This post is somewhat inspired by a recent post in this same community called “Is anyone else having trouble giving up Reddit due to content?”
I imagine “Reddit” will be a common answer. (And it’s one of my answers.)
Another of my answers is “Hasbro.” First Wizards of the Coast (a Hasbro subsidiary) tried to revoke an irrevokable license and screw over basically all 3rd-party publishers of D&D content, then they sent literal mercinaries to threaten one of their customers over an order mixup that wasn’t even the customer’s fault. D&D: Honor Among Thieves and the latest Transformers look really good, but those are within the scope of my boycott, so I won’t be seeing those any time soon.
Third, Microsoft. (Apple too, but then I’ve never bought any Apple devices in my life, so it hardly qualifies as a boycott.) Just because of their penchant for using devices I own against me in every way they can imagine. And for really predatory business practices.
One boycott that I’ve ended was a boycott of Nintendo. I was pissed that they started marketing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (though it didn’t have a name at the time) before the WiiU came out, prompting me to be an early adopter of the WiiU, and then when they actually released BotW, they dual-released it on WiiU and Switch. I slightly eased my boycott when the unpatchable Fusee Gilee vulnerability for the first batch of Switches was discovered. I wanted to get one of the ones I could hack and run homebrew on before they came out with a model that lacked the vulnerability.
No offense but this is a bad take. They didn’t normalize DRM. DRM was a thing before steam was around. And DRM companies like Denuvo are going to Game Devs and Publishers to sell them their DRM, not steam.
You’re mad at the wrong company.
Well I mean this kind of online activation tied to a program kind of drm. This wasn’t a thing before Steam outside of MMOGs.
I’m mad at the right company. It’s just for some damn reason Valve is still heralded as the indie darling that made Half-Life, and not the monopolistic marketplace corporation that it’s been for 10+ years.
I repeat: yes there are worse companies. That doesn’t make Steam or Valve good.
While overall I agree with this, their work on advancing gaming on Linux makes it easy to look the other way.