So, How’s The BDS Xbox Boycott Going?

By Wallace Truesdale | July 28, 2025 | 9:00am

Video Games Features Xbox

CW: This article contains references to genocide and violence.

Over three months ago, the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement made a request that was particularly relevant to anyone who cares about games: boycott Microsoft’s Xbox. Identifying the industry behemoth as “the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza,” a claim further supported by a recent United Nation’s report, BDS asks people to pressure Microsoft with divestment and exclusion from contracts.

In terms of complicity, Microsoft’s relationship with Israel precedes October 7, 2023, but took on a new level of involvement following Hamas’ attack. The company offered critical cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure, which has helped Israel meet the massive technological demands of their assault. The UN report states that “in July 2024, an Israeli colonel described cloud tech as a weapon in every sense of the word, citing these companies,” with the companies in question being Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon.

Additionally, they explicitly call for a boycott of Microsoft’s gaming products. The organization offers tiers of engagement, including canceling Xbox Game Pass subscriptions, boycotting flagship series Candy Crush, Minecraft, and Call of Duty, and finally boycotting all Microsoft gaming products, including hardware and any games published by Microsoft-owned publishing labels.

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BDS Movement Tech Campaigns Coordinator Bella Jacobs says this focus on gaming products is strategic. “We need to target companies that play a clear and direct role in Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, as Microsoft does, as well as in violating the rights of other peoples/communities, and where there is real potential for winning,” she shared with Endless Mode over email. “We called for global BDS pressure on Microsoft, including a full boycott of its Xbox gaming business, when the evidence of the company’s complicity in Israel’s genocide against 2.3 million Palestinian in Gaza became irrefutable.”

Considering the parties involved are Microsoft, a company with a massive consumer base and enough capital to buy (and slash) whole portions of the game industry, and BDS, a 20-year old nonviolent movement to pressure Israel into complying with international law (a form of protest so scary it’s effectively banned in many U.S. states), it’s worth taking a longer glimpse at the state of the boycott. A moment where games have been explicitly connected to a decades-long apartheid regime deserves attention.

First, a noteworthy part of this three-month mark is how the media space has wrestled with it. As noted in Autumn Wright’s “Games Media Can’t Ignore BDS Xbox Boycott,” written a week after BDS’s initial announcement, the rollout of the news was markedly slow. While the announcement day did involve other big news with tariffs affecting Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders, Wright points out that a call to boycott one of the biggest gaming publishers for its complicity in a genocide is also news warranting urgency.

While several publications did report on the call to action eventually, the familiar tension around the Israel-Palestine matter was felt, with Wright writing “there may well be an understandable fear of reprisal among journalists: from Xbox, from the bosses who pay workers’ checks every month, and even from the current U.S. administration. But the press should not meet challenging moments with silence.”

It’s worth noting that BDS’s call went out a month after the public detainment of Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil, which ended after a three-month detention that kept him away from his wife during their son’s birth. These kinds of actions tend to have a chilling effect on how news gets covered, not to mention previous industry intervention of pro-Palestinian support and Microsoft’s potential retaliation against protestors, so the hesitation around coverage is not entirely unsurprising. However, this does not mean conversation hasn’t existed, as articles like Skybox’s Will Borger’s “It’s an Incredible Day to Stop Giving Microsoft Your Money” have recently discussed the boycott in conversation with Microsoft’s most recent mass layoffs. Other publications have also made a point of mentioning the boycott in articles discussing Xbox products.

Another way to contextualize the BDS boycott’s progress is looking at other direct actions in the gaming space, given that this year has featured quite a few. There are other campaigns unrelated to video games worth nothing, but the focus here is meant to relate how the gaming audience specifically participated in protests recently. Additionally, these comparisons don’t intend to create a competition of success amid consumer movements, but instead highlight that their unique circumstances require different measures of success.

For example, in late May 2025, the Geoguessr community ran what might go down as one of the most efficient direct actions in gaming history. After Geoguessr’s devs announced a World Championship tournament at the Esports World Cup (EWC) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, major Geoguessr map creators made their maps unplayable. In their statement, they explicitly state Saudi Arabia’s extensive human right abuses—against groups including but not limited to women, LGBTQ people, and political dissenters—as the reason for their protest, calling any participation in EWC as assisting Saudi Arabia’s sportwashing agenda. Geoguessr’s devs announced the game’s withdrawal from EWC the next day.

A key point for this protest’s efficacy has to do with the power dynamics at play, of which a meaningful parallel does not exist between Xbox and its customer base. Geoguessr’s success can be largely attributed to its community-made maps, which during the protest were briefly replaced with generic maps that had less rhyme and little reason. Functionally, the game stopped being the version of itself that people enjoyed. Players leveraged the power of their work and were able to demand change as a result. However, just as important to note, the creators worked as a united front with a clear goal.

Another community that benefited from coalescing around clear protest goals was the Infinity Nikki fanbase. After being off-put by issues with the games 1.5 update that included many game-breaking bugs, a retconned intro, and aggressive changes to the gacha game’s monetization structure, players decided to participate in a girlcott that involved not logging into the free-to-play game, as well as not spending money if you do continue to play. Since its start in late April, it has forced two responses from the dev team addressing the situation.

At this moment, there has been no official call to end the girlcott, but such a statement may never come given the lack of an organizing voice. With that said, the dev responses should be taken as acknowledgment of the girlcott’s seriousness. As put by user girlrevolution on the Infinity Nikki reddit group, “Girlcotters don’t generally expect Infold to meet all our demands, but do reasonably expect these demands to be responded to. Based on that response, we will know if it is worth continuing to put our faith in this company to provide a game worth investing time and money into.” Plus, some players have kept track of what the devs are addressing versus ignoring.

This girlcott makes for a good contrast against the BDS boycott given they similarly ask consumers to divest engagement and money from their targets. It also helps accentuate how steep of a hill the BDS campaign faces, given the size of the boycott target. Whereas participating girlcotters have one clear game to avoid, Xbox’s previous shopping sprees have left them with a staggering amount of game studios, which dragged many old and new games into the tech company’s affairs. Even members of the professional games media can’t always remember which games Microsoft now owns; for example, criticism from BDS supporters about widespread coverage of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 earlier this month prompted some journalists to admit that they forgot that Activision’s decades-old skating franchise was now owned by Microsoft.

Moreover, most boycotts do not succeed overnight, especially for issues that have enormous backing from the U.S. government and corporate establishment, like Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Participation is more a marathon than a sprint. To borrow words from girlrevolution’s Reddit post once again, “boycotting is only an efficient tactic if it is sustained for a long enough period of time and by a large enough number of people.” This understanding adds a certain existential scope to the BDS task at hand that can make even a three-month check-in almost feel premature.

But despite these hurdles, when asked how BDS feels about the boycott’s progress, Bella was optimistic. “We have been pleasantly surprised with how much interest there has been around the world in our call to boycott Microsoft’s Xbox. We are seeing indicators that the boycott is already biting,” she said in her email. She went on to reference a few actions of solidarity, including the developers of TenderFoot Tactics pulling the game from the Xbox store.

Additionally, while Microsoft’s immense influence can be intimidating, it was also a significant factor in planning the boycott. “In naming BDS targets and calling for a boycott, there are [a few] main criteria: (1) level of complicity, (2) potential for forming a broad, cross-movement coalition against the target, (3) brand recognition, and (4) potential for success,” writes Bella. “Microsoft has long been a BDS target due to its level of complicity and at the top of our divestment list. But more recently, in partnership with Microsoft workers organizing with No Azure for Apartheid, we found a point of leverage with Microsoft gaming. Microsoft gaming is the company’s third biggest money marker with numerous alternatives.”

Notably, the hurdle to take action isn’t high. Considering that BDS’s recommended actions involve not participating in what’s considered a luxury product, plus the existence of enough non-Xbox games to turn backlogs into years-long projects, applying economic pressure to Xbox has a low barrier to entry. A purposeful one, at that. As Bella puts it, “for a boycott of a brand to be effective, there need to be viable alternatives to it, or the product needs to be non-essential.”

Another significant differentiator of the BDS campaign from others mentioned is its history. 20 years is a long time for any organized movement to exist, not to mention still have a significant impact on the present. This is on top of it drawing inspiration from the successful South African anti-apartheid movement. That wealth of experience has allowed the campaign to hone its messaging, be clear and committed to its call to actions, and offer resources that can catch interested parties up to speed on its campaigns.

In other words, a person’s participation in the BDS boycott might have less to do with ability and more to do with willingness, beliefs, or whatever allows them to keep playing Xbox games. This boycott could continue for a long time, although possibly not forever given how public sentiment has shifted around support for Israel. It turns out people are not a fan of the incessant targeted and mass killings of civilians.

It’s still early to make any strong claims on the boycott’s efficacy, and Xbox games are still selling well, but it is clear that momentum exists for BDS’s call to action. As such, given that the boycott is still in its beginning stages, an important question to ask now is not just how it’s going, but what’s stopping others from participating. Bella says “the BDS movement welcomes the principled stance of game developers and gamers, and it encourages everyone who plays Microsoft games, from Candy Crush users to Xbox streamers, to ask themselves: is this game worth supporting genocide? Genocide is not a game.”

The reported Palestinian death toll from Israel’s assault exceeds 59,000 as of July 23, 2025, but has been suspected to be much higher when factoring those undiscovered beneath the rubble, as well as the accumulative effects of starvation, disease, and more. Hundreds of thousands are still being forcibly displaced in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel’s occupation isn’t slowing down, but neither are BDS and others in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

Wallace Truesdale is a writer who loves games and much of what they come into contact with. He’s written for Unwinnable, Stop Caring, PopMatters, and more. When he’s not ruining himself with sweets, you can find him blogging at Exalclaw, or hanging out on Bluesky and Twitch.