Poll of the Day > Do you think it's pretty fucked up that...

(+) Yeah! (+)

gamers got more upset when Sexual Assaultivision-Blizzard announced a mobile Diablo game than when they got caught condoning sexual assault and a woman even killed herself over it? Like they got such a huge backlash over that Diablo game, but a few people got upset over the sexual assault thing then everyone went back to buying their shit a few weeks later. Like WTF kind of world do we live in where announcing a cell phone game is worse than sexually assaulting people?
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It's just that people are goldfish...

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Its almost like most gamers are just concerned with playing a fun game more than anything else

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why would i care what gamers think about anything. have you met any gamers

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I think it's fucked up that people rely so heavily on the fallacy of relative privation. Things can be bad without constantly needing to say, "Well, this is so much worse!", and there's always going to be something worse.

And the closer you are to something, the more natural it is for that thing to annoy you. There's nothing weird or fucked up about that.

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I'm not a game developer, so realistically only one of those two issues actually impacts me at all.

If I had an emotional breakdown every time a company abused its workers or condoned corruption in some form, I'd never be able to buy another product of any kind ever again. I mean, I'm pretty sure the laptop I'm typing this post on was assembled in a sweat shop and will do significant damage to the environment when I eventually scrap it. Human misery is pretty much the cost of business these days.
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I don't think anyone looks to Activision-Blizzard for their moral uprightness. They look to Activision-Blizzard for game development. So people will be more upset about the one of those that they engage with. That is in no way a metric to determine which action was worse. It's not as clear how sexual assault influences game development. Nor how making games for a mobile platform is a moral issue. There may be arguments for both cases but they aren't as obvious as the inverse.

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People got more upset that Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone than when it became clear that the working conditions in their factories are so bad that they installed nets around the buildings to prevent their employees from killing themselves.

Basically:

Lokarin posted...

It's just that people are goldfish...

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If anything, I'm disappointed Acti-Blizz's stock didn't come all the way down to 70 a share. I think, indeed, more people gave a damn about the content lull in WoW, Asmongold going to FFXIV, or the Diablo mobile game than the known issues within the company itself.

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faramir77 posted...

People got more upset that Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone than when it became clear that the working conditions in their factories are so bad that they installed nets around the buildings to prevent their employees from killing themselves.

Basically:

Not really, because you're assuming they care that much about the other thing.

And frankly, installing suicide nets isn't the controversy, it's what prevents controversies because it prevents suicides. A lot of buildings in the US have suicide nets, too, as do bridges.

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Meanwhile:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-has-patented-a-system-that-would-put-workers-in-a-cage-on-top-of-a-robot/

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from what i have seen, an order of magnitude more people were, are, pissed at blizzard for being huge fucking sexual abusing fuckheads than they are of a mobile diablo game that still hasn't came out, or had anything shown about it except for that time it was announced
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Lokarin posted...

Meanwhile:

http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-has-patented-a-system-that-would-put-workers-in-a-cage-on-top-of-a-robot

Wake me up when they take the extra step and just put the worker's brains directly into the robots.
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Lokarin posted...

Meanwhile:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-has-patented-a-system-that-would-put-workers-in-a-cage-on-top-of-a-robot/

that actually sounds like a pretty cool system for transport around the big warehouses

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lihlih posted...

Like WTF kind of world do we live in where announcing a cell phone game is worse than sexually assaulting people?

A selfish one. Most folk only care about what effects them and their own problems.

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The thing is, boycotts for things like this don't hurt the people you want them to hurt. It just hurts the worker putting in their 40-60 hours a week on a game who is going to get fired under the justification of "your hard work didn't pay off". The people you are trying to hurt (executives) are going to trickle it down. At most, Bobby Kotick is only going to have 4 new porsches in his garage this year instead of 5. The employees even said as much when asked about it:

https://massivelyop.com/2021/08/10/blizzard-workers-address-the-drawbacks-of-boycotts-gamers-lament-wows-deep-decline/

Conversely, wanting a new game in a series and getting mobile trash is absolutely something people should voice their opinion over and not support.

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AWinterJ posted...

A selfish one. Most folk only care about what effects them and their own problems.

I dont think thats true.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Wake me up when they take the extra step and just put the worker's brains directly into the robots.

Or the robots' brains into the workers.

AWinterJ posted...

A selfish one. Most folk only care about what effects them and their own problems.

Again, it's like asking why do we care so much about sexual harassment when we overlook sex trafficking overseas? There's literally always something much worse somewhere else, which doesn't magically mean that other issues aren't issues.

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