True, conservatives aren't the only people with marketable outrage.
In the case of hogwarts legacy, it seems unintentional, as was the case with Keurig. Will be interesting to see whether other brands will try to copy that. Doesn't seem to be a good strategy longterm to purposfully do a transphobic campaign, though, since it can taint the company image. Less so with inclusive slogans, since attitudes towards inclusiveness seem to be on a positive trend for the forseeable future. I don't see anyone in the future saying "Nike is a terrible company since they did that commercial about boys 20 years ago", but "We can't trust x-company, since they had a transphobic ad campaign 20 years ago" is plausible to me. Maybe I'm mistaken about that, we'll see.
I don't know if the outrage over Hogwarts legacy actually helped game sales, the game was gonna sell like hotcakes anyways. Someone smarter than me will probably study it at some point
Yeah, I think it got a few more sales by people who wanted to own the libs by spending 60 more bucks for the same game, but that might not make a big impact on the huge number expected for sales.
And they added an actual Trans character to the game, as well as a gay Professor. It’s just weird that Hogwarts in the 1800s was way more diverse than in the 1990s
Maybe their was a wizard minister like trump and then you had wizard trump cultists and these minority wizards didn’t want to deal with that so they left :(
The thing is, with hogwarts legacy and Harry Potter in general, the fanbase is very left leaning and most people agree that Rowling is a piece of shit, but they still want to enjoy harry potter stuff.
Hogwarts legacy itself isn't transphobic at all, there's a trans character who you meet pretty early on and by all metrics this game would've tanked in the right wing demographic if the controversy never happened
Hogwarts legacy was a perfect blend, you had the Fans of the brand who wouldn't stop buying the game but are against what Rowling peddles, theyre the majority of fans and always would buy the game no matter what, meaning it was always going to succeed thanks to this demographic. You had the boycotters who, most likely never were that into HP and wouldn't buy the game anyway, talking about it constantly and giving you free advertising. And finally you had the real transphobes, who would never buy an objectively "woke" game like Hogwarts legacy, buying just to "trigger the libs".
Ultimately the success of the game was never going to rely on a boycott, it was always going to be extremely successful, but the boycott did still get a few extra people to buy the game, and simply delayed some people who've bought it on release but simply waited for the whole controversy to die off.
In any other situation this would've been considered a "woke game" for "woke people" , except a tiny population of "woke people" got unreasonably outraged which attracted right wingers to a buy woke product. So to replicate this you wouldn't make a transphobic product or ad campaign, you would need a completely inclusive product, then somehow get one tiny population of the left mad at it (not enough to lose all sales from the left), which will make the right desperate to buy that product to try and make that tiny population angrier.
"most people agree that Rowling is a piece of shit"
maybe if you left your online bubble you'd find that the majority of people either don't know/care about what she said, or agree
I am very specifically talking about people on the Internet, you know the people who would be aware of the boycott? Since that's what we're talking about?
Plus, most my friends i most people i know who know who Rowling is know how much of a piece of shit she is, or at least know some of it, it ain't like it is a deeply held secret by the Internet lords, shes a very famous person who has been very publicly a horrible person.
You seem completely lost, in not sure you understand what is even being discussed here, and even then you (and your acquaintanced apparently) sound way too out of touch.
Maybe you don't really read, or you're too young to be fully aware of the series in its prime, and how people operate, but I grew up right in the middle of the series being written. Literally everybody I know who ever read the HP books has an opinion on JKR's behavior.
And what do you call people sitting in their computer all day trying to find people rightfully calling her a piece of shit and defending her?
You know she isn't gonna fuck you right?
How pathetic are you? I never even said i hated her, i couldn't as I've never personality met her, but shes objectively a bad person, unless you're transphobe too, which means im trying to reason with another piece of shit right now.
Also side note: people who support her don’t even say anything anymore on platforms like these cause we get hit with a barrage of buzzwords, bans, and downvotes. So you’re not going to have a realistic idea of what people think if you’re filtering certain opinions out of the mainstream platforms
I don't think people care much about it from that side. I don't think many gay people will go "wow, this beer has a rainbow on it, i'm gonna buy 10 cases". Cynical either way.
The difference is that with Hogwarts Legacy it only worked one way. Some people bought the game out of spite for the people who hate JK Rowling, but nobody who doesn't want to support the game is buying it just so they can shoot the disc and burn the case.
Bud Light's strategy is working both ways. People who would otherwise never buy Bud Light are buying it just to stick it to the people who are mad about their Pride campaign, while the people who are mad are buying it just to shoot the cans and burn the box. It's the same thing that happened when Nike made a deal with Colin Kaepernick and when Carhartt started enforcing a vaccine mandate for their employees.
Anti HL people did try to get spoilers out to people during the pre release. How would they have known if some of them hadn't bought the game themselves?
I'm just saying, its not that different. Snowflakes got outraged because of X product just like snowflakes from another tribe got outraged from Y product.
I didn't even know it existed until it blew up. The outraged caused it to gain a much wider net, and got a number of people to buy it who may not have otherwise known about it
The advertising for it kicked off at the same time the outrage kicked off. If you hadn’t heard about it from Twitter you’d have seen an ad for it somewhere else shortly, or on steams front page or something.
Except it wasn't the ads that I saw until I had looked into the controversy. Regardless of what may have happened, a lot of eyes were drawn in due to the controversy.
I'd personally say that there's a bit a of difference between getting upset over bigotry towards vulnerable people and getting upset over tolerance towards vulnerable people, but that's just me.
I personally don't subscribe to the whole "boycott a product because its creator is a bigot" thing because basically every CEO is a Republican and they're all like that, but I can see why some people wouldn't want to financially support such a hateful person.
And that's basically why I don't boycott products based on the politics of its creator. But I do understand why people are offended by such hateful bigotry towards a marginalized group.
Who else wakes up every day trying to exterminate a group of people?
Does Chik Fil A wake up every day thinking how they can paint gay people as dangerous violent predators? Do they support people who are trying to reduce the number of gay people (genocide)?
Thats true, a boycott of HL didn’t do anything really, Rowlings still a rich piece of shit and there’s not much anyone can do to change that. An awareness campaign about her and maybe raising money for a trans charity would have most likely been much more successful than the kinda useless boycott.
😂 well nothing quite so extreme but the vitriol they displayed towards others - not quite the loving community you would expect. They say things like "you can't even do the bare minimum to support us"
Im pretty surrounded by queer people and I never see people who say stuff like that, maybe its like an online thing with people who dont really get how little impact the game has on Rowling? Im not a big HP guy and AAA Games kinda all feel the same so I never planned on playing it regardless, so I dont really care that much either
The outrage was more about JK Rownling and the product being associated with her. About every fourth tweet she posts is a negative news article about trans people. Some people think they've found hidden bigoted stuff in the game, but that's after already deciding it's bad to buy the game, so not too credible.
Man, that's a whole rabbithole and no single thing to point to. It's stupid twitter drama, I'd ignore it as best as possible if I were you. I also don't have a collection of links to offending tweets, since I'm not a serial killer. She never openly called for the eradication of trans people or something. She is openly against pro trans legislature as in this article on her website. But she's a mostly-liberal writer, so what she says sounds reasonable on first read. Just be warned that the numbers in that article are misleading and it's full of dogwhistles. She's constantly posting news articles vilifying trans people. She also openly associates with known TERFs (Trans exclusionary radical feminists). Not a good look for people who are for the rights of trans people. If you're on the fence about trans issues, you might not find her statements too bad, but I'd recommend listening to people on the other side of the argument.
Yeah, just sounds like somebody with different beliefs. Afaik the game studio disagrees with her statements and has called them out. I'm not a fan of the game, But maybe people should focus their issue on J.K herself and not the computer game?
Yeah, just sounds like somebody with different beliefs.
Not just that, she's also actively campaigning against pro-trans legislature. I'm neither trans, nor do I live in the UK, but if I was, I'd probably find it hard to stay cool about Rowling using her platform to campaign against my rights.
As for whether or not it makes sense to get outraged about a work related to her books: everybody has to decide about that for themselves. I don't particularly care about it, but I get the impulse. Social media about video games is an area where a particular group of very-online kids at least feel some kinda power, so I guess it's cathartic to them to do something. They won't be able to change JK Rownlings feelings about the topic anytime soon. Pretty sure the (very agressive) twitter backlash she got has only hardened her stance, which is a pity, but understandable. But they might be able to deter some people for buying a game that brings her royalties. Drop of water on a hot stone situation, of course.
One of the reasons i support the game is because of how awful so many Rowling protesters treated people who played the game. They set up a whole website to track streamers and youtubers who played/were playing the game with the sole intention of harrassing them. I know thats a vocal minority, But it really does turn one off from supporting that group. I liken it to those Climate protesters who throw soup on the old paintings, It just turns the vast majority of people against you
Sure I get that. Though I personally like that specific climate protester thing. It did everything right imo. It's nondestructive regarding the art (you bet those paintings are protected behind glass) and it garnered a lot of attention. Sadly they seemed kinda goofy doing it, so they lost on the coolness & charisma factor necessary for it to be an entirely useful campaign.
Lol, how is that a controversial statement. The budwiser campaign is like "queer people are cool, I guess" while the outrage about Hogwarts Legacy was about JK Rowlings weird TERF streak. The effect in media is similar, but the underlying ideas pretty much the opposite of each other.
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u/Mystshade Apr 06 '23
It worked for hogwarts legacy.