industry as a whole.

While I wouldn’t tell people that they shouldn’t do so, especially as an act of solidarity, refusing to buy from Bioware or EA on it’s own won’t change much. Like most industries, almost every major competitor has similar problems, even if they’re not always to the scale that has been revealed in this case. As is usually the case, true ethical consumption is practically impossible. Even if you stop buying from the worst offenders, the “bad but not that bad” studios and producers won’t see it as a rebuke of their use of crunch-time-culture, but simply that they can’t go that far with it. Those practices will still exist and fall under the radar until things get as bad as they did here.

I can’t claim to have a perfect solution myself, but helping to spread stories like this, showing support for efforts by game developers to organize and unionize, suggesting and supporting laws that will protect game developers from abusive business tactics like this, and similar efforts are a start. Make the effort as visible as possible, so that the whole industry knows we won’t keep accepting this behavior.

Like I said, I definitely won’t tell you not to stop buying from Bioware, but we still need to do more to see actual change.

We should definitely do more, but we should *also* refuse to buy from especially egregious developers, at the same time. Bioware, Rockstar, for example.

One thing you can do about the industry as a whole.  It’s small, and it may not have a complete effect, but stop pre-ordering games.  Wait till the game it out before getting it.