"I'm Not Gonna Tell You to Steal Video Games. But..."

Content warning: Discussion of sexual assault and suicide.

Remember that “Piracy. It’s a Crime” ad they used to put on DVDs? “You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a movie”, yeah? The music slapped, but even as a wee boy I knew that using LimeWire or Pirate Bay is nowhere near the same as stealing a car. Stealing a car is morally wrong not just because you are taking something that belongs to someone else, but because a car is a life-changing thing. A car could be essential to somebody’s survival, especially if they’re self-employed or live in their car. Likewise, stealing somebody’s handbag could be stealing somebody’s life-saving medication or an irreplaceable family heirloom. Less dramatically, stealing an individual’s property is going to, at least, ruin their day. If I torrent, say, Black Widow or Space Jam: A Poo Legacy (thank you) I’m not ruining anybody’s day, I’m just depriving a multi-billion dollar company of a fraction of the price of a cinema ticket. Also, in the digital age products like these are infinite. When I purchase a digital product all I get is a license to access something that exists infinitely in a corporation's databases. I wouldn’t steal a car because it’s a shitty thing to do, but stealing from a corporation doesn’t actually hurt anybody.

I know it’s more complicated than that but you get the point; taking something infinite is not deprivation.

And speaking of doing shitty things, let’s talk about video game companies!

Way back in February I wrote about the Ubisoft abuse scandal. The video game studio spent years protecting and promoting abusive men in leadership roles accused of homophobia, sexual harassment, racism, and more. A year on from the widespread coverage of such revelations in June and July 2020, the French union Solidaires Informatiques sued Ubisoft for allegedly enabling institutional sexual harassment.

Among the individuals named in the suit are Serge Hascoët, who long time fans will remember as the one who reportedly held meetings in strip clubs, drugged employees, and advocated for and engaged in sexual assault of female employees. CEO Yves Guillemot - pronounced 'Colossal Fuckhead' - was either so incompetent that he didn’t know any of this was going on or so insidious that he actively promoted and protected known abusers. Guillemot is also named in the suit, along with the HR Department for their part in burying harassment complaints. But Ubisoft has many studios across the world, and surely they aren’t all like this, right? Wrong! In July 2021, the same month this lawsuit was announced, Kotaku published a detailed report explaining the sordid history of Ubisoft Singapore, co-developer on the latest Assassin’s Creed title:

“While problems at Ubisoft Montreal, Toronto, Quebec, Montpelier, and the head Paris office have been widely documented, Ubisoft Singapore has gotten less attention. But based on interviews with over 20 current and former employees there, there was no shortage of issues, ranging from sexual harassment and racial pay disparities to bullying by managers.”

Ethan Gach, Kotaku, 21 July, 2021, <https://kotaku.com/the-messy-stalled-reckoning-at-an-assassins-creed-co-d-1847336158>

A month later, on 17th August 2021, Kotaku reported that Ubisoft Singapore is under investigation by the Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment Practices, the nation’s workplace watchdog. Evidently, Ubisoft’s toxic culture is not a boil only to be lanced in France, but a disease so profoundly vile that it consumes the entire entity; Ubisoft’s abuse problem is Ubisoft. Why on Earth would I pay for a product made by such a noxious company?

They’re not alone either. Back in July 2021, Activision Blizzard Inc. - the company behind the hugely lucrative Call of Duty and World of Warcraft franchises - was sued by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) for a:

“culture in which female employees are subjected to constant sexual harassment, unequal pay, and retaliation”. (Maeve Allsup, ‘Activision Blizzard Sued Over ‘Frat Boy’ Culture, Harassment (1)’, Bloomberg Law, 22 July 2021, <https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/activision-blizzard-sued-by-california-over-frat-boy-culture>)

It’s being described as a “frat boy” culture in many publications, but it seems way more Promising Young Woman than Bad Neighbours; that is, a fatally misogynistic “frat boy” culture. Don’t believe me? Well, the men at Activision allegedly pass over women for promotions, joke openly about rape, and get drunk and sexually harass as many women as possible in office-wide ‘cube crawls’. Furthermore, a female employee who was subjected to “intense sexual harassment...including having nude photos passed around at a company holiday party” killed herself while on a company trip with her male supervisor. The company’s first response, of course, was to vehemently dismiss the details in the lawsuit as “distorted” and “false”, while using this woman’s suicide to villainize the DFEH:

“We are sickened by the reprehensible conduct of the DFEH to drag into the complaint the tragic suicide of an employee whose passing has no bearing whatsoever on this case and with no regard for her grieving family.”

Activision Blizzard’s statement, Sean Hollister, The Verge, 22 July 2021, <https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/22/22588215/activision-blizzard-lawsuit-sexual-harassment-discrimination-pay>

Classic bit of corporate gaslighting. But wait, there’s more! Just a couple of weeks ago, the DFEH expanded their lawsuit to allege that Activision Blizzard’s HR department has been shredding documents relating to the ongoing investigation. Shredding documents. You know, that thing companies do when they have absolutely nothing to hide. I’ll remind you that Ubisoft’s HR was also alleged to be complicit in the widespread abuse at the company by burying complaints against senior staff. It seems the blockbuster video games industry may just be rotten to the core.

On top of that, the games published by Ubisoft, Activision, EA, and more have become increasingly predatory and mediocre as they are designed not around exciting stories or gameplay, but around ensuring the player is directed as often as possible to the in-game store. In Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, for example, one can buy ‘Helix credits’ to purchase cosmetics, time-savers, and gameplay advantages. One set of gear will set you back around 1000 credits, which will cost you $10. You can’t simply fork out that $10 directly, however, because publishers design their in-game stores to be coercive and confusing, abstracting the dollar cost from the credits cost so the player loses track of how much money they spend. Purchasing only the gameplay-enhancing gear (weapons, armor, and companions) in the store would set you back 8,550 Helix credits, or around $70 - since the credit packs are designed to not equate equally with the item prices. That’s more than the entire base game sold for at launch!

In-game purchases (I won’t call them ‘microtransactions’ when some are as much as £99.99) are even more despicable when one considers how much money these companies rake in and who they’re getting it from. Of EA’s entire $5.6 billion revenue in FY2021, around 29% ($1.62 billion) of this was made from their Ultimate Team mode in FIFA and Madden games. This mode involves the most controversial aspect of video games discourse since Mortal Kombat’s gruesome, low-resolution finishers back in the 1990s: loot boxes! You know, gambling. But oh no, this isn’t like your grandpappy putting five bob on a couple of race horses every week, nor like you impulsively picking up a scratch card when you pay for your meal deal. That requires the tedious effort of going outside and being an adult. When you gamble with EA, you can stay in the comfort of your own home and childhood. That’s right: with EA’s FIFA franchise rated for ages 3 and up, the kids can gamble before they can even write their own name! Ah, capitalism really does breed innovation.

I don’t want to focus on in-game purchases here, but know that every major game publisher is now designing their blockbuster games around predatory, manipulative in-game purchases that deliberately target children, addicts, and neurodivergent people. And they’re making a fucking mint. Some exploitation is less targeted though. Activision steals from all American taxpayers every year, with a little help from the federal government. In 2018 the company paid a whopping $0 in federal taxes with an income of $447,000,000, and also received a rebate of $228,000,000. (<https://charlieintel.com/activision-blizzard-paid-0-in-taxes-in-2018-took-228-million-from-tax-payers/58639/>)

Two hundred and twenty eight MILLION dollars were taken from the taxpayer and handed to Activision Jizzard, who contributed nothing. This is also the company where hundreds of employees are laid off in years of record-breaking profit; employees that are often paid so little anyway that they have to skip meals to pay rent. If an American taxpayer pirated the next Call of Duty it wouldn’t be theft, it would be reclamation. Oh, and, in case any UK readers are feeling left out, Edinburgh-based Grand Theft Auto studio Rockstar North paid no corporation tax between 2009 and 2019. This is despite 2013’s GTA V making $1,000,000,000 (ONE BILLION!) within days of release and parent company Take Two making hundreds of millions from GTA Online. Despite paying no corporation tax for a decade, Rockstar North claimed at least $42,000,000 in tax relief in the 2010s. (<https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/29/grand-theft-auto-maker-uk-corporation-tax-rockstar-north-games>)

The poisonous immorality of modern blockbuster game companies like EA, Activision Blizzard, and Ubisoft may make enough of a case to steal certain video games, but there is a more complex side to piracy. Essentially, piracy is an issue borne of high demand and low accessibility. In November 2019, Disney+ launched in only a few territories - USA, Canada, and The Netherlands - due to licensing issues in much of Europe and other markets. The Mandalorian then became widely pirated due to it being so hotly anticipated and so narrowly available. Yet, even after the expansion of Disney+ in Spring 2020, The Mandalorian was still the most pirated show of the year. At a glance, this seems to contradict the idea that low accessibility is the biggest cause of piracy; after all, it was available on Disney+ in many major territories. But legitimate avenues are still obsolete to those who can’t afford them. Consider that a global pandemic caused massive unemployment and exacerbated the international poverty crisis, leaving most people with more time on their hands and many with less ability to do anything outside the home. With high demand for stuff to watch and reduced resources to legitimately access said stuff you have a recipe for widespread piracy. The same can be seen with Game of Thrones in 2015, which was being illegally downloaded over 100,000 times a day due in no small part to the high price barrier of HBO in the US, Sky in the UK, and Foxtel in Australia. (<https://irdeto.com/news/illegal-downloads-of-game-of-thrones-episodes-increase-more-than-45-percent-year-over-year-in-the-final-weeks-bef

The entry price of video games has been unfairly high for years, and with the release of the PS5 and The Xbox: New Xbox many publishers announced a $10 hike, bringing the price of many blockbuster games such as the EA and 2K sports series to $70. The vultrine, highly lucrative in game purchases are only becoming more egregious too, as they sap money from those who need it and funnel it to the top of the company. With that in mind, surely you can understand how many people would rather illegally download some games than fork out the equivalent of a weekly food shop for one. And why should you? Why should you give your money to companies that promote abusive work cultures and defraud the public for access to an infinite product?

I’m wary of placing too much personal responsibility on the consumer when it is the system that must change. But when you buy the next Call of Duty, FIFA, or Assassin’s Creed all you’re doing is helping executives line their pockets and perpetuate harm. I’m not calling for a boycott, but maybe think before buying the next big “Kick the ball” or “Shoot the brown people” interactive entertainment product churned out by these abuse factories.

They say that there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and it seems video game companies took that as permission to get real weird with it. Mass layoffs, sexual harassment, and exorbitant prices are just the tip of the iceberg of shitty practices Thom Jupp believes could justify theft of big-budget video games.

- For more on the targeting of aquisitive in-game purchases towards the vulnerable, check out Access-Ability by Laura K Buzz <https://youtu.be/34GF-NdIX4E> and The Jimquisition by James Stephanie Sterling <https://youtu.be/7S-DGTBZU14>