Voting with your wallet is a strategy that's been suggested to everyone from campaigners wanting tech companies and high street clothes retailers to stop relying on sweatshops, to people who don't like the idea of the new Human Torch being a black guy. In neither of those cases is it likely to have an effect, but in video games, everything is made or broken on the amount of sales a game gets. There's not much of a margin for error. Not that video game development is a zero-same deal, per se, but sales really do matter more than anything else. There are directors in Hollywood who manage to get by even without having huge hits, simply because there are some willing to fund artistic expression over commerce. That is not a infrastructure that currently exists in games, and may never exist. Just look at Ken Levine. He presided over the BioShock games, which were huge successes critically and commercially. Yet they didn't make enough to recoup the games' huge budgets, and his studio Irrational Games shut down. Loads of people lost their jobs. That's an extreme example, but if Levine can't make it work, what hope do smaller studios have if their games aren't mega hits?
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
