Here’s one nobody has mentioned yet. Hasbro. Owner of Wizards of the Coast which recently tried to massively fuck over D&D players and sent hired mercinaries (literally Pinkertons) after one of their Magic: The Gathering players for something that totally wasn’t the player’s fault.
They accidentally sent a notable player (dont remember if they were a content creator or something) an unreleased card. Pinkyboys showed up at his house and harassed him to return it.
So, D&D first. WotC back in 2001 realized something. There are a few books that they sell a ton of copies of and make a lot of money off of. (The Player’s Handbook, The Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual, etc.) And then there are a ton more books that take a lot of effort to make but that they don’t sell many copies of so they don’t really make much money on them, but they still have to be made in order to ensure that the more profitable books sell. (These are mostly the published adentures.)
They figured that it would be in their best interest to incentivize third parties to write a lot of these published adventures so that WotC itself could focus more on the core books. So they licensed a lot of their core content under a license (The “Open Gaming License version 1.0a” or “OGL 1.0a”) that allowed third parties to use it in their own modules and sell those modules. It created a vibrant ecosystem of publishers.
The OGL 1.0a was intended as a perpetual license. They promised third party publishers that the wording of the license didn’t allow WotC themselves – creators of the OGL 1.0a – to revoke the license. (This was on an official FAQ on WotC’s site.) So you’d be able to sell your module that included verbiage and elements from official D&D materials forever.
Well, in 2022, they changed their tune. They created an “OGL 1.1” (which was not “open” the way the 1.0a was) and started pressuring publishers they partnered with to accept the new license. It basically allowed them to rip off any third party content and include it in official WotC stuff without paying the third party publisher and also ban the publisher from using the material they wrote. It also put ridiculous restrictions on virtual tabletop software (software for playing D&D remotely.) Now, that’s not so catastrophic because they couldn’t revoke the OGL 1.0a and publishers were under no obligation to accept the OGL 1.1, right?
Well, they came up with a legal argument why the language of the OGL 1.0a that they’d been telling everyone couldn’t be revoked on existing works actually was something they could revoke. Basically, if they convinced a court they could do that, every third-party D&D module that relied on the OGL 1.0a would have to accept the OGL 1.1 terms that would let WotC rip off their work or stop sales immediately.
There was massive backlash from the community. D&D players were remarkably unified in their response. And the CEO of WotC was really tone deaf and dismissive and soured WotC’s relationship with the D&D community even further. Enough subscriptions to D&D Beyond (an online service owned by WotC) that shareholders started asking tough questions at shareholder meetings.
So, finally, WotC hired a slick PR firm to smooth things out. And, honestly, I have to admit they did good. They ended up leaving the OGL 1.0a in place (unrevoked it, sorta). But also, WotC had already said “actually, we can revoke it” and nobody trusted the OGL 1.0a any more. So WotC also dual-licensing the same OGL-1.0a-licensed content also under a Creative Commons license that is (more certain to be) unrevokable and is more open than the OGL 1.0a. The upcoming version of D&D will be OGL 1.1 only, but players and third party publishers are pretty unified on the idea of refusing to migrate to the new version and the current version is safer from the evil clutches of WotC than it was before this whole fiasco went down.
Now, the consensus among the D&D players is that WotC isn’t the bad guys so much as Hasbro, WotC’s parent company. When WotC backpeddeled and did the dual licensing thing, I decided to end my boycott of Hasbro. (I was actually DM’ing a D&D campaign at the time.) I looked forward to buying more D&D books. To seeing the latest Transformers movie and the D&D movie. Stuff like that.
And then, very shortly after that all went down, there was the other fiasco started by WotC.
I’m a little less familiar with this one, but some player of Magic: The Gathering purchased packs of MTG cards from a small reseller and the reseller fucked up. The reseller, not knowing the difference, gave the customer packs of a not yet released but similarly-named line of cards that weren’t supposed to be available to customers at all yet.
The customer made an unboxing video of these not-yet-officially-released cards and stuck it on YouTube. And that’s when shit hit the fan. WotC could have DM’d the customer on YouTube and asked if the customer could take down the video and exchange the cards for the ones he’d actually purchased, but instead they sent the actual, literal Pinkertons (a private security/mercinary company known for union busting and lots of illegal quasi-military/quasi-police actions against innocent people) to go harass the customer’s neighbors and intimidate (like while sporting assault rifles and body armor and camo – on the customer’s front porch) and bully the customer.
Now, my understanding is that the customer did nothing legally wrong. The fuck up was the reseller’s. The customer was under no legal obligation to return the cards or take down the video or otherwise cooperate in any way. The customer also said in later videos about the whole situation and the visit he got from the Pinkertons that they would totally have fully cooperated if they’d have just contacted him and asked.
As soon as I heard about WotC sending the Pinkertons after a customer, I recommitted to boycotting Hasbro and I intend never to end that boycott. I really didn’t expect something far worse to follow right on the heels of the OGL 1.1 fiasco.
Glad it was informative! Back when the D&D situation was all happening in realtime, I was so addicted to any and all news about it. I watched all there was to see about it on YouTube constantly. (And there was a lot.)
I’ve never played Magic, but especially given how soon after the D&D debacle it went down, it felt like a continuation of the same story. So I watched a lot about that as well.
My mother regularly goes to Hobby Lobby because its the only craft shop nearby. God I wish she’d just buy her shit online. Probably get better quality too.
PayPal acts as a bank without having to follow any banking laws. You have 10k in your PayPal account and PayPal decides its theirs? No recourse for you.
Just search paypal took my money and you can read all the horror stories.
I only have PayPal linked to a credit card, so I can always pit that ruthless company against them, I guess. But it does sour me on them if that’s how they treat their merchants
(not only have none of these companies made any effort at improvement, they’ve consistently gotten worse as time goes by – remember one comedian commenting “the bar was on the ground and y’all brought shovels”)
I wouldn’t judge people like that. You don’t know what happened back then, there is a chance they grew up as a person or they were tight for money and took whatever job paid the most with their available skill set.
Can’t believe I had to scroll down this far to find Walmart. No one does small business destroying, union busting, supplier squeezing, and employee exploitation quite like the Walton family.
Fast fashion isn’t even considered clothing for some peaple. XD Just put your jeans, your t-shirt and your sneakers and go to work, the modern slave outfit.
True. And while I try to, I’m not gonna stop watching twitch because amazon owns it. I won’t however donate through bits but only through direct donations.
Full boycott is difficult for a lot of shitty companies. But I limit it as mich as possible.
I try as much as I can but I find it hard to avoid any car manufacturer and Amazon. I’m trying my best to not go to Amazon and rather to Ebay or microcenter if I can though. As for fast fashion, I am planning to go thrifting or to goodwill.
I go by more of a criteria than a list. This criteria is followed personally but fits even more at my own workplace in the protocol. The criteria is really just things like “these businesses do not follow courtesy”, things like GoodWill, Autism Speaks, and Catholic Charities. There’s a charity ranker that has listed Catholic Charities as the top charity almost three years in a low. That’s on the blacklist too, we’ve known better all along. I can give a much larger list if asked.
It’s one thing to treat your people like fools, it’s another to run on gifting by members and still do it.
Well if you were from the Netherlands and starving because the Nazis stole your cows and gouda cheese you would also want to try and save every damn penny you can.
I’ve been boycotting Walmart for over 20 years. In that time, there was only one thing I couldn’t find anywhere else but there. After buying it, I found it at Costco shortly after. I was never so happy to return an item in my entire life. I even signed for the return on the fanciest cursive “Fuck Walmart” that I could muster.
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