There has been a long history, at this point, of Activision Blizzard doing the wrong thing, outraging fans who would quickly forget about their indignation and buy the next game. This time, the gaming community is up in arms over Activision Blizzard’s removal of the NICKMERCS DLC bundle from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 after the streamer, Nick “NICKMERCS” Kolcheff, made a statement responding to a tweet regarding a fight between Armenian-Americans and LGBT/Leftist activists over a school board voting to recognize June as pride month. Shortly after his tweet, Activision removed the NICKMERCS DLC bundle which resulted in gamers now referring to Call of Duty as Call of Groomers. But will this reaction end up with any real repercussions for the company?
Currently, America has come to a breaking point concerning the LGBT community. That breaking point? The indoctrination and grooming of children. From explicit drag queen shows that are touted as “family friendly,” to letting prepubescents read sexually explicit books about sexual encounters, promotion of chest binding, to children being chemically castrated through use of puberty blockers and genital mutilation via the cutting off of breasts or penis depending on the child’s biological gender.
The push from the LGBT community to gain access to prepubescent children has been so egregious that it has started to result in companies such as Anheuser-Busch, the parent company of Bud Light, and Target see their stocks take a dive and, in the case of Bud Light, no one buying the once-popular beer as they push LGBT gender ideology. Parents and people in general do not feel it is acceptable to introduce prepubescent children to the topic of sex or sexual orientations in any form at such an early age. That children should be children and that the parents should be the ones to teach them about the birds and the bees.
To which Nickmercs certainly seems to agree since he stated on Twitter,
“They should leave little children alone. That’s the real issue.”
Yet, Activision Blizzard doesn’t agree with that sentiment since their response was to remove the NICKMERCS DLC Bundle from Call of Duty and issued a statement,
“Due to recent events, we have removed the “NICKMERCS Operator” bundle from the Modern Warfare II and Warzone store. We are focused on celebrating PRIDE with our employees and our community.”
The issued statement was immediately met with backlash from the gaming community which sees Activision Blizzard as being fully supportive of gender ideology being introduced to prepubescent children in order to groom and indoctrinate them.
While it is great to see the gaming community coming together, once more, to push back against Activision Blizzard, it isn’t the first time this has happened. However, my problem with the gaming community is that they should have been boycotting/cancelling Activision Blizzard a long time ago before things got this bad. And, given the gaming community’s record, I don’t see this sticking to Activision Blizzard like it has Bud Light and Target.
From the removal of dedicated server support, to introducing online DRM for single player campaigns, severe sexual harassment, and having a hostile work environment the community got angry for a short while until the next big game was released. Then, upon the release of the latest game, those same “indignant” gamers were some of the first to buy it and play it.
Games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Diablo 3 drew a lot of criticism, which prompted this writer to boycott the CoD franchise and Blizzard entirely, to discovering that the company fostered a culture of sexual harassment via a lawsuit from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing Lawsuit. The lawsuit came about after the suicide of an Acitivision employee over, according to the parents of the victim, sexual harassment. Then there was the outrage of Activision CEO Bobby Kotick who was sued by a flight attendant over sexual harassment and allegedly in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book. Let’s not forget that Blizzard supported China when the company censored American citizens’ right to free speech when they said, “Free Hong Kong” which resulted in the short-lived #BoycottBlizzard campaign.
But, every time each of these things came to light, there was some backlash from the community, a news article or two from video game journalists, and then it was back to normal. No real, lasting repercussions for Activision Blizzard from the community. No blacklisting of the company by video game websites.
Remember the outrage over The Sims trans controversy? That fizzled out real fast and the game still allows child NPCs to have top surgery scars and chest binding.
Which brings us to Activision Blizzard’s Call of Groomers moment. Will the backlash have any real impact on the company or, at the very least, the Call of Duty franchise? I certainly hope so. The fact that Activision Blizzard supports the exposure of gender ideology to prepubescent children is disgusting and revolting.
Yet, I can’t help but think that this backlash will fizzle out into nothingness quickly unless high profile personalities speak up.
After all, the most recent example of gamers being outraged was back in February 2023 over The Sims including chest binding and top surgery scars; which video game outlets such as PC Gamer defended. But the outrage was over very quickly even though that was an argument about child grooming and indoctrination as well.
Given the history of sexual harassment at Acitivison Blizzard, I’m not surprised that they would support an ideology that requires the grooming and indoctrination of prepubescents. It will also be interesting to see which video game news outlets will speak up to defend or oppose Activision Blizzard’s response to NICKMERCS and their take on the gaming community’s disapproval of the company and its actions.
For now, we’ll just have to wait and see how Call of Groomers developers and whether or not it will become the video game industry’s version of the Bud Light effect or quickly fizzle out. As for me, I’ll keep boycotting Activision which started back in 2009.
As for Activision, they seem to think that gamer outrage will fizzle out. Otherwise why keep their Pride tweet up after closing the comments to prevent consumers from ratio’ing them?
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