As I type this, the boycott thread on the Subnautica subreddit has reached nearly 60,000 upvotes, in spite of its being locked and nearly two weeks old. And of course, it’s not alone; the Subnautica fanbase has been spitting fire (in multiple directions, mind you) ever since the delay announcement and ousting of the three top execs on the game that has dissolved into trash talk and lawsuits and one hell of a feud over corporate shenanigans and money. A lot of money.

Subnautica 2 is merely multiplayer, not an MMO, and yet it has my attention now not just because of the legal dispute but because of the boycott itself. I probably shouldn’t even call it a boycott. It was a call for a boycott for a game nobody can even buy yet and won’t even now be out until next year. It was a threat of a boycott with 60,000 anonymous people behind it and press swarming all over it to amplify it. I have no idea whether the boycott itself will happen by the time the game comes out; for all I know, gamers will trickle back and open their wallets. They often do. Or maybe the lawsuit will make to boycott moot. We really have no idea.

But the important takeaway here is that merely threatening a boycott worked. Krafton flinched. Krafton panicked so hard that it released several contradictory statements and gave the founders’ lawsuit against it more ammunition. Krafton has been rushing to fill space with posts about how it’ll compensate the very workers it was previously trying to avoid compensating. I’m fascinated by how well that worked. The history of boycotts in the gaming industry is so scattershot that I don’t have much faith in them, but Krafton apparently did.

Is boycotting an MMO company or game ever worth it? Can you think of an example of a time when boycotting or serious community pressure on a game studio actually got the result the playerbase wanted?

Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!