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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

The fact that they are cancelling these events is proof that you are wrong... Blizzard, a company, is reacting to statements made in English not dollars.

In fact, I'd argue that they basically never react to statements made in dollars, one person can only control a small number of dollars by speaking in dollars, and can control a surprisingly large number of dollars by speaking in English.

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Those of us that spend money on Blizzard products are definitely making our statement with dollars. I really want to play this new Priest deck in Hearthstone, but don't have any of the cards. Instead of buying some, I'm just not playing. I really want to play Overwatch with my friends that have a Switch, but I'm not buying Overwatch for the Switch until they make clear what their values are.

I'm giving Blizzard a chance because they have a lot of good will built up, but as time goes on it's becoming clear that they aren't going to do the right thing. Right now, it feels to me like if they could personally take the right to vote away from 8 million Hongkongers, they would. And that is not where I'm going to spend my money.

What I think is interesting about all of this is that China tried to make a power grab. Our market, our rules. But it appears that they like watching basketball more than they like every employee of the NBA to be opposed to reform in Hong Kong. And I'm guessing they like having their Chinese teams competing in the world stage in things like Hearthstone Grandmasters and Overwatch League, so they can't really tell Blizzard to take a hike. So with that in mind, I feel like Blizzard is free to do the right thing here; the last thing China wants is isolation. But it's a game of who blinks first, and corporations are pretty bad at playing that game.

>> In fact, I'd argue that they basically never react to statements made in dollars, one person can only control a small number of dollars by speaking in dollars, and can control a surprisingly large number of dollars by speaking in English.

> Those of us that spend money on Blizzard products are definitely making our statement with dollars. I really want to play this new Priest deck in Hearthstone, but don't have any of the cards. Instead of buying some, I'm just not playing. I really want to play Overwatch with my friends that have a Switch, but I'm not buying Overwatch for the Switch until they make clear what their values are.

You can't make much of a statement with only dollars. There are a million reasons why someone may have chosen not to buy something, so the message sent is highly ambiguous and unlikely to be interpreted correctly.

Every boycott needs to be backed up with a statement outlining its reasons, and the boycott will only be maximally effective if each participant echos these statements to the boycotted company and in the media.

Good thing people are doing both. I am pretty sure Blizzard saw the myriad of messages attached to account deletions.

The question is, are you the majority or the vocal minority?

The former works, the latter will sound extremely convincing (because you see the comments as being entirely one sided in favor of boycott) and achieve nothing.

Let's wait and see.

I spent my money on blizzard products. I had most of their library. I had just bought the last hearthstone expansion.

I deleted the account and I urge you to do the same. Just not spending does nothing.

You can do both. If people do nothing but complain and their bottom line isn't affected at all, it just tells companies they can ignore their audience.

For sure, but you don't cancel events because of people just deleting their accounts. It's not like they were worried that this event would turn into a "let's silently delete our accounts party".

I deleted my account on their service over this, and I know so did others. There was more spoken than just English.

Yeah, my wife and I used to spend $500* per year on Blizzard stuff. We cancelled everything when the news came out.

*Two WoW subscriptions + me buying Hearthstone cards.

Deleting my account was a revealing relief. Not just your account as in some entry in a database gets deleted including the characters stored on their servers, but also every game you paid for and all the purchase you made inside the games. The shock from the revelation of the control the company had about what I thought I bought made me follow through and free myself from the sunken cost fallacy which was trying to stop me from deleting my account. That was a good lesson for me. I'll never again buy any product, be it a game, software, or hardware that any company can that easily take away from me.

Amen, brother

Unfortunately I think that pretty much limits us to TuxRacer so far as the gaming space goes

Thanks for the support.

We have more than Tux Racer. There are a lot of games without DRM and with full offline single-game experience, like for example the excellent Factorio. Factorio isn't without issues either, because it isn't free software. It is only released as a x86-64 binary, so when I get rid of my x86-64 desktop and switch to then hopefully RISC-V or POWER, I won't be able to run Factorio. Still, this is much better than anything Activision Blizzard offers. There are many other games like that.

Also, for many consoles the software works in emulators and are outside of the control of any company.

Yet, we need free software. There is no way around it.

I've seen a lot of people post how they were unable to delete their accounts due to what seemed like obstruction on Blizzard's end.

It was a hassle. If you didn't have two factor set your sucked.

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