The world is ending. Wouldn’t you rather go down swinging?

About a month ago, I was sitting at this computer, struggling with what would become Digital Trends’ review for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. Hard to believe it’s been both that much time and that little; I feel like I’ve lived a lifetime since that review was published. I’ve done about 200 reviews in my time in the business, but Fatal Fury was asking something different of me, something more. 

What should I say about SNK being owned by Saudi Arabia, about alleged rapist Cristiano Ronaldo being put into a fighting game because he plays for a Saudi Arabian soccer team and is boys with the Saudi crown prince? I knew I needed to say something; I was disgusted, and couldn’t avoid writing about it. Or could I? It would have been easy to just chalk it up to “controversy” or a “bewildering inclusion” for marketing purposes, to not dig into what was happening, turn in the review, and go about my day. I watched as everyone in the Fatal Fury review Discord talked about sending in their pieces, and wondered how it had been so easy for them. They had to be struggling too, right? Maybe they were just handling it better than me. This failure was mine. Had to be. I couldn’t be the only person writing about it. They just knew what they wanted to say.

I wasn’t worried about my editor. I’d told Digital Trends editor Giovanni Colantonio I’d be writing about Ronaldo’s inclusion beforehand, what it meant for CoW and SNK, and if he wasn’t comfortable with that, he should probably get somebody else. Surprising nobody who has ever worked with him, Gio was cool with it. But it would have been easy to gloss over it, to write it off as a controversy, and not go into detail. I was worried about backlash; I’d gotten death threats during GamerGate, and that wasn’t something I was eager to go through again. I was worried about torpedoing my relationship with SNK, a developer I deeply admired. I was worried I wouldn’t meet the moment, that I’d write about it the wrong way, do a disservice to what it was I was covering, and the real-world impact it would have on the FGC and the people in it. I grappled with that for a long time.

Ultimately, I wrote what I wrote, sent it to Gio, and Digital Trends published it with minor changes mostly aimed at protecting me legally and making the piece better. If you liked that last paragraph, know that it didn’t read that way initially. Gio told me what I had there wasn’t good enough, and he was right. I went to bed not knowing what would happen; I didn’t know if I’d be the only one saying anything; I didn’t know if I’d have a relationship with SNK the next day; and I didn’t know how the FGC, a community I’ve been a part of for years and made my name covering, would respond. But I felt, deep in my bones, that writing anything less than what I did would have cost me a piece of my soul. And that wasn’t something I was willing to live with over a fucking video game. No matter what you do in this business, you have to be able to look yourself in the mirror afterwards.

If you’re here, you probably know the story. The review blew up, the responses were positive, and as far as I know, my relationship with SNK remains intact. A lot of people told me they respected what I’d done, that they considered my review the last word on CotW, but I was surprised to learn I was one of the only people who had written about it that way. I wasn’t alone, of course. My boy Connor Makar, one of the best reporters in the business, wrote an excellent, uncompromising review for Eurogamer. Skybox co-founder Lucas White didn’t pull punches over at Restart.run. And Ashley Schofield, whose work I’ve admired for a long time, covered it admirably for Edge in Issue 411. There are others, too. But we were the minority. Mostly, Ronaldo’s inclusion and the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s ownership of SNK were glossed over as a “controversy” or not mentioned at all. Few noted that the soccer star was a credibly accused rapist; fewer still said that he allegedly admitted to it in a leaked legal questionnaire. Ronaldo’s lawyers deny the veracity of that document, of course. Draw your own conclusions.

My point here isn’t to gas up my own work, or that of my colleagues, though I’m happy to go to bat for my friends whenever I can. This isn’t about any of us, and what we did or didn’t do; it’s more to convey my dismay at how few people in this space seemed to care when the time came for them to step up to the plate. To them, the prospect of a new toy far outweighed the moral calculus of what playing and promoting City of the Wolves meant signing their name to. 

I’m not here to talk about City of the Wolves, but I think what happened with the coverage of that game (which is, for better or worse, a massive financial failure) matches up with what I do want to talk about.

Last week, Giant Bomb went independent, sold to the guys who have made it great for the last few years after essentially being shuttered about a week earlier. Unless you’ve been in a coma, you know that games media is in a bad place. Sites are shutting down or getting bought up and then shut down. Polygon got bought by the soul-sucking automatons at Valnet the same day we thought Giant Bomb was through, and its staff was promptly fed into the metaphorical woodchipper. Some of the best in the business, who did remarkable work, were out of a job. Those of us watching wondered how long it would take for Valnet to try to replace them with younger, less experienced writers they could exploit to make slop, which is largely, with all due respect to the writers who work at those sites, what Valnet-owned websites do.

Then a funny thing happened. Zombie Waypoint — you know, the place that used to publish folks like Rob Zacny, Chia Contreras, Patrick Klepek, Austin Walker, and a host of other games media luminaries — wrote about Giant Bomb coming back. That’s all well and good; it’s news, and some of the only good news we’ve had in a while.

But then that piece did the one thing it needed to avoid doing: it made Giant Bomb’s resurrection about Waypoint. Let’s get something out of the way: the folks at Nu Waypoint aren’t scabs, exactly, but they are operating in a place I’d argue nobody should be. They joined up with Weyland-Yutani Waypoint after the old staff had been shitcanned, knowing that the original Waypoint cats got fucked over by Vice, which still owes them severance packages it never paid.

The This Ain’t Your Daddy’s Waypoint’s team is fairly inexperienced, which is probably why this happened, and to their credit, they have taken that article down. You can find an archived version of it here if you want to read it. 

I’m not here to shit on the Great Value Waypoint folks specifically. Really. I’ve got a bit of a reputation for going for big air, and while it’s tempting to put on my Jordans and windmill dunk on a team at a website that represents everything awful about corporate ownership, it won’t actually solve anything. I don’t know any of them personally, but I doubt they’re bad people. They’re victims, too, when you get right down to it. Everyone has to eat. The real issue is capitalism. But Tastes Great, Less Filling Waypoint’s existence in general, and that article specifically, are emblematic of a larger problem in games media and video games in general: a lot of people in this space want to be able to do whatever they want, and not only do they expect you to be okay with that, they want to be praised for it.

And it’s not just Gus Van Sant’s Waypoint or the City of the Wolves reviews, either. It’s the mindset of “I want a new toy, and I don’t care who gets fucked over when I buy it.” Look no further than the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which has called for a boycott of Microsoft’s game division because, as Autumn Wright wrote for Aftermath, the company is “complicit in the unlawful occupation of Palestinian land, Israel’s apartheid regime, and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.”

You’d think this would be pretty easy; despite capitalism’s best efforts, the only thing easier than spending money is not spending money. Spending money takes effort. Keeping your powder dry is free. It costs you nothing, which is the entire goddamn point. But I can’t tell you how many people in this business, and in the larger games marketplace, have twisted themselves into knots to justify buying the Oblivion remaster or DOOM: The Dark Ages at release. The BDS movement isn’t saying you can never buy Microsoft games again. It’s just asking you to hold off until a trillion-dollar company stops profiting off the genocide in Gaza. Those games will be there a week, a month, ten years from now. All you have to do to make the world a little better is wait to give yourself a treat. But apparently, that’s too much to ask. And if you can’t even stand up when all you have to do is wait to have something you want, why should anyone expect you to do anything that might actually cost you when the chips are down and we’re playing for keeps?

It’s not hard to hold yourself to a higher standard. It costs you nothing to tell the truth, to refuse to spend your money in a specific place. Turning down a job may cost you, but I know a lot of people who said “no” when Valnet Polygon came calling, looking for new writers to replace the incredible people they’d kicked to the curb. I’m proud to call many of them my friends. None of them are rich. Maybe the folks at Waypoint Remastered need the money, but a lot of really talented people in this space have spent time driving delivery trucks. Doing what’s right has a cost, but in this case, it’s incredibly fucking easy. All you have to do is say “no.” There are very few universally true rules about anything, but “don’t cross picket lines and, don’t fuck over your peers, and don’t make the world worse because you’re too lazy to do better” are absolutely some of them. At some point, we all have to be willing to say “enough.”

I’m not going to tell you I’m a model of moral clarity. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and done a lot of things I wish I could take back. But when they put us in the ground, we cease to be people and become our choices. It’s easy to live in hypotheticals; we don’t really know what we’ll do in a situation until we’re living through it. Fascism is no longer something from the history books. It’s here, now, and it’s not waiting for us to get ready to fight it. Neither is capitalism. There’s no boss music to let us know it’s game time. There’s no grand speeches for most of us, no great battles. Nobody is coming to save the day. There’s just us. That’s it. The moment is here.

Resistance is a lot of small acts that build and build and build until, finally, the dam breaks, and a million small choices turn into a tide that history will call inevitable. But it’s not. It happens because people stood up and did something. And when they bury me in my beloved Virginia, I want the people throwing dirt on my casket to know that I had the wherewithal not to profit off of other peoples’ misfortune, and when asked, had the self-control not to buy a fucking video game so I could do my bit to punish a company profitting off genocide.

We’re at an inflection point, here, now, whether we realize it or not, and our actions, however small they may seem, shape the future. We built Skybox because we wanted a future for all of us, but it’s not about me, or Lucas, or Brian, or anyone else here, or even this website. It’s about what we do together, the things we stand for, even if they seem insignificant. Right now, that means paying for this place and commissioning its writers out of my own pocket. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But at least we can say we tried. At least we didn’t just sit here hoping things would magically work themselves out.

If you don’t like who you are today, if this piece makes you uncomfortable, you can wake up tomorrow and choose to be someone else. It’s that easy, and that hard. The choices we make are our response to a question from the universe, and how we answer it totals our lives. It’s the same question over and over, the only one that matters: who are you?

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this piece referred to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in a way that both diluted the meaning of this essay and made people feel that it was trivializing one of the most horrific events of the 20th century. That language has been removed. We’ve also made a couple of factual corrections regarding the current version of Waypoint based on new information from folks who work there. If we believe in holding ourselves to a higher standard, that means acknowledging our mistakes and correcting them.