I mean, sure. But how do YOU feel? I'm genuinely interested.
I, personally, would not buy a Harry Potter game even if I knew developers would get paid less for it. My empathy towards trans people, a profoundly underprivileged group, trumps my concern towards fellow game developers.
On other topics I make a case-by-case decision; for example, buying console hardware when I know part of it has a good chance of having been manufactured by Uighur slave labor. I'm considering skipping next-gen consoles unless this is addressed.
If you want to continue this conversation we can take it to PMs so as to not derail the thread. In the end I'm just one more guy trying to make it in indie development so my opinion shouldn't count more than any other dev's (which is the entire point of making a thread about it).
My honest question is: Would any developer really care and actually leave these jobs that provide a livelihood if these situations came up in their organization?
Yes, of course. I myself have rejected high-paying IT jobs for banks, corporations and high-frequence trading, because I wanted to do something more meaningful with my life than making rich people richer. My last paying job before going indie dev was in telemedicine. I don't imagine I'm the only software engineer out there that would rather be happy with themselves and what they do, than be paid more.
If you're a programmer, then working in game development, whether on AAA or indie, is
already sacrificing half of your potential salary just to be able to make what you enjoy. Working on a game you consider actively harmful makes zero sense; you may as well work for the nearest corp and get paid twice as much.
I know the poor dev excuse is not valid, but why call out people for using it as an excuse to support vile people when developers are not quiting their jobs to find others in bigger numbers when they know they are working to support the funneling of money to these people? Why feel offended by the use of this excuse if some are also using excuses to justify working in these places?
I can think of a multitude of reasons, primarily:
1) Because "devs not quitting their jobs" don't often post here to tell us why they don't. I'm not in the habit to speaking to hypothetical people.
2) Because their (again, hypothetical) excuse
would actually be honest. They aren't saying they don't quit their job for the sake of other people. They are saying they don't quit their job for their own benefit, because the money they are paid is worth to them more than the transgender people the game hurts, which is the self-obvious truth. They aren't using other devs as a shield, nor feigning concern for an unrelated group of people.
I myself am in a similar situation and know the company I work for may partake in ethically questionable stuff, yet I am not quiting or getting offended when people call out employees.
I think I agree with you that it is shitty excuse, but some of the reasoning I disagree with because most of us have to deal with these unethical practices in different ways and we have to deal with it, not just quit in protest. I know I can't possibly afford that, it would kill me.
Again, you aren't using "a shitty excuse": you are using
no excuse at all, which is actually honest. I am not your conscience, you owe me no explanation at all for your actions (and I wouldn't know enough about your particular situation to judge even if I was so inclined, anyway). You only every owe moral explanations to yourself.
Again, what I'm calling out in this thread isn't people buying the game. It's people buying the game
and justifying the moral consequences of them by using us as a shield.