Star Stable Online Celebrates (?) Pride Month, Promises Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

UPDATE 3: After a day of confusion and misinformation, Star Stable has added the original Pride Month message back into their news post… in certain countries, that is. I’ll just leave these screenshots of my reply to them on twitter as closing thoughts. This article is a mess, I apologize.

UPDATE 2: Star Stable claims that the mention of LGBTQIA+ people and Pride Month were removed in order to comply with COPPA law. Although COPPA is a US law and Star Stable Entertainment is a Swedish company, businesses with customers in the US still need to comply with these regulations. However, I can find no sources or precedents of that law actively dictating anything about LGBTQIA+ content. The American Federal Trade Commission’s website even states that

COPPA is meant to give parents control over the online collection, use, or disclosure of personal information from children. It was not designed to protect children from viewing particular types of content wherever they might go online.

A possible reading is that letting kids buy specific pride color items is too close to "asking" kids about their gender/identity/orientation, i.e. allowing them to reveal it. However, the ingame items with different pride flag colors are all still available, and only the news post on website and ingame launcher has been edited.

UPDATE 1: In an utterly disappointing development, the paragraph quoted below has been removed from the news post the day after. Multiple people from the SSO team itself are blindsided and disappointed by this decision, and I am trying to find out more about why it happened: the best educated guess we have for now is that there was significant backlash from concerned parents, and that there are differences between what is considered appropriate for 13+ social media networks and what is acceptable in the game’s own launcher, where younger children can see it.

To put it frankly, I consider this to be regressive bullshit. The existence of LGBTQIA+ people is not inherently adult. Many children of any age are themselves in the process of questioning their identity, gender and relationships to others, even long before "sexual orientation" comes into play.

I hope that SSE and its consulting companies who had a say in this will reconsider whether they really want to bow to homophobic scaremongering instead of proudly supporting their LGBTQIA+ players and employees.

Interesting side note: Star Stable has previously had events for Valentine’s day, but apparently no one objects to heteronormative content with romantic implications. Fuck this shit, honestly.

Original Article below.

In this week’s news post, Star Stable Online wishes its LGBTQIA+ players, employees and community members a happy Pride Month and kicks off the “Rainbow Festival” ingame event.

Happy Pride Month!

The Rainbow Festival kicks off during Pride Month! We’re wishing a very happy Pride Month to all of our players and send extra warm wishes to our LGBTQIA+ players, colleagues, and community. We’re very proud to celebrate the beauty of diversity across the globe this month and every month and we hope that all of you are filled with pride for who you are today! Know we are committed to making equality, inclusion, and diversity a priority all year long.

That ingame stores offer rainbow apparel during June is not a novelty, but as far as I can find, it is the first time that the Star Stable team explicitly acknowledges Pride Month and its LGBTQIA+ community. The event’s store now offers clothing and various decorative items featuring different LGBTQIA+ pride flags.

Star Stable has one canonical lesbian couple (and a second one that’s strongly implied) and two non binary characters as NPCs – This is a good start for some casual LGBTQIA+ inclusion, but also leaves a lot of room for more, considering the breadth of side characters in the MMORPG.

Rainbow Capitalism and pinkwashing are hardly revolutionary acts, but an explicit acknowledgement of LGBTQIA+ players and their desires represents a step in the right direction nonetheless .

Especially as we keep seeing arguments pop up about non heterosexual or non gender conforming content in horse games – be it during last year’s Horse Isle 3 discussions or some recent reactions to the casual inclusion of a gay couple in Horse Club Adventures – with claims that acknowledging and representing diversity in romantic orientation and gender is inherently not suited for children.

In that environment, there is significant value is having the biggest player in the market lead by example.