With so many accusations of sexual harassment, racism and other scurrilous behaviour floating around huge game publishers like Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft in recent years, and as money from the Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is finding its way into companies like SNK and Embracer Group, it’s a pretty depressing time to be a gamer that pays attention to the world around them. Is it possible to game, but not support a company or regime with a terrible human rights records? You may think so, but reality is quite different.
“What about China?” is a pretty common complaint, but this is one you simply cannot escape. PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch are all partially made in China, a country with severe human rights issues. They are also partially made in Taiwan, a country which uses child labour.
Where did that new console of your come from?
Foxxconn is one of the production partners often used by console manufacturers. A spate of suicides linked to low pay at the “Foxconn City” industrial park in Shenzhen, China, has been widely reported alongside several additional suicides at various other Foxconn-owned locations and facilities in Mainland China. Your console includes gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper, nick, cobalt, tin, zinc, all of which need to be mined, causing devastation to the natural landscape and pollution.
All of the above also applies to PCs, and you’re going to need a graphics card from either Nvidia or AMD to game competently. These are also fabricated in China and also in Taiwan where the death penalty is still in use, and the country is a primary destination for children trafficked for sexual exploitation. You will also need an OS, with the most popular ones for gaming being Windows, the first version of which Bill Gates liberally copied from Apple (itself lifting the mouse input from Xerox), and which rose to dominance in part thanks to some extremely anti-competitive behaviour.
Once all of that is done, you’re going to need to ship your console or PC parts to your country, generating carbon which contributes to global warming. You will also need packaging, and here’s finally a glimmer of light as the PS5 ships in packing entirely made of recyclable cardboard and non-recyclables are being minimised. Microsoft is also incorporating recycled plastics into their new Xbox consoles and accessories.
Now you have your gaming device you can start to chose your games. Activision and Quantic Dream have all recently had sexual harassment and racism lawsuits against them. CD Projeckt Red deceived customers, Ubisoft has had multiple allegations of sexual harassment, sexism and racism. The lead of the HoloLens and Kinect department at Microsoft also just quit after allegations were made against him.
Blizzard renamed Overwatch character McCree after his namesake was implicated in the ‘Cosby Suite’ scandal.
Even if a developer has a reputable public-facing presence, following the money can show that they’re funded by less than amazing organisations and governments. Similar to ‘sports washing’, video games are increasingly funded by regimes with abysmal track records.
Tencent is a Chinese company with strong links to the oppressive Chinese Communist party and are developing “Patriotic games” for them. The CIA is said to have reviewed the company and alleged they received funding from Ministry of State Security as it was being founded. Tencent owns Riot Games (which paid out in a lawsuit relating to “gender discrimination in pay and promotion, sexual harassment, and retaliation against women”), Funcom, Leyo, and Sharkmob.
They have a majority share in Supercell and Grinding Gear Games, and own 40% of Epic, publishers of Fortnite. They also own sizeable chunks of Dontnod Entertainment, Fatshark, Marvelous, and Bluehole Studio, which is part of PUBG publishers Krafton. They also own shares in Sumo, Frontier, Activision, Ubisoft, Paradox, Remedy, Yager, Bohemia Interative, and Klei. On top of that invested in Discord, Lockdown, and Platinum Games.
Another Chinese company, Netease, invested $100m to get a seat on the board of directors at Bungie. While Epic promoted a homophobic map creator during their Pride month celebrations, Valve are fighting the EU in a geo-blocking case, has been accused of applying pressure to developers about competitive pricing, and has had some issues with the types of games being allowed on the store. What about GOG? Well, they removed a game that including content critical of Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party seemingly after pressure from the Chinese government.
That’s a big chunk of the gaming world no longer available to a guilt free gamer, including three of the big four publishers: Activision, Take-Two, and Ubisoft. EA is also off the table – in February 2021 the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia acquired 7.4 million shares of EA, valued at $1.1 billion and then in June 2022 they splashed out $1.05 billion for an 8.1% stake in the Embracer Group. That’s Deep Silver, THQ, Aspyr, Gearbox, Coffee Stain, Saber Interactive, Perfect World, Crystal Dynamics, the studios formerly known as Eidos-Montréal and Square Enix Montreal, and many more smaller publishers and studios. PIF also bought shares in Activision and Take-Two.
The F1 Jeddah street circuit, bought and paid for by the Saudi PIF, which is feeding into video games, sports and much more.
The PIF is wholly owned and run by the Saudi Government, and has become known for its ‘sports washing’ by buying up Newcastle FC in the English Premier League, funding the renegade LIV Tour in golf, feeding cash into Formula 1 to get a Saudi Grand Prix (which ran this year in the shadow of militant activity from the war its waging in Yemen), and more. The country regularly executes people and is one the very few countries in the world not to accept the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The country also traffics children as jockeys for camel racing, and homosexuals are imprisoned. Then there’s the brutal assassination of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 by Saudi agents, for daring to speak out about the government.
More recently, a survey of Paradox staff found that “Offensive treatment is a systematic and far too common problem,” (though they have taken meaningful steps since that report) and Tripwire Interactive boss John Gibson backed the Texas anti-abortion laws.
The pool of games you can play as a guilt-free gamer is clearly very small, and further investigation makes it even smaller. For example, Team 17 is a wonderful and lovely indie publisher from the UK so surely they are safe? Sadly not. They held an IPO in May 2018 and company is now partially owned by Blackrock Inc, a company that also invests in weapons makers such as Sturm Ruger and have also had a hand deforesting the Amazon. Also there’s the whole NFT thing they tried to do.
Also, every game with Cthulu in it is taking inspiration from the works of H.P. Lovecraft, a deeply racist author from the early 20th century. Not even tentacle-filled existential dread is safe.
It’s clear that it’s totally impossible to get hold of guilt free hardware, and even if you could it’s almost impossible to buy a game without tangentially helping fund a company or regime with a terrible human rights record.
If the board members and CEO’s of these giant publishers are happy to take money from investors with blood on their hands, we can at least take some consolation from how hard employees are willing to fight for rights and representation, and the fact that the the players themselves are often a generous bunch. A recent appeal with Fortnite raised $144 million for Ukraine, and ongoing games such as Destiny 2 regularly sell cosmetic items, the profits of which go directly to charities.
Andrewww
Thank you for this article, with which I fully sympathise. Well, the games industry doesn’t fare much better, I guess, than electronics in general, and the Fairphone and Shiftphone approach is an extremely rare one, and one you just cannot find in the games industry (not for hardware, and for software only with some rare indie developers maybe). There’s simply no such alternatives, at least not yet.
And in some ways it’s even worse, I think, the games industry is often much less professional, it’s more immature than other sectors, which is why there’s so many harassment cases occurring there, specifically.
And then you have also this highly vocal and therefore over-represented group of gamers that think they can spread hate against all non-white/male gamers (which became blatantly obvious in this whole gamergate thing). And someone as brave as Sarkeesian only need to be present so that they themselves prove her to be fully right by their own absurd actions.
Still, some development in recent years also made clear there’s increasingly strong opposition against many forms of discrimination and prejudice, as many publishers publicly stood up against it, which is at least something, even if they still don’t comply internally.
Still, the world is what it is, and I keep preparing my kids for it: 80% of all people you meet you better forget about, and the remaining 20% you better don’t trust half the time either. And that’s not special about gaming, people are just awful, I’m afraid you’re right. However, that doesn’t mean it’s all doom and gloom, there’s still lots of values to stand up for, one just needs to adjust to have realistic expectations.