The way I see it, would pirating this game / buying it used keep a bit of money out of Rowling's pocket? Sure. Would that absolve the player of whatever guilt they would feel from supporting a J.K. Rowling product? Idk, I'm not you. But to me, the issue goes deeper than just who gets money and who doesn't.
Not to pass a personal judgement on you or anyone in this thread, but it's still a game directly tied to Rowling whether she sees a dime from it or not. She'll almost certainly see thousands from it, but she's rich she could care less (there's still something to be said about not giving your money to her, and especially about not contributing to sales figures for a game directly tied to her and her one legacy, but I digress). To me, at the end of the day whether I got it used (which might not be an option considering where physical media's at) or pirate it, I would still be contributing to a larger societal "buzz" about it, whether through talking about it online or simply by seeing for myself what it's like.
But even if we were to acknowledge that it's a video game for one of the (sadly) largest book franchises in history, and thus there will be an inevitable buzz about it regardless, which we will try our best to avoid contributing to, it's still ultimately a world based around Harry Potter, a book series written by J.K. Rowling brimming with every bias and bigoted idea she holds. Will the game still have goblins who conveniently only show up in the narrative to operate banks? Will it still have house elves who are "oh so happy" to be enslaved? Will it still have characters as skin deep and awfully named as Cho Chang? But more importantly, is it worth giving the game the time of day to see if it actually avoids all those plot points, or even goes a step further and tries to address how shitty they are? To me, not really. Not only because I highly doubt they would dare to take a stance against most of the things Rowling wrote, even if they threw in a quiet dialogue line about how trans people are valid or something similarly tepid and non-confrontational, but because I honestly think those things are so baked into every corner of Harry Potter's world that the only way to divorce yourself from them would be to just not make a Harry Potter video game.
Maybe others disagree with me, and sure, whatever. But I wish people would stop making tepid arguments and scenarios which would absolve them of guilt for buying the game, especially when every argument I've heard in favor of it just feels like an excuse rather than a genuine point. Yes, I feel bad for the people who got stuck working on a thing tied to such a shitty person, but that doesn't mean I'm going to buy it so they can collect bonus checks they likely aren't going to given either way. Sure, it's good that you aren't directly lining Rowling's pocket, but at what point is that just a band-aid covering a refusal to critically examine anything about the world she wrote? Sure, you aren't personally transphobic solely for being interested in Harry Potter even after everything Rowling has done over the past several years, but also as a trans woman who myself once had a passing interest in those books, and has known a dozen trans women who all *loved* those books as kids, only to end up having no choice but to completely detach from them once the author started openly wanting us dead? Seeing people try and console themselves for still liking that world sure feels some sort of way.
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