Y'know people, the fact that so many of you are refusing to join a boycott is the very reason the boycott won't work. By being so pessimistic and unwilling about it, you're part of the problem. You proud of that?
Corporations are never going to improve on their own. They always try to get the most money for the worst service they can get away with. And thus, EA is only going to get even worse if we let 'em. The only thing corporations ever, ever, ever care about is their bottom line. If human trafficking was legal, EA would definitely invest in child sex slave stocks. Corporations do not care about ethics. Some individuals within corporations care about ethics, but at the end of the day if it doesn't bring a profit, it doesn't matter.
And thus, there are two and only two ways to make corporations behave. The first one is extensive regulation to the micro level. Laws that tell corporations exactly what they can and can't do, and exactly how they have to do it. Essentially we need not a free market, but a chained up market that gets whipped and stepped on whenever it's been naughty. I'm actually a huge fan of this approach, but nobody else is because people actually care about the rights of huge wealthy entities that don't care about our rights. Go figure.
The second way? Boycotting of course. The only way people can possibly make corporations behave is by hurting their bottom line. And the only way to hurt a corporation's bottom line is a large-scale boycott. But because so many of you care too much about the short term, you're unwilling to do something that'll improve the long term. Which, by the way, is the same attitude that leads to obesity and global warming and laziness. Putting the short term before the long term never, ever, ever has a positive outcome. We're killing our favorite industry by letting it do whatever it wants.
If we don't stand up for ourselves, we will see a future where EA will put commercial breaks - not just billboards (which is already pretty terrible) but actual commercial BREAKS in their games. We will see a future where you have to enter a code just to play the single player mode. We will see a future where we can only use our copy of a game on a single console. We will see a future where an EA forum ban is means that you have to re-buy every game you ever bought from them. And that's why I'm drawing the line here.
So yes, I'm joining the boycott.
