The problem with fanboy boycotts is that they involve fanboys. Even if the overwhelming majority of the fanboys genuinely agree with an issue, and feel that they are being wronged or given an inferior product, none of them plan to do without the good in question. Chance are if they were willing to they wouldn't go through the trouble of doing something like a boycott to begin with.
Thus typically those involved in an "online boycott" are people who all plan to buy the product but think it would be nice for everyone else to forego it so the company will change it's mind and give some capitualation like dedicated servers, or simply do things differantly with the next installment in a series.
That is why internet petitions, and threats of boycotts, are not taken seriously and oftentimes banned on otherwise neutral sites simply because they generate a lot of whining with no substance.
Truthfully fandom could have a lot of power if it could coordinate even just a little bit, or grow a pair. Despite what you might think of them, look at what has been achieved by sites like 4chan's /B/ or the Something Awful goons. The big differance between them and say those involved in the anti-IW protest for MW2 is simply that they have the guts to do something legal or otherwise, and realize that enough people acting semi-anonymously is impossible for even federal law enforcement to deal with, if they could be convinced to take it seriously.
You knew it was going to fail in this case, because nobody was willing to do anything but make noise, and approach IW humbly with hat in hand (which corperate America will gladly shat in for you while they laugh). Had you seen anything such as raids, denial of service attackks, site vandalism, or threatening anonymous letters arriving in such numbers IRL that IW feels the need to whine about it... well then maybe something might have come of it.
On the other hand if they have a boycott going on, but are getting letters about killing them and their kids every day, and periodically have to remote Goatse images from their main page... well they might take that seriously enough to change something.
In general there just isn't anything I care about when it comes to gaming to get upset enough to boycott, never mind issue a call to action... except maybe capitulating to censors, and I kind of feel that is something that requires action on a large scale including by the companies themselves. Anything "non kosher" would have to come alongside serious attempts to change things.
Really though I'd think anyone who signed an IW petition should be feeling pretty low right now. I mean it's pretty insuling if you think about it that these guys somehow managed to spend 250 million dollars on this game all together, meaning that they basically had to be wiping their butts with $100 bills, and they couldn't be bothered to provide dedicated servers. Truthfully it's pretty bloody insulting for those that care about such things. Granted 200 million of that was spent on advertising which means probably used to bribe reviewers, or just generally wasted. Human life is cheap and you can pretty much buy a 13 year old virgin sex slave to do what you want in South America or SE Asia for 50k. So basically they could send an underage (or not) sex slave with a suitcase loaded with $50,000 worth of cocaine to 2000 owners of websites, magazines or TV stations to run an add or just say something nice about the game in a column. I'd probably be hard pressed to find 2000 worthwhile advertising venues for this game... stop and think about that for a second.
