29 Jan 2023, 15:47

@Pyrephox said in D&D Licensing Agreement:

@Faraday said in D&D Licensing Agreement:

@Jennkryst said in D&D Licensing Agreement:

‘because boycotts never work’… like I said, I’ve got a very recent, very visible boycott that DID work to call them out on their bullshit.

Absolutes are rarely correct, so of course we can’t say that boycotts never work.

One can say, though, that boycotts rarely work. But don’t take my word for it, listen to the economists:

“The typical boycott doesn’t have much impact on sales revenue.” (source: Institute for Policy Research https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/news/2017/king-corporate-boycotts.html)

“If the aim is to hurt company sales, boycotts rarely succeed.” (source: NYT https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2017/02/07/when-do-consumer-boycotts-work)

“most [boycotts] fail to have any noticeable impact.” (source: Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2012/08/when-do-company-boycotts-work)

etc.

There are plenty of obstacles to getting enough critical mass behind a boycott to matter, and the perception of “eh, it probably won’t work anyway” is only a small part.

Those articles do note that with the right conditions, boycotts can be successful. Usually it’s negative press that matters more to the companies than any impact to the bottom line, and occasionally it’s possible to drum up enough support to make a dent to sales.

With WotC I’d speculate it was a perfect storm: the negative press was killing them (after all, their whole business model relies on other companies trusting them enough to make games on their platform), and it’s a small market to begin with (fewer actual humans must be motivated to impact the bottom line).

To this, I’d add that the company had a specific metric that it was using (D&D Beyond subscriptions) that could be directly impacted in ‘real time’ by people in a measurable way (canceling said subscription), as well as already including data collection of WHY that metric was changing (the cancelation page asks you why you’re canceling - I specifically indicated the OGL and I’m sure others did likewise).

This made it quite easy for decision makers to rapidly see what impact customer action was having on their profit base, and to know why. Most boycotts - especially for products with a national or international platform - don’t have that luxury.

Additionally, given that is their metric, the proliferation of news online was far more likely to reach the target demographic.

Whereas news about an author’s socio-political views aren’t necessarily going to seep into the consciousness of the millions of people who are fans of their work and its off-shoots.