Those of you who have followed my work for any extended length of time will likely know, I attempt to balance my personal political and moral beliefs with the realities of my job as a media critic to the best of my ability.
Perhaps the most obvious example of this over the past five years has been my relationship to coverage of Ubisoft’s video game releases. Stories of abuse by upper management of the day to day staff at Ubisoft studios came to light in the summer of 2020, and while things seemingly improved in some parts of the company, staff at many Ubisoft studios reported again in 2021 and 2022 that things had not meaningfully improved for them in the years since the abuse scandal came to light. As such, as a general rule of thumb, I chose not to play or cover Ubisoft’s game releases going forward, until such time as there was evidence that the culture of executive abuse of workers at the company had improved.
But, as some of you will know, I’ve made exceptions to my no Ubisoft game coverage rule from time to time, perhaps once a year or so over the past couple of years. My work primarily focuses on covering accessibility in games at this point, and it’s hard to deny that Ubisoft as a publisher is driving forward accessibility in important ways. They occasionally have game releases that are so innovative in the accessibility space that I would be doing a disservice to my coverage of accessibility in the gaming space if I did not discuss the things that they were achieving.
In those instances, my approach thus far has been to cover those games from a perspective narrowly focused on the accessibility aspects that I want to praise, while starting my coverage with a couple of paragraphs of context explaining the reasons why I usually do not cover their titles.
My view is that generally speaking I can avoid this one company’s games without a huge hit to my overall ability to do my job as a media critic, and navigate exceptions by ensuring that if I provide their games coverage, I do so in the context of reminding people of the topics that for me were the reasons to personally avoid supporting their titles.
Last week, I’d been gearing up to play South of Midnight on stream – I stayed up late finishing my previous stream game, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, so I could stream South of Midnight on the first night it was publicly available. I had been excited to make space to cover the game, and was personally really excited to play it.
I was then made aware a few hours before that stream that the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) non profit, which has been curating a list of boycott targets for those wishing to support Palestine and put economic pressure on businesses supporting Israel during their ongoing genocide of the people of Gaza, had called for a consumer boycott of Microsoft, and in particular their Xbox brand.
I have, to the best of my ability, been following the BDS consumer boycott list for some time now. Generally, I think the group does good work in explaining why they choose the priority boycott targets that they choose, what they aim to achieve from a specific boycott, and what methods they want to see people enact to work toward those aims. Of the multiple groups working to arrange pro palestine boycotts, their work feels the most consistent in its approach.
In this case, the reporting backing the decision to boycott Microsoft seems solid, and well reasoned. To simplify a complex topic, a January 2025 joint report by The Guardian, Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, with additional reporting from Drop Site News, Microsoft has been actively deepening its relationship with the IDF, or Israeli Defense Force, in the months since October 2023. In particular, claims are made regarding Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology and artificial intelligence products being used by the IDF in the bombardment and invasion of Gaza.
According to Drop Site, two former Microsoft employees, Abdo Mohamed and Hossam Nasr, have been instrumental in driving BDS’ call for a boycott of Microsoft’s gaming offerings. As reported by the Guardian, Microsoft fired the pair in October 2024 after they organised a vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza outside the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
While Xbox games and consoles are not directly responsible for the decisions being made by parent company Microsoft, the calls for a consumer boycott of Xbox exist essentially because the Xbox brand is the area of Microsoft’s business that most consumers have the most choice about exerting financial pressure. Actions like cancelling a GamePass subscription, avoiding purchasing Xbox published games, and purchasing multiplatform games on alternative platforms are places that the average consumer can exercise choice to boycott, where things like use of Microsoft Teams, Windows operating systems, or Microsoft Office products may be more difficult to arrange for people made to use these products on work machines.
The logic for the targeted boycott is sound, and I understand the reasons they have decided to ask for a boycott of the gaming part of the business.
And so I cancelled my planned South of Midnight stream. I took the night off rather than stream something else, I’d sort of set my heart on that particular game, and took the weekend to sit with my thoughts on this matter.
I want to remain consistent in my political beliefs, even when doing so is difficult to align with my career goals – I want to be someone who does the right thing, even when doing so is hard.
Right now, here is where I stand – I plan to stand in solidarity with the BDS’ decision to designate Microsoft, and by association Xbox, a priority target for consumer boycott. I want to make an effort to stand in solidarity with that, which means for the time being I do not plan to stream, play, or review any Xbox exclusive new releases going forward, while this boycott remains in effect.
There are work obligations I have already either recorded, or signed paperwork for, that I can’t navigate around. I will ask people to be understanding of those projects as they release, and understand the context in which they occurred.
There may be Xbox games in the future that are so notable for accessibility reasons that I cannot reasonably avoid covering them in my capacity as someone whose job is to report on accessibility in video games. There will be news stories that I need to cover, Xbox are frequently on the front lines of accessibility improvements in the industry, even outside of their games themselves. I will aim to cover these news stories with the same degree of upfront context that I currently provide Ubisoft games in the rare instances that I cover them. I know it’s not a perfect solution to navigating the boycott, but it’s the best approach I currently have.
This will inevitably mean turning down future work opportunities. I will do my best to navigate that impact as best I can.
With this all said, I want to be honest and acknowledge that I am imperfect in my navigation of this boycott, and boycotts more broadly. I know because I was put to the test this past weekend, and recognised a place where I would struggle to be consistent in my boycott response.
When I posted on Bluesky about my engagement with the Xbox boycott, I received a reply from someone who told me that both PlayStation and Nintendo were both also on the BDS organisation’s boycott list, and to be consistent I would need to boycott covering their games too.
I was surprised to hear this – My job is to be aware of gaming news, and I would have assumed that I would have heard this, if it had taken place.
It turns out there was some miscommunication – Neither PlayStation or Nintendo were boycott targets of the BDS non profit organisation, but had each been listed as potential boycott targets by different pro palestinian rights organisations.
The sources I was sent had varying degrees of evidence for their claims, and varying amounts of justification for their selection as focused consumer boycott targets. They were not without purpose, the Nintendo article for example noted that Nintendo’s consoles use Nvidia components, and that Nvidia may have sold parts for a supercomputer to the Israeli government. It’s not like there was no smoke to the fire, but the documentation was a lot more sparse as to Nintendo being complicit directly in the criticised actions of Nvidia. Nintendo isn’t a subsidiary of Nvidia the same way that Xbox is of Microsoft, but money spent on Switch 2 consoles will still end up in Nvidia pockets.
I’ve generally stuck to the one BDS non profit boycott list as I think it does the best job of being thoughtful and detailed in its choice of targets, and its reasoning and aims, it’s a list that I feel like I can follow consistently while being left meaningful alternative options to the things that I’m boycotting. Their target selections are made to maximise impact while not being a “you have no options left” boycott.
And as much as I tell myself I find it easy to follow the BDS boycott list, I know there are targets they could select that I would find really hard to follow.
If that person on Bluesky had been correct, and the BDS boycott had called for boycotting all three major video game home consoles, I don’t know how I would have navigated that while still doing my job, reporting on video game accessibility. Would I have had to buy an AMD graphics card to replace my Nvidia one for my PC, and move to covering only PC games going forward? Would that be manageable while maintaining my career, and still talking about video game accessibility?
Hell, if the boycott had been of Nintendo, in a new console launch year where they seem to finally be making the kinds of accessibility improvements that I’ve spent five years advocating for, I don’t know how I would have navigated that. I know it would have had a much bigger impact on my planned work output for the year, and would have been a lot more emotionally difficult for me to accept. I would have had a harder time walking the line between supporting a boycott and finding ways to continue my work.
Any credit I take for supporting the Xbox boycott has to come with the context that they’re a boycott I can afford to support without major career losses at this time. There are cases I would have found more difficult.
I don’t know that I have a nice, neatly wrapped conclusion to this essay. I’m trying to follow my principles and be consistent in my stance on supporting consumer boycotts, but I know that I’m weighing up a lot of factors about my career in that process. My approach isn’t perfect, but it’s the best I can do.
I want to do what I can financially to avoid giving money to companies who I fear may use it in ways I do not wish to support, and to follow the advice of groups like the BDS non profit on where best to apply that pressure, but I am also deeply aware of just how many companies ultimately tie back to things I wouldn’t want to support ideologically or financially. It’s the curse of our world being essentially run by a small handful of megacorporations, everything is eventually profiting someone terrible.
I don’t want to use that to absolve myself of complicated choices, everything being terrible isn’t license to be thoughtless. I’m doing my best to make the hard choices, while accepting that I am human and will be contradictory at times, or find some things harder than others.