Where Koei Tecmo backed down, consumers and distributors are stepping forward. Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 will in fact be available in the US and UK, courtesy of Play-Asia — and that’s where things just got interesting.
It began with our previous coverage of Koei Tecmo’s decision not to release their beach-bunny sim to markets bloated with slavering social justice warriors. Numerous other gaming news outlets picked up the story soon after, and then the real fun began.
It was the digital bikini snap heard around the world. Social media caught fire. Twitter rang out with cries for a boycott of the online retailer, alongside loud virtue-signalling and self-righteous declarations against Play-Asia as a whole.
Within hours, Play-Asia was feeling the heat. Well, some kind of heat, anyway. They went from 9,000 followers to over 12,000 in the middle of the night, once more proving Yiannopoulos’s Law of Heckle Shekels. As of the time of this writing, they’d surpassed 15,000. That’s a 50% growth overnight.
By 11pm yesterday, controversial HuniePop developer HuniePot had thrown their hat into the ring, offering $1 million flat-out to Koei Tecmo for the right to publish the game in the USA.
Instacodez, another online retailer similar to Play-Asia, upped the ante with an offer of $2 million for European rights.
But no one was laughing harder than Play-Asia themselves, basking in the torrential outpouring of support for standing up to online morality bullies… and the sales that came along with it.
As of this moment, Play-Asia.com is more popular than it’s ever been. In a surprise to absolutely no one, it just so happens that all of the people hunched over their Twitter accounts to tell the world whenever they feel personally attacked by other people having different opinions than theirs… don’t actually have much of an economic impact.
Maybe if they were actual patrons of the businesses they were boycotting? That’d be a start. Regardless, once again we see that standing up to bullies isn’t just good judgment, it’s good business.
Nate Church is @Get2Church on Twitter, and he can’t become a wildly overhyped internet celebrity without your help. Follow, retweet, and favorite everything he says. It’s the Right Thing To Do™!