I’m not going to buy Hogwarts Legacy, even though I’ve always loved Harry Potter, because I think the harm that JK Rowling is doing to trans people is unconscionable, and I can’t contribute to the size and strength of her platform anymore. There are people out there - many, unfortunately - who agree with Rowling’s positions and will likely buy this video game to support her and their love of the Wizarding World. I will fight those people at the voting booths, because I don’t expect reasonable words will ever reach them.My thoughts are with a different group - those who oppose Rowling’s campaign of hate yet intend to buy Hogwarts Legacy anyway. Our own Stacey Henley did a marvelous job addressing the morally conflicted in her recent piece, Should You Play Hogwarts Legacy If You Care About Your Trans Friends? Read it if you want to understand why supporting Harry Potter means supporting JK Rowling.But what of the developers at Avalanche Software? Surely they’re innocent casualties in all of this. They worked for years on Hogwarts Legacy, not knowing who Rowling really was. Many are arguing that boycotting the game punishes the developers for Rowling’s behavior. They are going to buy the game despite everything because they want to support the developers.On the surface, it's an empathetic position to take. It’s true that many developers at the studio oppose Rowling’s views. She wasn’t directly involved in the game, and Avalanche has made a noticeable effort to distance itself from her. It’s certainly not their fault that Harry Potter has been poisoned.Those things are all true, but what does that have to do with you buying the game? I’ve seen quite a few people claim they want to buy the game to support the developers, but that seems disingenuous for a number of reasons. Do you support the developers of every game, or just this one? I don’t hear anyone talking about supporting the devs behind Babylon’s Fall or Marvel’s Avengers, and boy, they could really use it right now. I don’t think you want to support the developers, I think you want to play the Harry Potter game.
But let’s say you do legitimately want to buy Hogwarts Legacy to support Avalanche Software. Maybe you’re a huge fan of Cars 3: Driven to Win on the Wii U, I don’t know. How exactly does buying the game support the developers? It seems like a lot of people are under the assumption that the developers of a successful game will make more money or have more job security, but that’s not at all how the game industry works. In fact, often the exact opposite happens.Every studio operates differently, and I don’t know specifically how Avalanche operates, but generally speaking the game industry does not offer developers higher rates or bonuses based on how well a game sells, and the success of a game does not ensure more secure jobs. The game industry operates largely on short-term contracts, particularly when it comes to triple-A. As a game gets deeper into development, artists, writers, engineers, and designers are hired on contract. Teams get bigger and bigger until the game finally releases, then all of those contracted employees leave. Sometimes studios lay-off mass amounts of employees after a successful launch, as has been the case multiple times with Activision Blizzard. When studios start working on another game, they start hiring contractors again.The people who benefit from a successful game are the CEOs and shareholders. The developers get a paycheck. If they’re lucky they don’t get fired when the game comes out. If they’re really lucky they don’t get sexually harrassed by their managers. None of that has anything to do with how many copies of the game were sold. But maybe you’re just thinking of the developers as artists. They poured their heart and souls into this project and they want people to appreciate their work. It wouldn’t be fair to deny them that just because of Rowling, right? Once again I have to ask about all the games you haven’t bought, and wonder if you spend as much time lamenting all the artists whose art you haven’t yet appreciated. I think probably not. But let’s say for the sake of argument that Avalanche’s developers are at risk. If the game doesn’t sell well then they won’t get bonuses and they may get laid off. Warner Brothers could even decide to shut down the studio completely, putting hundreds of developers out of work. In that scenario, do you really think it’s your responsibility to save them? How can the livelihoods of all these people be left entirely up to a sales figure? Doesn’t it seem like there’s a bigger problem here?
Developers at Avalanche and across the industry do need your support, they need you to start caring about unions. Organized labor is the only thing that’s going to protect them from the crunch, chaos, and job insecurity that plagues the industry. The only thing buying the game is going to do is get you a new video game. If you actually care about supporting the developers, start talking about unionizing the industry. Instead of arguing about difficulty options in Souls games or how manly Aloy looks, start tweeting about employee representation. Talk about it all the time, show the developers that you care about their job security and safety at work. Get angry when you hear about discrimination at Sony. Ask Ubisoft why it still hasn’t responded to demands made by employees more than 200 days ago. It doesn’t matter how many copies of Hogwarts Legacy or Elden Ring sell when developers are reporting poor wages and working conditions, so do something about it.Even though boycotts don’t work, constant pressure from players does. Battlefront 2’s loot box controversy changed the entire gaming landscape only because gamers got mad and wouldn’t shut up about it. We bullied the Stalker 2 studio into shutting down an NFT campaign. We can pressure the industry to accept unions too, but we have to be just as consistently relentless as we were about loot boxes and pay-to-win. It’s not as fun as buying the Harry Potter game, but this is how you support developers in a way that actually matters.