No Games For Genocide, a collective of video game workers and union organizers, just announced a pledge to boycott Xbox. It calls on journalists, developers, streamers, and consumers to participate in the Palestinian-led BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) movement against Microsoft, which it’s accused of being complicit in Israeli war crimes. The tech giant recently cut off cloud services to an Israel Defense Forces intelligence unit that used them for mass surveillance of Palestinians, but continues supplying them to the rest of the military.
After years of acquisitions, Microsoft has become a gaming industry monolith, and avoiding it entirely may prove difficult for many, especially considering how dire the industry’s job crisis has been over the last few years. But No Games For Genocide believes that the more people who take part in their movement’s proposed collective actions, the better chance the tech giant will take notice.
“The games industry in particular is at the intersection of entertainment and tech, and there are a lot of material links—when we’re looking at the tech aspect of hardware and software—there are a lot of connections between the games industry and the genocide that Israel is committing against the Palestinian people,” Sara Khan, a content creator, cofounder of Game Assist, and one of No Games For Genocide’s organizers, told me over a video call. “A few of us really wanted to organize around that, and organize people within the industry to say ‘we don’t want these ties’ and find a way to move past them.”
Khan and IWGB Game Workers Union founder, Austin Kelmore, worked with other industry members to organize No Games For Genocide and determine where to focus its attention. The IWGB recently unionized Disco Elysium maker ZA/UM and has been fighting Rockstar Games over the firing of 34 Grand Theft Auto 6 developers.
“Sort of serendipitously, the Palestinian-led BDS movement announced earlier this year that Xbox was going to be one of their new consumer targets,” Khan explained.” It made sense for it to be a priority campaign for us.”
SIGN OUR BOYCOTT XBOX PLEDGE: We are asking gamers, game workers, streamers & journalists to join us in boycotting & divesting from Xbox, to force Microsoft to end its complicity in the genocide of Palestinians.
We’ve provided concrete actions everyone can take. Sign here: nogamesforgenocide.com
— No Games For Genocide (@nogamesforgenocide.com) 2025-12-02T16:00:16.473Z
No Games For Genocide has been working with the BDS National Committee to organize its campaign, which doesn’t just include signing the pledge, but offers a variety of other ways people can participate.
It argues that consumers should avoid purchasing Microsoft or Xbox products, streamers shouldn’t play Xbox-published games on stream (or accept sponsorships from any Xbox game studio), journalists should “halt all coverage of Xbox-published games,” and developers should “demand [their] publisher not publish [their] game on the Xbox and Microsoft Stores,” among other things.
Khan and their fellow organizers know these are some pretty tall orders. “People understandably are facing hurdles and have to consider the potential risks to their job security, their livelihood, which is completely understandable,” they said. “This is definitely more long-term work. How do we build that collective power? How do we make sure we’re protecting people’s jobs and accounting for that risk? […] As individuals, these things are scary; the risks that they carry are very real, so it’s important for us to build that collective power.”
Perhaps with that risk in mind, many of the pledge’s signatories (which include the investigative YouTube channel People Make Games and worker-owned game studio Soft, Not Weak) are at the consumer level. “That’s immediately more accessible to folks,” Khan explained. “Hopefully, over time, we’d love to be able to get more studios or media outlets in a position to commit to the pledge.”
The term “collective power” comes up a lot; the notion that organizing behind a common goal can create cover and/or protection for individuals who want to publicly take a political position that may result in retaliation. Khan likened it to union organizing and how workers feel empowered to stand up for fair wages and labor protections together as a unit: “How can we build towards you being in a position—not just you as an individual in your workplace, but hopefully multiple individuals, perhaps the entire workplace—to get you into a position where this would be doable? […] There is only so much we can do as individuals. There’s so much more we can do as a collective.”
But didn’t Israel and Palestine just agree on a ceasefire? And what about the September 2025 “update” from Microsoft that confirmed the company “ceased and disabled a set of services to a unit within the Israel Ministry of Defense?” When asked, Khan pointed back to the official BDS statement after Microsoft announced it was terminating Israel’s access to AI and Azure cloud tech.
“Microsoft remains a key technological pillar in Israel’s apartheid regime and its genocide in Gaza,” the BDS news post read. “It continues to equip the Israeli military, government, and prisons with the technology used to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.”
Khan also emphasized that Microsoft and other video game companies are complicit in the genocide and imperialism taking place in the global south, and that No Games For Genocide’s goal is to help the industry rethink its role in these systems. (In 2023, a petition created by the Game Awards Future Class calling on The Game Awards host Geoff Keighley to acknowledge the humanitarian crisis in Gaza was reportedly ignored.)
“The violence that Palestinian people have been experiencing is, plain and simple, settler colonial violence,” Khan said. “It’s an occupation, not just apartheid and not just genocide…so a ceasefire is not enough. We have to question the very existence of a settler colonial state, and we have to ask: What does decolonization look like for the Palestinian people?”
No Games For Genocide’s long-term goals are aligned with BDS: “We keep mounting up the pressure until we see Microsoft divesting.”
Kotaku has reached out to Xbox for comment.
