I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to go forward since Ashe because of my frustrations with… everything. This video isn’t about Overwatch, it’s about Diablo Immortal, but I wrote a very long-winded comment asking Mr. Skyen (a guy who’s opinion I respect) about how I feel about the current state of Overwatch’s promised diversity and where I should go from here as I’m disappointed.
He left an equally-long response, which I won’t post in full here, but I want to emphasize the last paragraph because I felt like it gave me a direction going forward and is was very much worth sharing with you all.
“This doesn’t mean Blizzard’s artists and developers don’t strongly believe in the necessity of representation and the value of diversity, it doesn’t mean the staff are homophobic and hypocritical, it just means that they can only ever act within the boundaries of what aligns with the interests of Blizzard’s shareholders, i.e. maximum profit with minimum expenditure. Maximum exploitation of the audience’s desire for diversity and representation, while dealing with as few of the risks of having diversity and representation in the game as possible. You should push for better representation, you should hold your money back until they give it to you, you should criticize Blizzard’s lack of effort in public, you should be loud about it, you should condemn cowardice and praise bravery. And still, you need to remember that Blizzard is not a person and Blizzard is not your friend.“
I highlight that last bit in particular because I know this is where I fail. I bought… more lootboxes than I should’ve during the Halloween event. I wanted the skins. Going forward, I’m going to try my best to be a conscious consumer. No lootboxes, no OWL tokens. No microtransactions, period. I will probably stop sharing information about official merchandise as well.
I’m going to keep sharing the voices of those who are most disappointed, of those who have yet to be included. I encourage others who want to remain in the community and are still passionate about the game to do the same.
PkCaramel 