Kulturkampf

[Potato]

In today's episode of "Activism dressed up as videogame journalism" we head over to Kotaku for their absurd take on Activision Blizzard redundancies

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2024/01/xbox-is-not-your-friend/

Xbox, the games industry’s most well-funded publisher and hardware maker, made almost 2,000 people redundant this morning.

I’m not sure if you can visualise what a group of 2000 people looks like. Jump over to Google and have a look for a sec because it’s basically a small army. A mass of human lives, with dogs and kids and parents and hobbies and annoying habits and favourite shows and bills. And now, without a job.

At the time of writing, we are hours out from the latest devastating wave of lay-offs hitting the video game industry. Microsoft announced approximately 1,900 job cuts across its gaming division, including Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax, and Xbox. 8.6% of its colossal 22,000-strong global workforce. It is an unfathomable number of workers impacted by the single stroke of a pen, the news coming by way of a memo by industry darling and head of Xbox, Phil Spencer.

The whole article is fucking stupid, but I think the closing two paragraphs are some of the most idiotic shit I've ever seen written, even by the idiotic standards of video game journalists.

Gamers writ large are an enthusiastic bunch, a trait that I often find endearing and intimidating in equal measure. Hype cycles are so easily spun up for the same reason communities so swiftly galvanise. Media coverage, old and new, commercial and enthusiast, perseveres despite a lack of funding. This ferocity for the art form is just as often soured in service of product, too. The same vine that grows passion is just as likely to bloom entitlement. It’s an audience ripe for the kind of exploitation Xbox has wrought, giving thousands of vocal, deeply committed players a direction to aim their fervour, complete with figureheads to cheer and ideologies to embody. Consumerism becomes identity, and Xbox wants you to identify with it above all else.  

Even as I wrote this piece, Microsoft closed the day with a $3 trillion valuation for the first time in the company’s history. As the maligned former CEO of Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick, lands softly from his golden parachute, and as Phil Spencer’s exhaustive, years-long effort to become the face of the average gamer, all Xbox’s carefully stored goodwill is deployed to announce a catastrophic number of job losses. The landscape as laid by Xbox more closely resembles scorched earth than the verdant pastures promised to its employees and customers. The only green left emanating from the minifridges gathering dust in the corner.

Imagine acting like this over job losses at little ol' Activision Blizzard!