Earlier this month, Big Walk developer House House explained why their co-op puzzle adventure wouldn’t be available for sale on Xbox: Microsoft’s gaming division is a priority target of the the Palestinian-led BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, which names the tech giant in general as a pressure target alongside Google, Amazon, and a host of other companies. House House isn’t alone in taking this action.
Narrative platformer Celeste and party fighter TowerFall have delisted from Xbox recently, and Maddy Thorson of Maddy Makes Games fame took to BlueSky to explain why: “For those who’re asking, yes, we delisted Celeste and TowerFall on Xbox. We did this to support the BDS boycott.”
For reference, Microsoft gets a cut whenever it makes a sale through its proprietary digital distribution storefront, similar to Steam. Console producers tend to take a loss on hardware, subsidizing it for accessibility to more consumers, so they can make up the difference by selling other stuff, a crucial slice of that other stuff being games.
So as long as sales trickle in for critically acclaimed games like Celeste and TowerFall, that’s a bit of easy money for Microsoft—the choice to delist the game stops that. If you’re an Xbox owner who wants to observe the boycott, you can always buy used physical versions of games where that’s an option or switch to another platform for the time being.
But this is PC Gamer dot com, so you probably haven’t even heard of the Xbox. You’ve certainly never seen one up close. You’re probably playing Chessmaster 9000 on your second monitor as you read this, you beautiful freak. In any case, you can always buy TowerFall on Steam. Same goes for Celeste.
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