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.
I stopped using Apple products since the time when they convert my mp3s to an iTunes derivative. Never buying/using Apple again.
A lot of stuff. All streaming services. I even boycott entire us states, at least where applicable.
I’m not sure “boycott” is the right word, but I refuse to pay for games that have microtransactions in them.
I also won’t have anything to do with Hasbro in general and D&D specifically until they issue a public apology for the halfling art in 5e. I’m only half kidding.
I have a local grocery chain I only go to when I’m desperate because the president of the company is an absolute shit bag of a human being, and because they have armed guards confronting shoplifters, which is really fucking dystopian if you ask me.
I used to boycott ATI before AMD bought them, because the driver support on Linux was so bad. I got a laptop with a GPU they didn’t support until almost a couple years later, and then as soon as it worked, they dropped support because it was too old.
Now they have the open source driver and better GPU support than Nvidia.
To be fair, ATI windows drivers were dogshit as well.
Digg, I don’t even remember why. It’s been like 10 years.
I try to boycott as much of Nestle as possible and Tencent
airbnb, Chinese stuff as much as possible, newscorp, fairfax, a specific car mechanic who I caught out in an attempted repair extortion over 12 years ago now and I still badmouth them whenever the general topic arises
oh and one of my wife’s acquaintances (fortunately less so these days) who is a self centred idiot, literally publicly cucked her husband and doesn’t feel bad about it, just parks in the common driveway (literally the way in and out for the units behind ours) and makes excuses for her klepto kids all the time. by boycott I mean I refuse to acknowledge her presence if she’s around unless it’s to tell her to move her fucking car. again.
EA, since 2013 when they fucked up sim city.
Animal products.
Have been boycotting those for 7 years now, and I can’t imagine ending that.
I was sitting here thinking, “My god, all these people are boycotting these things? I’m not boycotting anything.” And then I saw your comment and realized that I boycott things without really thinking about it as an active boycott. Vegetarian since 2013 myself, vegan for just about a month.
Ubisoft, EA, Epic Games, Blizzard / Activision, etc… All of these companies mistreat their workers. From racism and sexism to sexual harassment and unbearable crunch. Fuck these companies. (I also boycott other companies, but I havent seen these mentioned yet.)
Steam, last year I logged in via browser to check something, and it was showing I’ve not been online for 8 years.
Fuck Steam and this whole drm/application crap they normalised. Yes others are worse, but I’m not accepting it.
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.
Cheaperthandirt.com has pulled enough stunts to make me permanantly shun them. The thing that sticks out the most for me is canceling confirmed orders so that they could turn around and put items back on their storepage for a massively inflated price.
There’s no way some of the stuff itt is actually boycotts.
Boycotts are organized and have specific goals and demands. Not buying nestle products isn’t a boycott because whats the demand, that they break up? Pirating media or blocking ads isn’t a boycott both because it’s not organized (in the political sense, not the semantic sense) and there’s no demand.
There’s nothing wrong with not buying nestle stuff or piracy but they’re not boycotts.
Also boycotts don’t work on their own. They gotta be paired with a protest movement, the more militant the better (the option of boycotting covers the non-militant bases).
I don’t care how good the game looks, or how much I want it, or how deep the sale is.
I dont buy games from EA, or Ubisoft, and I don’t buy anything from Nintendo or Sony.
Companies that actively hate its customers won’t see a dime of my money.
Also Nestle, for what I hope are obvious reasons… but its hard to avoid it since it hides itself in so many subsidiaries.
Why Nintendo? Maybe I’m out of the loop.
So I just got home and I did not prepare a dissertation on the subject, so I’m just gonna tell you the two issues I remember clearly off the top of my head.
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they had a program that would sick lawyers on anyone that streamed/lets play’d Nintendo games, unless they signed a very invasive contract with nintendo that gave nintendo something like half their profits.
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they are so grossly incompetent that when Tears of the Kingdom had its street date broken early, they sent their lawyers out to abuse DMCA to shut down any discussion or screenshots of the game, up to and including DMCA’ing their own twitter account promoting the game… Which is stupid because the coverage was better than any coverage money could buy, and buy going full draconian on it they just looked ike out of touch assholes.
Theres plenty of other controversial and stupid bullshit from nintendo, both big and small… and it just, to me, shows a disdain for the customer thats willingly giving them their hard earned money.
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I’m trying to avoid products made in China, with varying success.
Am also vegetarian if I get the choice (which isnt always)
Edit; I appear to also be boycotting fast fashion if unintentionally. I wear clothes until they are worn out and then some
