girzwald said:
Bingo. I am in no way equivocating this but the principle is the same. That's how the civil rights movement got the "back of the bus" rule to go away. They GREATLY inconvenienced their lives to send a message to the bus companies. The bus companies that greatly depended on blacks paying bus fare to stay afloat. They tried reasoning with them, they tried being nice but they wouldn't budge. Because why did they care about the feelings of blacks as long as they kept paying the bus fare. So, they hit the bus companies the only place they would understand, their bottom line. They walked or carpooled to where they went.
The bus companies damn near went bankrupt, so they gave in. Not because they suddenly had a change of heart and thought to themselves "these people are really determined, maybe we are wrong". No, because they were losing money. And quite frankly, I don't care what any companies reason for eliminating their crappy DRM or crappy overpriced DLC, just so long as they do. They know we don't like it, but they don't care because tools keep shelling out their cash regardless.
I'd like to believe that, but I just don't. I've heard comparisons to the civil rights movement and the Montgomery bus boycott, but the situation isn't even remotely analogous. It's SO different.
It's also important to remember that the actions of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders of the day were motivated by what would be politically expedient. Yes, they were concerned about taking the moral high ground too, since many of them hailed from church leadership. But the reason why they staged the Montgomery Bus Boycott is because they knew it would work.
They knew they had enough of a force at their command for it to actually mean something, and they also had already started to get their rights as a people recognized from a legal standpoint. Brown v. Board of Education had already happened by this point, which means that the Supreme Court *already* recognized the unconstitutionality of segregation, and all the institutions which still maintained segregated facilities were really just biding their time. They already commanded legal power, they commanded economic power, so they decided to leverage those to obtain the social power which had been denied them for almost a century.
Gamers who protest, say, restrictive DRM or shitty DLC that seems to have been cut from the original game, don't have any of those on their side. Whether we want to admit it or not, our squabble is a fairly trivial one. A big deal to us, but trivial in the big scheme of things. The "protest gamers" don't command enough economic power to drive any company near bankrupt (or even make a dent in their profits), nor are their rights backed by any kind of legal precedent. There just isn't much on their side.
If you choose to take the ethical high ground by protesting against a company's practices using "legitimate" measures, then good on you. That is a personal decision on your part and one you can feel proud of. But it is not logical to believe that your actions are effective as a means of compelling change.
