Ethical Analysis Holding an Ethical

Ethical Analysis

Holding an ethical reputation within the local environment is key for small and growing businesses. The second you offend your local consumer base, is the second you limit your growth outside of that initial market. Thus, in the case of Broadway, it made the decision to remove provocative games from its local market, yet did not follow through with this ethical decision across the board, and decided to sell overseas, where there would be less of a backlash.

There are several stakeholders within this specific case that will be affected by the overall decision. First, are the executives at Broadway, whose reputation will be tarnished or whose pockets will be drained. If they decide to shell away the game forever, the loose money. However, if the decide to sell the game, it may affect their reputation and still cost them money. Additionally, the employees are at risk. Within a small company, if a game goes sour, all the employees within that small organization will feel the pain.

The ethical issue in this situation is whether or not to sell a sexually explicit and violent game to young gamers. Broadway has conducted several studies to determine the nature of their market. They know very well that their target market is kids between 5-12 and teens 13-19. Out of this market, 75% percent is male. Kent saw that his target audience wanted more action and violence in new upcoming games. Research has shown a level of addiction to video games that rivals that of compulsive gambling. In fact, further research done by Kent showed that because players wanted more intense levels, they were actually willing to pay more for those levels. Thus, gamers were willing to pay double the amount of coins if it meant an increase in game intensity. Broadway took his results from the research and implemented them into several new games that were instant hits in the market. The game Kent developed utilized this and other questionable elements to capture the attention of his target audience. He implemented a female character within the game that would remove one piece of clothing after every successful level played. Eventually, at the end of the game, the character was fully nude. This was too provocative for an American young audience, and so the executives at Broadway made the decision to sell games online to adult audiences and to sell it overseas. Taiwan is ok with accepting it as is, and all that needed to be done elsewhere was to tone down the violence and also sell the games to the Mexican market, while still leaving the sexually explicit references and nudity.

Broadway was following a strong ethical principle in their decision, that of Respect for Autonomy. According to this principle, businesses "should allow people to reign over themselves and to be able to make decisions that apply to their lives," (Rainbow 2010). Thus, by moving the game to overseas markets, Broadway was trusting in the autonomy of individuals outside the context of the United States. According to research, "Each man deserves respect because only he has had those exact life experiences and understands his emotions, motivations, and body in such an intimate matter," (Rainbow 2010). Thus, Broadway was respecting the individual decisions of its players to decide whether or not the game was ok to play.

However, this was only followed outside of the United States. The decision locally was much different. Because of the nature of the young audience, there was the moral dilemma for the insertion of such sexually explicit references. And so, Broadway was not acting ethically when they failed to uphold local ethics abroad. According to research, "A winking tolerance of other's unethical behavior is in itself unethical," (Jennings 2007:14). Rather than acting out of ethical obligation to others as they did to their own, Broadway let it slide and moved sales elsewhere, where they knew they could get away with it. This is typical in the modern globalized world, where business covers a range of very different cultures. According to research, "because the multinational is not confined to a single nation, it can easily escape the reach of the laws of any particular nation by simply moving its resources or operations out of one nation and transferring them to another nation," (Newton 2008:342). This is exactly what Broadway was doing in the decision to move its sales to other nations, with less moral standards in terms of the games their children play.