Regarding a certain recent game about a magical school that’s gotten way more publicity than it really deserves, largely due to concerns regarding certain leading minds behind the game and the IP itself having a history of not very good opinions on certain people to put it lightly, and this effectively turning into some sort of widespread ban on anything related to the IP in general, I can’t help but think back to the first time this happened, back when it was a book and not some multimillion dollar franchise. The sides have flipped, yet it’s all very familiar.
Back when the books were first hitting shelves, evangelical Christian types were eager to get them back off the shelves, claiming that normalizing magic was a highway to Hell, and thus a number of places for a time banned them under the usual moral panic that had happened hundreds if not thousands of times for similar reasons. If those books were missing from shelves anywhere else, it was because the books were just that popular. Then there were more books, and there were movies being made of those books, as well as games and toys, including some inexplicable “slime chamber” playset that had pretty much nothing to do with anything in the series ever and was just a weird product of gendered marketing.
So now that Twitter has existed for a while and become an easy avenue to see how racist or sexist or however otherwise of an asshole people can be, as if the internet itself wasn’t making that easy enough, naturally the author went on a number of rants of very much not good opinions, in between claiming that wizards constantly shit on the floor and other insane headcanons like that. But that’s not all, as it turned out that someone else involved with the new game also had pretty terrible opinions and had their own rants. While they ended up leaving the company, there still ended up being the concern about the author behind the books getting royalties from it, and so a boycott was called.
This boycott didn’t seem to work by the looks of things, because there’s a lot of people who are nostalgic for this series who have been wanting a game just like this one. And of course there’s people who are treating this out of spite, claiming some kind of victory over certain people just because a game is selling well because it’s tied to a controversial IP. I wouldn’t consider it much of a stretch to consider that these people are, or are closely related to, the same people who wanted the books off the shelves in the first place. The signs all seem to line up perfectly, ultraconservative types just treating this like a sort of “enemy of my enemy” situation in their latest crusade.
However, from a purely practical standpoint, there are many reasons to not buy the game anyway, in following with game industry trends. First thing, it’s a $70 game, which that price point has gotten a lot of criticism due to how that’s being attached to games that have taken seemingly the same effort as a $60 game did, and $50 before it. Namely games having a ton of arbitrary DLC and microtransactions attached once again.
Second, the PC version is apparently somewhat broken, because publishers seem to be pushing more toward consoles and leaving little room to polish PC versions because that requires a lot more hardware to make sure it works on a number of configurations. Consoles are just cheaper on all fronts, but they have a very specific selection of games and aren’t the open market that just loading any random program on a PC is. There seems to be the idea that throwing more expensive hardware at a game solves everything, except so much hardware is now much more expensive, particularly graphics cards that can go for much more at MSRP than a scalped console during the worst of the PS5 shortage.
Third, it really looks like a somewhat generic action game to me. This is more subjective than the other things but lately I’ve been playing a number of weird indie games, among other random games, that I’ve found way more interesting because they’re doing different things. And I’ve played a number of fairly generic action games already. Selling me on a realistic-looking action game involving having to go to school would be hard enough without any attached controversy.
Fourth, maybe it’ll come to Game Pass. Even Microsoft has admitted that Game Pass does impact actual sales, which is pretty obvious given that it’s easy to play through a number of shorter games on there in the span of a month, though as far as I can tell they run some kind of deal where they pay up front to be added to the service for whatever amount of time, so I’d hope this wouldn’t be impacting the actual funds the developers receive. That may be more on the publishers to fulfill, so who knows. Either way, this really only applies if someone still wants to play the game at all. If this did come to Game Pass at some point, would I play it? Honestly, I don’t know, but probably very unlikely. It depends how bored I am, and I have a lot of other games to get to, plus I’ve generally not really felt much about the series in many years, whether or not there was any additional controversy on top of things. I’ve more drifted to sci-fi things usually with some occasional fantasy. I’m also not exactly avoiding every single controversial work either. Sometimes I just want to analyze something for myself, like a weird movie or something. Doesn’t mean I have to pay for it though. There’s libraries and other ways. However, I’m not sure there’s a lot for me to analyze in that game anyway.
Also, with regards to spoilers, that whole thing about shouting about who kills someone in one of the later books at lineups for the book’s release because there was a leak online is one thing, really a dumb prank that ended up becoming a thing in itself because it could be condensed into three words that had a lot of meaning then. This new apparent spoiler about the games that’s been around on Twitter feels more petty, at least partly because of how it’s written, but more about it being a response to the game already having sold many copies, as well as trying to ruin things for people invested in the story, mainly those who have already bought the game. Given I’ve seen the post and I’m like “who the hell are these people even” clearly means I’m not invested in the slightest, and refund policies for games are certainly all over the place for those who would be driven to refund a game just because the ending was spoiled, so not sure if that’s doing much other than making people who are supposed to be the “good guys” because they support human rights and equality look like assholes to the general public. I understand the main reasons behind it but not the method. I would hope that “being ‘those people’ who ruined a game for some people” wouldn’t be the thing that pushed certain human rights violations against certain groups just over the edge into law, but you never know with humans, especially their governments. They can have any asinine reason to pass any kind of oppressive law, but it’s usually attempting to skew toward the supposed safety of children.