The SuperDQP Weekly - June 9, 2025
So. You want to boycott the biggest entertainment companies on the planet. You came to the right newsletter.
Wishlist rec against the machine
If this newsletter is gonna go against the man, it’s gonna need a wishlist rec that does so. And there are few better places to start than with Unbeatable.
Pitched as a game where “music is illegal and you do crimes,” it’s a story setup as old as the hills, but it’s executed well with charmingly grungy characters and a timelessly punk rock edge.
It’s also a rhythm game, and a fun and varied one at that! There’s a lot of depth at play just in the game’s available demo, with hints that more minigames and music will stretch the game’s ideas even further when it fully releases.
It’s a great game for people who love punching cops! (In video games!)
Unbeatable will launch later this year on PlayStation, Xbox – though maybe hold off on buying it on Xbox, for reasons outlined in the main body of the newsletter – and Windows PC via Steam. A demo is currently available on Steam. If you’re participating in Steam Next Fest this week, make this demo a priority.
Where reasonable alternatives exist
I haven’t consumed anything related to Harry Potter in a long, long time.
I haven’t been to the park, I didn’t play Hogwarts: Legacy, I stopped giving a shit about Fantastic Beasts, and I sure as hell am not watching that new series heading to HBO.
I’m not going to pretend that it was an easy choice to abandon the series, when I made it. I know it’s easy for many people to be smug and claim that Harry Potter was always bad, or that they couldn’t get into it as a kid, but it was a beloved part of my childhood. For as many problems as it had (and it had many), it was still a vital story of belonging and defiance of familial abuse. It, and the similarly-problematic X-Men films of the era, were important parts of my upbringing for that reason. They resonated with me.
But the time came to let them go, and I did. My need not to support active bigotry and harm outweighed my childhood nostalgia.
Rowling is a unique case study in entertainment boycotts. Much of today’s entertainment is owned by massive corporations that had relatively little say in its core creation. Star Wars started as an anti-fascist nostalgia project, and Spider-Man was created to appeal to young victims of bullying and poverty, but they are now both owned and operated by the same faceless multinational corporation. It’s all out of George Lucas and Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s hands (or at least it was, before the latter two passed away).
Rowling, however, still owns and operates Harry Potter just the same as she did when Philosopher’s Stone was first published in the late 90s. Large portions of the money that go into Universal Studios Butterbeer and Hogwarts: Legacy sales go directly to her, and you can trace a direct line from those sales to bigoted political campaigns that have resulted in harm towards queer people around the world. It is very simple to rationalize a boycott of her work.
Let’s put a pin in that and move into a thornier boycott.
In early April of this year, Palestinian-led movement BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions), added Microsoft to their list of boycotts due to their active complicity in recent crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip, including knowingly providing AI technology to the Israeli military with the express purpose of targeting Palestinians in attacks.
This boycott bled into Microsoft itself, with workers attempting to bring attention to the company’s complicity in internal emails and press events. Microsoft, for their part, has done their best to silence this criticism.
Not long before this, in a bout of excitement for the then-upcoming Doom: The Dark Ages, I started going through every single WAD in the recent Doom 1+2 collection, but upon the start of this boycott, I made an announcement of solidarity with Microsoft workers and stopped my Doom coverage. To this day, I still haven’t picked up Dark Ages, and I don’t think I will for the foreseeable future.
Boycotting Microsoft is not as easy as simply refusing to buy the latest Doom, or even as simple as canceling Game Pass and Office 365 subscriptions. Vast swathes of the world’s infrastructure is built on Microsoft’s technology. I rely on Windows 11 both at work and at home for both professional and leisure applications, and making the switch to an alternative like Linux Mint would be daunting at best and severely costly at actually.
But that said, as I mentioned in my announcement, simple steps to stop giving Microsoft money do make an impact, even if the result isn’t a complete 100% abandonment of the company’s software. Not buying Doom, while sad for me, is a sacrifice I can reasonably make. There are more than enough rad shooters on the market that are not published by Microsoft, and the same goes for other types of games. I can afford not to play Avowed or The Outer Worlds 2.
And similarly, I can afford not to pay for Office 365. I’m writing this newsletter on LibreOffice, which may not be as robust as Word, but it gets the job done reasonably enough for my purposes.
However, it’s not just Microsoft on that BDS list. Disney and Amazon are also both on that list, and both of those companies also have a stranglehold on American entertainment, including video games.
Hell, just at last week’s PlayStation State of Play stream, two of the highlights were Arc System Works’ new Marvel fighting game (Disney) and IO Interactive’s new 007 game (Amazon). These are games that A) look insanely cool, and B) I will likely ignore in the same deliberate way I’ve chosen to do with Doom and Game Pass.
These boycotts are a lot more difficult to rationalize. Disney’s presence on the list has to do with casting choices in Captain America: Brave New World and the recent Snow White remake; choices that Arc System Works had nothing to do with. And ArcSys is a notably progressive developer among the fighting game scene, including sexual- and gender-diverse characters like Bridget and (my current main) Testament in Guilty Gear Strive. By the time those Disney casting choices were made, work on Marvel Tokon was likely very well underway at ArcSys due to the long nature of game development. ArcSys didn’t have a chance to turn Disney down due to their inclusion on BDS’s list, like, say, Avalanche Software had when starting development on Hogwarts Legacy in 2018.
And similarly, IOI’s work on 007: First Light began well before Amazon’s acquisition of MGM in 2023.
And yet, due to these unfortunate circumstances and the decisions of higher-ups at Disney and Amazon, both games find themselves in this uncomfortable moral space where my excitement is dampened by their accidental complicity in the actions of the IP holders.
To paraphrase Barret Wallace’s immortal quote from Final Fantasy VII Remake: a good developer who works for a great evil is not without sin. They must recognize and accept their complicity.
But it’s worth noting that BDS’s boycotts are not entirely about morality. If they were, we’d be here all day arguing in circles that it’s immoral to use the iPhones and cars we need for everyday life. The boycotts, like their spiritual predecessors in the Civil Rights Movement, are about strategy. They are small, tangible actions to demonstrate that Microsoft and Disney and Amazon’s complicity in Israel’s actions in Gaza are not only immoral, but also unprofitable. That consumers do have power and enough of a spine to direct that power where it matters.
To return to that pin, Harry Potter is still a cultural juggernaut, but not nearly to the same extent that it was in the early 00s. Rowling has done severe harm to the brand, and the number of people who aren’t aware of Rowling’s political actions has been shrinking for years. Consumer advocacy does work.
So, let’s say you’re a massive Star Wars or Marvel or 007 fan. What do you do? These are often foundational entertainment franchises for a lot of people. It’s never as simple as just saying “give it up cold turkey.” All of the above properties – yes, including Harry Potter – have at least some redeeming qualities that made them special to millions if not billions of people.
But even though it’s never that simple, I do implore you to seek alternatives, not just for the sake of a boycott, but also to diversify and cultivate your tastes. Science fiction and superhero and spy media are giant genres and they are not limited to Disney+ or Prime Video or Xbox Game Pass. I also make it a habit to tell Harry Potter fans to read Discworld, a sprawling series of very funny and heartfelt fantasy books that were written by someone who was actively supportive of trans rights in life.
If you want to continue supporting Arc System Works, Guilty Gear Strive is still going strong and still has characters on the horizon, and lead designer Daisuke Ishiwatari is outspoken about queer inclusivity.
As for Doom fans, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: play Turbo Overkill. It’s a fantastic Doom 2016-like with charismatic voice talent and a chainsaw leg. And if you have an Oblivion fix, I’ve heard incredible things about Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon.
Point is, art is so much bigger than Disney or Amazon or Microsoft or J.K. Rowling make it look. That’s not to say that their works don’t mean anything; these boycotts wouldn’t be so hard if they didn’t. But the boycotts mean something because they are hard. It’s a flex of your power as a consumer of art and entertainment. You can make that choice. You have that power.
Not just the power to pirate their work, but the power to show them and others that their work can’t monopolize your tastes; that they don’t get to be cultural kingmakers. At the very least, not while aiding and abetting Palestinian and trans genocides.
Reasonable alternatives exist. So go seek them out!