The map of people sony's bs is going to effect is almost entirely the "bad states" on the "same map" map. It's a bit weird seeing people on reddit boldly jump to their feet to defend... the RF, PRC, most of Africa, the phillipines.

Whenever these gamer activism things happen I just see gamer-gate happening all over again, a witch hunt where people take a minor or normal issue and use it as an excuse to initiate a campaign of harassment and reaction across the net.

It's almost always driven by misinformation and outright lies. In this case it's been spread broadly that sony is imposing photo id checks, when as far as I can tell that's a uk government policy sony is complying with.

Likewise "i'm concerned about data privacy" has been another key rallying call. The data Sony asks for, at least in the us, is entirely a matter of public record.

The subreddit where this is being coordinated has been a cess pit since about a week after the game came out, with the posting dominated by aggrieved people screaming for blood and justice every time their favorite gun gets minor balance changes. I view the current witch hunt and/or consumer actvisim as "the community", the thin scum of the angriest and most miserable people who do much of the posting and upvoting on reddit, just finding a legitimist causes belli to rope in 100,000 people in to their weird hate campaign. Like, to be succinct, I think these disorganized internet post-4chan crusades are reactionary and destructive. They might get some movement out of Sony, dropping a well reviewed game to bad reviews in a few days is nothing to scoff at. To arrive there they've already harassed at least one woman, a trans employee at Arrowhead, off the internet and arrowhead is apparently getting a considerable amount of harassment.

Having watched gamer-gate happen, watched the years of harassment of women, watched and been part of some of reddits early witch-hunts back in the day, watched a few very well made games get torn apart by unreasoning hate campaigns, this all reads as disgusting witch hunting to me. Arrowhead is like 100 swedes whose last game was a weird little twin stick tactical shooter ten years ago. They don't have clout. If Sony decides to do something unpopular they don't have much if any power to stop it. I like those little Swedish weirdos, they made something really cool and i'm viscerally angry that they're being harassed and tormented for the crime of their niche tactical shooter gaining a wide audience.

There's also the whole thing with "consumer activism" taking the place of class consciousness. You've got, at minimum, 100k people who changed their steam reviews who are shaking their fist at bad company instead of figuring out their class role and understanding that all this rent seeking, enshittification, it's all capitalism and the normal behavior of capitalist companies.