Streamers Are Feuding Over The Game “Hogwarts Legacy”
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Other prominent gaming creators streamed Hogwarts Legacy unfettered. The gamer known as Asmongold told his 3.4 million Twitch followers that streamers should “instantly ban… anybody else who complains about playing the game.” Felix Lengyel, known to his 11.6 million followers as xQc, said, “People fund all sorts of evil with their daily purchases in way worse ways than you can even imagine.”
Beth, who describes herself as a “trans rights enjoyer” in her Twitter bio and streams as pickle_bee on Twitch to 200 followers, disagrees with such viewpoints. “Rowling has painfully changed how many see the franchise,” said Beth, who did not provide her full name. “I loved the universe, but now unfortunately I can’t separate that from how Rowling wants to remove rights away from me and my siblings anymore.” Beth, like some others online, has been tweeting out spoilers for the ending of Hogwarts Legacy.
Others have taken more serious actions. Sam Gibbs, an audio engineer for the Yogscast gaming collective, put together a website that checked whether a creator had streamed Hogwarts Legacy. Just one day after the site went viral on Twitter, it was taken down. (Gibbs did not respond to a request for comment.)
Some streamers are boycotting Twitch altogether, feeling that even having ads for Hogwarts Legacy shown on their stream is too much. “The trans community specifically is forced to deal with so much hate, that to force us to consume ads for a transphobic franchise is cruel,” Veronica Ripley, a Twitch streamer who goes by Nikatine and is currently leading the boycott of the platform, told BuzzFeed News. “I think it says a lot about a person’s convictions if your allyship ends at a video game.”
Molly Mae, a cosplayer and Twitch streamer with 8,800 followers, isn’t participating in the boycott. Instead, she is hosting a charity event on Twitch to raise money for Mind Out, an LGBTQ+ community mental health service. “Twitch has a large community of cis, straight creators who seem to be championing their own nostalgia, selfish desires, and unflinching loyalty to a game that has meaning for them,” Mae told BuzzFeed News. ”I just think trans lives are more important than playing some game.”
The outcry seems to be having something of an effect. Hasan Abi, Twitch’s top political commentator, said on stream that the only reason he isn’t streaming the game is that “it’s not worth it to get bullied and called transphobic endlessly.”
Ultimately though, many streamers just want to be able to play Hogwarts Legacy and acknowledge their love of the franchise. “Consuming a product created by the hands and minds of hundreds of people does not mean you share the bigoted views held by one of the creators,” ArielJadeLive, a cosplayer and streamer with nearly 17,000 followers, told BuzzFeed News. “Playing Hogwarts Legacy does not make you transphobic or even a J.K. Rowling fan. It makes you a magic or Harry Potter fan — or just a gamer.”
As for Kay, she said she’s “all for people making loud noises around this topic.” She added, “It’s important to fight for change on things you believe in. Many huge advances of what is acceptable in society have come from people taking a stance — gay rights, women’s rights, and racial equality. I think the reason why people are boycotting the game is more important to society than the literal boycotting of the game.”