for me, it would be Nintendo… In General
any time people are critical of something Nintendo-related it gets treated as a widespread boycott.
That way when the supposed “boycott” is inevitably unsuccessful, Nintendo devotees can sarcastically go “Another successful boycott, right??”
Has happened with every Pokemon release on the Switch since Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee
As someone who also enjoys Nintendo stuff, I find it pretty difficult to criticize Nintendo without a bunch of fans getting really defensive about it.
Like with this recent Switch 2 “boycott” narrative
there isn’t a boycott, it’s just simply people reacting to market conditions and overall economic conditions.
Wages haven’t met with inflation, games are getting expensive, times are hard right now with layoffs and a bad stock market. Prices for goods across the board are going up. Is it any wonder that people are just going to continue playing what they have or buy a cheaper (and maybe more powerful) alternative instead of being early adopters for a new console and 70-90 dollar games?
the tangible answers are Nintendo and FromSoft
the broad answer is that anything that centers an ‘auteur’ in its promotion/development or has a solo/main developer is going to make a notable amount of people who like it parasocial to at least some degree. I’m also guilty of this, I give a lot of reverence to Toby Fox and I actively follow what he outputs, as his work has earned a level of implicit trust that whatever he makes will likely resonate with me.
the reason this happens for FromSoft is of course Miyazaki, but w/rt Nintendo, it’s developed a Bell Labs-esque mythos around it that runs parallel to auteurism—not to mention the individual actors in the company that are ascribed that label to a degree, i.e. Miyamoto, Sakurai, Aonuma