Halo releases this week. Sony isn't going to notice anything.

My PS3 will have to stay thoroughly boxed up on the basement.

I won't be turning mine on, but that's only because I recently hacked my GameCube, so I'll be playing that until I decide to go back.

Seriously, timed blackouts and petitions are just being performative. If someone actually cares, sell your ps5/move to another platform. Nothing else matters. This is like how sports game fans complain every year that the game sucks but are still willing to drop 80 dollars on it.

Agreed it should be: starting 23 of August not purchasing any digital games and microtransactions. It would hurt Sony the most

I haven't owned a Sony console since the PS2, but I will gladly double, even triple, my effort to continue to do nothing!

You already won vs Sony!

How does it actually affect anything?

It gives certain social influencers a soapbox from which they can shout "Like, Subscribe, and Share!"

Modern day "boycotts" aren't really economic actions. They're media stunts advanced by affinity marketing groups intended to collect personal information and demonstrate their ability to mobilize large numbers of people.

Agreed on the last part. But a less cynical take: Companies like Sony obsessively track their sales metrics. If a campaign like this does go viral, and only a few percent of people actually follow through, it does create a noticeable dip in the metrics and an explanation will be demanded internally. There's a small chance this makes certain managers a bit more careful about such decisions.

In rare cases companies have taken back or at least delayed similar moves, and they never do so without indication that it will indeed affect their bottom line.

Though I don't think this campaign will have much effect, since asking for a full week is not something many people will follow through with. Also Sony is clearly banking on the fact that customers will stay due to lock-in to their ecosystem.

Yep. The hill my new console owning habits died on was any corp pushing paying to play online subscriptions and I stuck to that. I'll buy used later if there's exclusives I want and I can't just emulate it like Switch 1.

Couldn't agree more!

Just cancelled my PS+ subscription with reason "other".

I'll see you all on the seven seas!

but it makes those people feel good about themselves.

I thought that was the stupidest thing, the Reddit "blackout". Company doesn't care. It's a metric. It's a line on a graph. When stakeholders ask they'll point to it and say "This was are anticipated backlash from the Q2 decision to ban 3rd party APIs, but as you can see we already recovered and have grown at our normal pace."

I do want to give some insight. The reddit blackout did work technically. At least for me. I left reddit during the blackout and joined lemmy. Found it a lot better and remained. Letting people get a taste for not bootlicking a corp during a blackout is a small way to kick start a change.

Sure it might not get measurable change in the way the shareholders would change their mind, but every little discression against major corporations is a step in the right direction and I don't think the people ITT should be shitting on people for trying to retaliate against Sony, albeit for a short time.

I have a couple PS3's. Bought used. No online games. I think I've bought more of their titles on PC than console.

It's not even a boycott, I just haven't seen value in their recent offerings and would rather spend my money elsewhere.

There's some stuff I'd love to experience on the PS5.

But I will not be spending nearly a thousand dollars for a set top box with limited functionality they can effectively disable when I'm no longer making them enough money.

And with SteamOS getting better and better, the convenience of a console over a PC is becoming less of a thing.

Honestly, once SteamOS has dedicated apps for things like Hulu and Netflix, I think we can really change things. Right now my parents have an Xbox where my Dad can play an occasional game, but the interface is simple enough for my Mom to open her streaming apps. Once SteamOS gets that simple, I'll be switching them over.

Remember that screenshot of Steam group "boycott modern warfare 2" with almost every player with "in game: modern warfare 2"

Yeah, are they going to stop after a week, stomp their foot, and tell Sony to knock it off?

I boycotted Walmart for years, realized I would never see any change, and continue to not shop there because Walmart sucks and my life is better now. If you make the change the goal, you are lining yourself up for disappointment. If you make doing business with companies congruent with your values the goal, you win if you last a week, you win bigger if you last a month, and you win the grand prize if they change or you leave and never look back!

The only people that made change my views was Vanillaware. But their Switch release made me angry at myself for believing in digital scarcity. I won't fall for haggling tactics like these again.

Because the players have grown addicted to Sony's boot flavored meds, the withdrawals become too great after 1 week.

Damn, I thought I was leading the chunky peanut butter revolution over here.