Earlier this month, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement added Microsoft to its list of priority targets due to the company’s intense entanglement with the Israeli military via Azure cloud and AI services. Specifically, BDS called for supporters to boycott Xbox, including Game Pass, individual games, and future purchases of consoles and peripherals. Now, in a show of solidarity, indie label Ice Water Games has removed one of its projects, open-world tactics RPG Tenderfoot Tactics, from the Xbox store.
The collectively run games label explained its rationale in a statement yesterday: "The Tenderfoot Tactics team decided to remove our game from sale on Xbox in solidarity with the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign, which added Xbox to their priority boycott list earlier this month. We hope that Microsoft will listen to the voices of their workers and customers and stop all the business with the criminal Israeli military, which we have watched conduct an open genocide in Gaza over the last 18 months."
Speaking with Aftermath, Badru, a Seattle-based game worker who considers Tenderfoot Tactics his “baby,” said that though this represents a small loss of revenue for those at Ice Water, there wasn’t any notable pushback against his decision from the group. Ice Water is not a business entity – instead functioning as a calling card for a group of creators who maintain ownership of their games – but it still operates on a consensus-like model.
Badru, already part of a Seattle-based group called Boycott War Profiteers, proposed the idea of pulling Tenderfoot from the Xbox store to Ice Water after BDS declared Microsoft a target, and while some members did not respond at all, the “core people” – including Daniel Crane, a dev who’d just finished porting the game to Xbox – gave him a resounding series of thumbs ups.
"I think for us, it wasn't a super difficult thing to decide, because Tenderfoot Tactics Xbox sales aren't what's supporting all of our lives,” Badru told Aftermath, noting that those sales amount to a few hundred dollars per month. “It's nice to have it on that platform, but it's nice to be able to make the gesture, especially when it's just so exhausting watching what's happening and feeling like we can't do anything. ... I think it's important to be able to use that limited amount of power [we have on platforms] to put whatever pressure we can on things."
He noted that, at least in the short term, increased sales of Tenderfoot Tactics on other platforms – seemingly in support of Ice Water’s tactical retreat from Xbox – have already made up the difference.
Badru sees this approach as useful not in the sense that it’s going to miraculously bring Microsoft’s empire – or America’s Israeli vassal state – crumbling down, but more as a means of revealing to regular people the ways in which systems of oppression are intertwined.
"With regards to Microsoft, [it’s a] huge target, right?” Badru said. “It's a huge part of the economy, especially in Seattle. It feels like everybody sort of works for Microsoft, or at least downstream from it. Microsoft is practically part of the state; it's so interconnected with the US military. Whether we're able to make Microsoft change or not directly, part of the point of targeting them is to be able to advocate around this and show these connections. Otherwise, nobody's interested in Azure Cloud. Nobody wants to talk about whatever Microsoft's bullshit AI is doing. These boycotts create opportunities for us to shine a light."
This is also, Badru believes, an opportunity to build solidarity from within and without.
"I know a lot of workers at Microsoft are very sad about this stuff, and it's hard for them to speak out and make any change,” he said. “I think it's important to have this group of people outside applying pressure as well."
Badru explained that BDS and allied groups like Boycott War Profiteers go after less gargantuan targets as well, like a grocery store in Seattle that sources products from Israel, in the latter’s case. These efforts work in conjunction, and he believes that smaller indie devs can collectively build a similar sort of momentum.
"A lot of developers are on contracts or under situations where this would be a bigger decision for them to make. But now I see some other indies realizing that this is an option, a way to show solidarity with BDS,” he said. “So I do hope to see other indies taking their work off of Xbox. There's so many people like me where being on Xbox is not making or breaking your ability to survive, and it just feels gross."
In the meantime, Badru is just glad to see that people care.
"I know the gaming community has two very different faces, but the side of it that I see the most, especially among indie developers, is very progressive, cares a lot about peace and justice, and does not like to see what's been going on in Palestine,” he said. “People have been really enthusiastically positive about [Tenderfoot Tactics’ removal from the Xbox store]. It's been really nice to see."
