I think the problem here was the collective action strategy. You organise a boycott when the majority of buyers are aware of the issue and care. You don’t organise a boycott when the majority of buyers either don’t know or don’t care… and in this instance, the vast teeming majority of potential buyers didn’t even know. The boycott was never going to work.

There were some voices that had the right idea - some twitch streamers wanted to stream the game and use the huge viewership boost (and it was a record breaking boost in stream viewership) to campaign for LGBTQ+ issues and educate people about JKR. That was the right play: when people don’t know about an issue, your collective strategy should be to raise awareness and educate, not boycott.

The argument that “the (lack of) material effect of a boycott doesn’t matter, that it’s the principle of the thing”… that’s liberal failing: focusing more on virtue than on material change. It doesn’t matter if it was virtue signalling or genuine virtue because either way it was inconsequential: you objectively cannot stage an effective boycott when your call to action is restricted to your internet circles that form a tiny minority of buyers even if 100% of them get on board.

It’s just a textbook example of the West’s progressive movements being made impotent because liberals are the dominant voices in that collective, claiming the mantle of their predecessors like the suffragettes and civil rights movement but with zero clue about how those movements made an effective difference.