It’s safe to say that the backlash against the latest Wizarding World video game, Hogwarts Legacy, didn’t impact the sales enough to matter. The game continues to sell extremely well, a fact that every horrible person on Facebook feels the need to scream about in the comment sections of gaming posts.

The backlash against the game had several facets. The most prominent one was Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling’s continued descent into transphobia online, something that the game tried to mitigate by including a trans character voiced by a cisgender man and with the word “sir” in her name. On top of that was the continuation of anti-Semitic tropes used for the Goblin race drawn from the original text, the anti-social justice past of former lead designer Tony Leavitt, and the presence of a voice actor, Greg Ellis, who has been accused of distributing revenge porn of his ex-wife.

A boycott was always doomed to fail. It’s hard to beat the power of being on front of the PlayStation Store for weeks or the excitement of fans for a new entry in a beloved series. That’s besides the fact that buying the game combines regressive gamers’ two favorite things: hurting trans people and simping for millionaires. I remember when the news about Chick-Fil-A funding conversion therapy for LGBT people came out, and a woman walked into my store literally wearing a sandwich wrapper pinned to her chest as a badge of honor. Little has changed.

In a way, the boycott probably only made more people buy the game, which is something at least one friend of mine used as justification for her purchase. We protested wrong, so we lost the “game.”

But in another way, the boycott succeeded as in intelligence gathering operation. Allyship is a very fickle thing. Conservatives aren’t entirely wrong when they complain about virtue signaling. There is a huge chunk of the world that pays lip service to social justice because they think it reflects well on them. However, allyship is easy when it costs you nothing. Why not be the bigger person if it doesn’t even mean you have to have an awkward conversation, let alone risk security or livelihood?

As the far-right continues to crack down with official government power on trans people, it’s important to know exactly where the stress points are in the protective walls that are left. Hogwarts Legacy was an experiment with a very simple premise: will you not buy a game to help out your trans friends? Not, “will you take a bullet for me?” or “will you stand up for me at work and maybe lose your job” or even “will you not vote for a politician dedicated to destroying me?”

“Will you fail to spend $70 on a toy for me?”

For some people, that was too much to ask. And now, we know who they are every time we sign into our gaming networks and see them earning their trophies the way they previously tried earning accolades for supporting marginalized folks. That can be handy information if thing worsen for trans people.