i’m not mad, i’m just disappointed

forza horizon 6 launched on xbox series x/s and pc on may 19. worker-owned video game website aftermath published a piece about the game by co-founder luke plunkett on may 21. that same day, plunkett addressed his blog on bluesky, specifically in the context of the boycott, divest, sanction movement targeting microsoft — parent company of forza horizon 6 developer playground games and publisher xbox game studio — for its aiding of israel‘s brutal campaign of genocide against the palestinian people:

So! This is the first post about a Microsoft game that I think we’ve run since the boycott movement took off. Here’s where we landed after talking about it internally:

aftermath never promotes anything, regardless of the publisher. we have no access to pander to.

we’d never actively promote a microsoft product (trailers, covering press events, etc), and be part of a marketing machine, because…we don’t do that anyway.

a lot of our readers are playing fh6, i played it (i didnt buy it, nor did i receive review code) and i think there’s stuff to discuss.

this is a piece that’s discussing the game critically, spending a huge amount of time on some negatives, and I personally ended up in a space where like…I 110% support the boycott as a personal decision for people, but if I let it stop me covering games critically, thats weird.

so I mentioned and linked to @autumn-wright.com‘s excellent piece on BDS to remind people of the context, and decided to write something up from a critical perspective, not a “should you buy this” one (which, again, we don’t do anyway!)

I understand this is a fluid and very personal thing, and everyone’s stance on it will land in different places along a spectrum of action. This is where mine lands, but if you think that’s shitty, I respect where you’re coming from because I can see it.

i have a lot of issues with many of luke‘s points. let’s tackle them one by one.

“aftermath never promotes anything”

the idea that aftermath is more independent and thus more honest or ethical or whatever word you want to use thanks to its reader-supported, subscription-based model was a core selling point when the site launched in 2023. the phrase “aftermath never promotes anything” is a nice sentiment in theory, but it’s a little more complicated in practice.

this mostly comes down to personal interpretation; my own is that any coverage of forza horizon 6, positive or negative or a mix of the two like luke‘s blog, serves to remind potential customers of the game’s existence and thus benefits microsoft. whether or not aftermath received a code from the publishers — and it’s my understanding they did not — doesn’t matter. xbox absolutely considers negative reviews part of its marketing campaign because, these days, keywords are more important than content. it’s something every journalist in what is objectively a less serious and more enthusiast-focused media ecosystem has to examine and extrapolate for themselves.

same goes for the idea aftermath isn’t part of “a marketing machine” which, sorry, they absolutely are. we all are. everyone. the world we live in is a marketing machine. even this blog has the potential to advertise forza horizon 6 to someone. but aftermath, in this small, brief moment, was given an opportunity many never see: the ability to opt out of a system that both exploits us and conscripts us into the exploitation of others. extricating oneself from the machine takes more than a few semi-sympathetic words before diving into what you liked and disliked about a game.

“if I let it stop me covering games critically, that’s weird”

i disagree. if he let it stop him from reporting on microsoft as a journalist or saying anything at all about forza horizon 6 in the context of the boycott, that’d be weird. i just don’t see what luke did as journalism. and that’s not an insult! this isn’t a value judgement on blogs or game diaries or reviews, as i think they’re all important in different ways. again, it’s about more than just finding loopholes to let yourself off the hook.

aftermath itself, fortunately, has a couple of recent examples of where ignoring a story because it involved microsoft would have been a journalistic disservice, both by co-founder nathan grayson: double fine is unionizing and xbox’s new AI-loving boss shocks world, kills useless AI feature. it’s important we don’t conflate these two styles of coverage. one is surface-level analysis of forza horizon 6, the other is news.

“I mentioned and linked to @autumn-wright.com‘s excellent piece on BDS to remind people of the context”

aftermath covered the microsoft boycott in its early days with a blog by freelance writer autumn wright. “games media can’t ignore BDS xbox boycott” functions as both a way of getting the word out about the movement as well as a deeper dive into its history and how games media should function in its wake. it’s good. autumn is good.

my major issue here is one i have with pretty much every other video game website in existence: aftermath farmed it out rather than taking on the responsibility itself. i’m glad autumn made some money in the process, but tagging in freelancers for coverage of serious topics is an annoying, corporate games media strategy i’d hoped aftermath would avoid. too often it falls to the most vulnerable workers in this space to become the face of these social issues and take all the heat rather than more established, relatively safe, and often salaried staff writers.

and just to be clear, the original version of luke‘s blog only included a link to autumn‘s piece and didn’t actually mention microsoft being boycotted, only that forza horizon 6 is published by xbox. someone had to call him out on bluesky to get a cursory bit of context added to the text, and even then, it still doesn’t acknowledge palestine.

luke and nathan provided further explanation for aftermath‘s decision to cover forza horizon 6 on the site’s may 22 podcast. here’s a rough transcript (it’s a lot, but i want folks to have the full context to avoid the appearance of cherry-picking quotes):

Luke: So, like, I guess the summary of our thinking is that that we’ve obviously posted about the boycott. We fully understand what the boycott is.

Nathan: We ran a major piece about it last year that I think started a lot of discourse at other video game websites and has informed their approach to it as well, and that I think also helped to inform No Games for Genocide, and all of that. So, you know, which is a movement that is, I think, that is intertwined kind of with BDS, or that has derived a lot of their policies and approach from BDS, and then iterated on them as well.

Luke: I guess the important things to consider about that, in terms of us being a specialist games media outlet, is that the boycott isn’t calling for a universal blanket boycott of all coverage of all mention of this company or its games. It’s a movement that’s asking people to consider on a personal basis whether they believe, you know, buying a recreational product is worth supporting what is in effect genocide. That is an incredibly important thing to consider. It’s also a very personal thing for every person to consider because of the way Microsoft — and I’m going way beyond Xbox here, but just speaking about Microsoft in general — is such an integral part of so many people’s lives. Like, people use Teams at work. It goes way beyond video games. But what’s happened in video games in particular is I think that core purpose of the boycott itself has elevated into this sort of understanding for some people that it means a complete exclusion of all mention and coverage of Microsoft and Xbox things in general, and it’s like… not really. In practical terms, what the BDS boycott meant for games media was like, don’t promote Microsoft.

Nathan: Yeah, do not uncritically promote them. Do not act as essentially another marketing arm for them.

Luke: Don’t cover the press events, which we don’t do anyway here at Aftermath. You know, don’t just post trailers, don’t do previews, don’t be part of the commercial apparatus that sadly has been and still is a traditional aspect of games media where you sort of walk arm in arm with marketing through so much of a game’s development. It’s not precluding you from critically covering a game or talking about a game once it’s out, because that’s ridiculous.

Nathan: Well, even beyond that, right? Like, there’s a lot of crucial stuff happening at Microsoft as a company and as a video game maker right now, including the ongoing unionization effort that’s being led by CWA across numerous different Microsoft studios, and I think that we would be remiss if we did not cover that or touch on it. It’s very much in line with kind of our whole thing as being a worker-owned outlet and, you know, obviously believing very much in the rights of workers. And so, like, you’ve got to take that into consideration too. But also, No Games for Genocide, the movement I was talking about earlier, they have a page for this if you’re a journalist, what they recommend. They say if you’re a full-time journalist, there’s the option certainly to halt all coverage of Xbox published games, but there’s also, like, they say, if you have to cover Xbox published games, always do so with context about Microsoft’s activities and the ongoing boycott, and I think that’s like often where we land. If we’re going to talk about a Microsoft product — again already through a critical lens, in addition to saying, like, okay, here’s how we feel about it, or here’s, you know, what needs to be discussed about it — just making sure to include, like, and this thing, by the way, is happening, this thing of global consequence that involves Microsoft, and here’s how people are organizing around that, like not just letting that fade into the background, not just letting people forget.

Luke: Yeah, exactly. So, yes, we, by the time you listen to this, we probably will have published a piece about Forza. It is quite critical in a lot of parts, as you’ve picked up from our conversations this morning. It’s also quite positive about the game in aspects as well, but that’s just me, like, having a quick critical analysis of a game that I’ve played. I didn’t pay for it, so I have not actively taken part in buying something from Microsoft, but the fact remains that millions of people have made a personal decision to buy the game, and are playing the game, and the game is out there, and it is a game that people are talking about, and we are a website that talks about games and covers what people are talking about games, and so, yes, there is a piece on Forza Horizon that’s going live. And it’s funny, not haha funny, but like, it’s interesting that we’re having this conversation now in May 2026 because we haven’t had really major first-party Microsoft games to talk about since this happened, because they don’t…

Nathan: They did their Oblivion remake.

Luke: Yeah, but like, that’s… who gives a shit. I’m talking about like a new game, a Halo or a Forza, whatever Microsoft has left now. Fable when/if it comes out. It’s taken this long for it to come out, so it’s not that we’ve sort of kicked that can down the road or have changed our thoughts on the coverage of it. The stuff me and Nathan have just spoken about is the same place we’ve landed on this for a very long time. It’s just this is the first time it’s sort of come up, because here’s a game that lots of people are talking about that is part of games discussion at the moment, and it just happens to also have been published by Microsoft. So, yes, we are going to be talking about it on the website, with mention, of course, of the boycott, because again, that’s everybody’s personal decision, and we all have our own personal feelings on the length to which that’s practical, and things like that, and so, yeah, that’ll be there to link to and read alongside that piece.

phew. okay. here we go.

“we ran a major piece about [the boycott] last year that I think started a lot of discourse at other video game websites and has informed their approach to it”

something about this statement rubs me the wrong way. you don’t get to pat yourself on the back for commissioning autumn to write about the microsoft boycott and the influence they’ve had on this space while going on with business as usual.

i don’t necessarily agree with some of the conclusions autumn came to — the idea that xbox-published games don’t count as benefiting from microsoft‘s business dealings with israel is frankly a little baffling — but it feels like their heart is in the right place. aftermath doesn’t appear, at least in my estimation, to have been as thoughtful in their decision-making.

“[no games for genocide] say if you’re a full-time journalist, there’s the option certainly to halt all coverage of xbox published games, but if you have to cover [them], always do so with context about microsoft’s activities and the ongoing boycott”

while it’s true no games for genocide has a page providing detailed guidance for games journalists, nathan is not a just “full-time journalist” but someone who runs his own video game outlet. no games for genocide is very explicit about differentiating the two. here’s what they say under the section for website owners:

Halt all coverage of Xbox published games. If you are a site that writes about them, we urge you to move away from as much coverage of Xbox-published games as possible, ideally moving towards ending all coverage. This is clearly not a simple task, and not one we expect to be done overnight. Still, if we continue to cover Xbox-published games uncritically, it signals to Microsoft that it can aid and abet genocide unchallenged.

that’s it.

i don’t know who runs no games for genocide. they’d probably agree with me when i say they aren’t and shouldn’t be the end all be all when it comes to decisions about how to cover microsoft in the midst of the boycott. but i’m also not the one who ceded this responsibility to no games for genocide; aftermath is. you can’t cite their guidance and then ignore the part that specifically pertains to you.

“by the time you listen to this, we probably will have published a piece about forza. it is quite critical in a lot of parts”

i think we’re working with two different viewpoints of how to be “critical” here. when folks, including no games for genocide, say you shouldn’t cover microsoft products uncritically, they mean by including context of microsoft‘s relationship with israel. sure, you’re being “critical” of forza horizon 6 when you say the npcs talk too much, but you’re not being “critical” of the circumstances surrounding the game’s development and publishing.

the former is marketing, while the latter is the kind of cultural analysis readers are hoping to see from you.

“millions of people have made a personal decision to buy the game and are playing the game […] and we are a website that talks about games and covers what people are talking about games”

video game criticism is not the wind or the tides. it is not a naturally occurring force we cannot control, guiding us with an invisible hand. you do not have to follow trends or the whims of the industry, especially if you run your own website. but don’t take my word for it. here’s the aftermath staff introducing themselves in 2023:

As workers and owners, we’re beholden to no one but ourselves, and to you, our readers. When you subscribe, you’ll get access to writing that pursues the truth and casts a critical eye on gaming and the internet, that doesn’t need to placate capital or kowtow to PR. You’ll be supporting the kind of journalism our past experience has shown us you like best: honest and irreverent, written for people rather than SEO.

i’ve said “you can’t” too many times in this blog and i’m starting to annoy myself but fuck it. you can’t do this. a lot of people, me included, saw aftermath‘s launch as a turning point for the crumbling video game media apparatus, not only because of what it represented on paper but because its founders outright told us they were going to be different.

people read and subscribe to aftermath not because of what they cover but who’s covering it. did a significant percentage of the site’s backers give a shit about ice cream makers and screw extraction pliers before learning about them on aftermath? i very much doubt it. but chris person‘s obvious passion for the appliances and tools he uses in his every day life was all they needed to read and appreciate what he had to say.

say what you want about gawker, but this is its legacy: websites people visit to learn about something new and interesting (and maybe a little silly) from writers who do what they do for the love of the game, not to meet quotas. this is what drew me to kotaku all those years ago and why it was so meaningful for me when i finally got a chance to work alongside all the talented people who now run aftermath.

“this is the first time it’s come up, because here’s a game that lots of people are talking about […] and it just happens to also have been published by microsoft”

aftermath published an interview with overwatch 2 director aaron keller and lead gameplay designer alec dawson just a few months after microsoft was added to the boycott, divest, sanction list. microsoft owns overwatch 2 developer activision blizzard. the interview is largely positive and doesn’t mention the boycott nor link to autumn‘s story.

this is the part of the blog where i quote someone older and smarter than me to make you think i know what i’m talking about. here’s activist mario savio speaking at berkeley in 1964 after the university banned progressive political speech on campus:

“there’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,” savio said, “makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop, and you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people that own it, that unless you’re free, the machines will be prevented from working at all.”

it’s a powerful idea, that our bodies can literally be used to jam up the progress of societal ills. video game journalists at mainstream sites who choose not to cover microsoft games run the risk of being fired, and freelancers limit the kinds of work they can accept if they adhere to the principles of the boycott, divest, sanction movement. sometimes we’ve been so stripped of agency that the only thing you can do is use your body to slow the machine’s violence. sometimes doing the right thing leaves us mangled and broken.

that’s what’s so disappointing about aftermath in this moment. why go through the trouble of establishing a worker-owned website if not to be in a position where you can easily take a stand when the times comes? you can’t be fired, and a microsoft blacklist means nothing with thousands of subscribers backing you up, so why tie yourself in knots making excuses? returning to savio‘s metaphor, the folks at aftermath don’t have to use their arms and legs and skulls to stop the machine, at least not in the way the rest of us do. they just have to stop greasing the wheels.