On Thursday, April 3, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement made Microsoft a “priority target” of its call to boycott companies it identifies as complicit in the unlawful occupation of Palestinian land, Israel’s apartheid regime, and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. A top point in this direct call for nonviolent action: boycott Xbox.
Microsoft joins the list of corporations including SodaStream, Siemens, HP, and Reebok that are targets of the BDS movement's boycott, which aims to maximize consumer pressure on select companies with more narrow, achievable actions. Specifically, BDS asks consumers to boycott “Microsoft's gaming products;” this includes boycotting games published by Xbox subsidiaries such as Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard; uninstalling major games like Minecraft and Call of Duty; not buying Xbox software and hardware; and cancelling Game Pass subscriptions.
On Friday, the games press largely devoted itself to covering Nintendo's delayed Switch 2 pre-orders and the panic surrounding Trump’s announced tariffs, political actions that are already materially impacting consumers. While non-games publication Dropsite News was among the first to cover the announcement, I felt games publications were slow to pick up the story. When I began writing this piece on Monday, only one major games publication, RPS, had covered the call for boycott. Tech news site The Verge, sister site of Polygon, included mention of the boycott in its coverage of worker protests at Microsoft on April 4, and Polygon later covered BDS’ call on April 8. On April 9, PC Gamer also mentioned the boycott while covering the protests at Microsoft, and Paste ran a story on why the boycott will succeed. Various podcasters and streamers have announced publicly they will stop covering Xbox-published games. Critic Kaile Hultner covered the news day-of on their blog No Escape, adding that they would participate in the boycott. The following day, they followed up with a post exploring concerns over the call’s potential impact on game developers.
The relative quiet from the games press was noticeable in part because many games journalists have been vocal about the injustice in Palestine in the past. Sites have widely covered Palestinian developer Rasheed Abueideh's fundraiser for his game Dreams on a Pillow; members of the press have spoken freely about their position on the conflict on social media; and in November 2023, People Make Games published a widely shared story platforming, among others, Gamespot managing editor Tamoor Hussain.
Much like the events of the past 18 months, there is a history looming behind all this. In 2021, IGN's parent company took the unprecedented step of removing a staff-organized call for fundraising of humanitarian aid to Palestinian relief organizations, later reposting an edited version. Owner Gamestop removed a similar story from Game Informer. Reporting on the removals by Imran Khan at Fanbyte has since been removed, though so has much of Fanbyte's archive.
There may well be an understandable fear of reprisal among journalists: from Xbox, from the bosses who pay workers’ checks every month, and even from the current U.S. administration. But the press should not meet challenging moments with silence.
A brief history of the boycott
BDS’ call might be particularly challenging in the games space. In games, “boycott” might conjure up aggrieved gamers throwing a fit over matchmaking servers, the vitriol of racist influencers signaling their disdain of a game about a Black person, and anonymous social media accounts expressing their ire for the cultural production of a British transphobe. In contrast, BDS is a decentralized movement organized from within Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora. It was formed in 2005 with the endorsement of over 200 groups, including worker unions and professional organizations, refugee organizations, and women’s organizations in Palestine. The movement attempts to consolidate the protests of Palestinian civil society into more effective, targeted actions, while calling on international consumers with conscience to participate. Its actions are modeled off South African anti-Apartheid protests.
BDS creates primary targets to maximize the impact of its boycott. Existing primary targets include SodaStream, an Israeli company operating on occupied land with an alleged history of discriminating against Palestinian workers, and Hewlett Packard, which provides servers to Israel’s Population Registry that restricts the free movement of Palestinians in their homeland. BDS boycotts have seen several successes over the past 20 years: in 2023, Puma ended its sponsorship of the Israel Football Association, which sponsors teams on occupied land. (Puma claimed the decision was made irrespective of the boycott, though BDS documented its campaign’s effect.) A boycott of Sabra hummus, the original college campus culture war, ended in 2024 following the divestment of Israeli manufacturer Strauss Group (attributed to a decrease in U.S. sales). The power of the BDS movement's boycott strategy has proven so substantial, in fact, that many U.S. states forbid boycotting Israel.
Microsoft’s elevation to a primary target of the boycott follows new reporting published this year about the company's involvement in the siege on Gaza, which has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians (including 15,613 children under the age of 18). The Guardian reports Microsoft has “deepened its relationship” with occupation forces, with documents showing that “Microsoft’s products and services, chiefly its Azure cloud computing platform, were used by units across Israel’s air, ground and naval forces, as well as its intelligence directorate” during what Human Rights Watch and UN experts have called acts of genocide.
The Associated Press reports Azure is being used by the Israeli military to compile and search through information gathered from mass surveillance. The Guardian's report also indicates there are uses of the tech on air-gapped computers. This has all been profitable for the company: internal company data and documents reviewed by AP journalists shows Microsoft entered a three-year, $133 million contract with the Israeli Ministry of Defense in 2021, and The Guardian reports Microsoft has generated $10 million in deals from "engineering support and consultancy services" since 2023.
This week, Microsoft fired an employee for protesting during the company's anniversary event, while others previously began the No Azure for Apartheid campaign from within, whose petition BDS urges consumers to sign. In 2024, Google similarly fired employees who protested the company’s contracts with the Israeli government.
A question for games media
BDS' call to boycott Xbox is a response to Microsoft’s aiding in and profiting from acts of genocide, and it should be reported as such. I would argue that BDS is significant enough to have warranted prompt, widespread coverage of its announcement among the games press, though I understand the silence may be a symptom of an untenable journalistic landscape rather than apathy or hypocrisy among individuals. But the news here doesn’t end with coverage.
How should games journalists and critics respond to a call to boycott Xbox? Reviewing an Xbox-published game with a Microsoft-provided press copy doesn’t technically breach the boycott, but could it be seen as promoting sales? Games media includes SEO and commerce writers who make lists of sales that include Xbox games and services, encouraging people to purchase them. Would this work, which buoys many games outlets' finances, work against the Palestinian cause? Would service writers, creating guides and tips for Xbox games, be lending tacit support to purchasing them? Is reporting on release dates and new game announcements from Xbox breaking the spirit of the boycott?
In interpreting the call to boycott’s application to games media, Carolyn Petit, managing editor at Kotaku, points to a distinction in the aims of critics, journalists, and the enthusiast press. “It’s my feeling that journalistic outlets covering the industry needn’t stop covering Xbox games altogether, but that they do have a responsibility, frequently, to put the games and consoles made and published by Microsoft into a larger context that brings the boycott and the reasons for it to bear. I think it has to be approached rigorously but thoughtfully, in a way that’s clear about who and what it’s targeting.”
She mentions the newly released South of Midnight. The game’s initial review embargo lifted just before BDS’s call, and it is the first Xbox Game Studios game published during the boycott.
“I haven’t played it yet but by many accounts it offers a wonderfully rich portrayal of the American South . . . It is a Game Pass game, and the BDS boycott call includes not supporting these kinds of revenue streams for Microsoft, so when mentioning the game’s availability, I’d find it appropriate to remind readers that BDS has called for the boycott, and why, and let readers decide for themselves what choice they wish to make,” Petit says.
Freelance writer Grace Benfell, who authored Paste's coverage, brings up the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), which targets academic and cultural institutions. “The [cultural] boycott invites an equivocation between Microsoft and Israel itself, and thus we should treat Microsoft's cultural products as propaganda for as long as the boycott stands. That equivocation is not exact, of course, but it is also useful.”
Like Petit, Benfell raises concerns about games journalists’ role in the larger games media sphere. “I think it is a reality, despite our best intentions and efforts, that games press is largely an arm of public relations and consumer reporting. That is not always true, of course. But I would consider what exactly we are saying ‘yes’ to now when we agree to review a Microsoft-published game or cover a new Call of Duty event. If our access to a game is predicated through a PR relationship with Microsoft, can the resulting output ever be critical or radical?”
Benfell emphasizes that, lacking exact guidelines, she would be “hesitant to flatly condemn any critic that covers a Xbox-published game,” but the consideration is vital. My own interpretation of the PACBI guidelines is that it applies to work made with or funded by complicit Israeli cultural institutions, so Xbox-published games would not automatically fall into its scope.
A manifesto for games writing during the genocide
And this is where my reporting ends, where my journalistic detachment can no longer go. This is where we, where I, must put something on the line. The call to action has arrived to each and every member of the games media, and we must now choose how to respond. And know that when we write about Elder Scrolls VI or Call of Duty from now on, we are choosing.
Here is my stance. I cannot see a way for myself to review or cover boycotted games while maintaining my conviction with the movement for Palestinian liberation. However, liberation won’t be found in the strict adherence to bulleted criteria. It will be found in support of justice. On the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “Our concern would not be to put the bus company out of business, but to put justice in business.” King continued, “I came to see that what we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system, rather than merely withdrawing our support from the bus company. The bus company, being an external expression of the system, would naturally suffer, but the basic aim was to refuse to cooperate with evil.”
We must withdraw our support from the evil system, not merely withdraw our support from Microsoft. As Marina Kittaka wrote in 2020, we must divest from the video games industry. We must refuse to cooperate with evil.
But writers, staff and freelance alike, must also pay rent, with different access to the support networks that have historically assisted striking workers or mass protest movements. As a freelancer, I have the freedom to not take up work that contributes to injustice. And as a freelancer, I see less and less work every month without putting this story in my portfolio. So yes, I will continue to edit articles about Xbox release dates when they come my way at the copyediting gig that pays my rent, but I understand myself guilty of breaching the boycott, and it is a contradiction I must live with. Not to excuse away the feeling of guilt under a mantra like "No ethical consumption under capitalism," but to gnaw at me from inside, to fuel me to make a different world beyond games where I do not have to live with this feeling anymore.
It would be easier to follow our consciences if material conditions changed—but I cannot let capitalism shift responsibility to an amorphous other or a possible future we are all now responsible for. As Ben Ware writes in On Extinction: "If the future is to be salvaged and the dead time of the present to be redeemed, it will only be through the transformative agency of those who have learned how to take political sides.”
As a critic who works slowly outside of marketing cycles, who resists hype, I will continue to be vocal about the iniquity of the games industry and how games are made. I have published criticism over the past 18 months that calls attention to the genocide, and I will continue to. And to ensure to myself and my readers that my writing continues to work towards justice, boycotted games cannot themselves become the subject of my work. Mention is unavoidable if I am to properly offer context of the medium in my criticism, but acknowledgement of the boycott and the cause behind BDS’ call will accompany these references. Unlike a land acknowledgement, though, the content of what follows must be withdrawn from the evil system; it must show others the inevitability of liberation and justice in this world. But how?
Games journalists and critics are writers of and within empire. Therefore we must make the conditions for revolution inevitable, and we must see the liberation of the Palestinian people within our lifetime. There are many of you who know games are political and feel at a loss for what to do right now in ways greater than interpreting bulleted lists of correct behaviors, who cannot imagine that writing about games could at all align with moving the world towards justice. I am sure I am not the only one who has felt, at times, like my writing cannot do to the world what needs to be done.
But then I remember what others words have done for me already. In games, the words of Grace Benfell, Kaile Hultner, Jacob Geller, Jake Steinberg, and, after the first election of Donald Trump, Austin Walker, EIC of the week-old games vertical Waypoint, who wrote how games media could respond to a fascist’s rise to power: “It is also our goal to build a new lexicon inside of the gaming community. One that isn’t about reaching wider audiences with new stories, but one that will help us address our own failures, systemic and personal." If the second election of Donald Trump has taught us anything, it is that our writing must also do the work to shape how others understand the world. We can move with compassion and with interest when we write about games. We can share how we came to know what is inevitable.
