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Like… what does Ready Player One have to do with Gamergate? It seems more about popular culture and the book and that were likely done without the idea of the after effects of Gamergate.

I seems like "I want to start a controversy and draw eyeballs to my article to increase my hit count." It's amazing that Gamergate still does that after four years.

#GamerGate was 2014. The original book ws 2011. And ironically some blame the rejection of the book on GamerGate too.

GamerGate is only a generic term for something nerdy which the corrupt press or SJWs dislike.

It always seems like the news media has a large hateboner for gaming or at least have a pretty unfair scornful view of it and nerd culture in general at times.

Might be fatigue talking, but what if they think the film's going to fail, and by declaring it to be Gamergate while decrying it, they can claim it as a victory against GG?

Actually, I've been wondering for a while if Gamergate has been a draw for either side because the whole thing is quite frankly chaotic and disorganised. That and many on either side seem to have splintered and focused their aims on different targets and for different goals sort of.

Cause the video game industry is bigger than the news industry or the movie industry. The best word for this situation is: salty.

Hmm, that does seem true, although maybe what causes that envy is the fact that video games is how much money they actually make.

https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/the-global-games-market-will-reach-108-9-billion-in-2017-with-mobile-taking-42/

Actually, now that I think about it, a lot of stuff that would be associated with geek/nerd culture makes a lot of insane money for quite some time really.

@Garde

> According to this GDC panel, the PC master race is white, privilaged and problematic

The FGC is on consoles because everything needs to be frame perfect to be competition viable and consoles are ultra-standardized.

RTS and MOBAS barely exist on console and thus the Asians winning all those Starcraft tournaments will be more on PC.

Whites will play whatever.

That's all this is.

@Rustic

> Like… what does Ready Player One have to do with Gamergate?

RP1 likes video games, GamerGate likes video games, game journos and SJWs bloggers have an ever-increasingly psychotic hatred of video games to the point where they see Vivian James telling them "git gud" in their breakfast cereal.

@YourHigherBrainFunctions

> Realistically I think in the long run video game companies will not dick over customers as overtly as they are currently, rather they’ll be more covert about dicking over customers. We probably will see games go down from $60 to $40, but the reasons why they’ll go down in price is that if you look very carefully they’ll be cutting so many corners that a fair price for the game would only be $20.

And while that can solve some of the issues with overbudgeting it's not going to address the root cause of AAA cost overruns, which is that the giant mega-corps in video games are spending far too much on unimportant bullshit while simultaneously starving the productive elements of the corporation. Cutting the game's budget from $40 mil to $20 mil is not going to do much when you're still spending $50 on marketing. Sure you need to spend some cash on marketing but there's far more efficient ways than putting up a billboard, let alone a bunch of billboards in the same area.

Of course this hits the big weakpoint of corporate middle-management, the main goal there is to maximize the hierarchy under oneself while at the same time minimizing the money spent on anything else.

That will just continue the rise of the B & A class studios who haven't built up an ossified bureaucracy of people who add no value either directly or indirectly.

@Bookie
"That will just continue the rise of the B & A class studios who haven’t built up an ossified bureaucracy of people who add no value either directly or indirectly."
That's pretty much what I was getting at.

EA and such won't die out so much as become irrelevant in the long run. To use an analogy Kotaku, Polygon and such are pretty much irrelevant because there's so much competition now.

Actually, I’ve been wondering for a while if Gamergate has been a draw for either side because the whole thing is quite frankly chaotic and disorganised.

Gamergate was a total wipeout for the free and independent Internet. We still can't discuss it in most places other than here, and people have not been able to build up alternate discussion forums and marketing channels. There is too much money on the other side subsidizing the corrupt while threatening to boycott anyone who does business with their competitors.

Another sjw video game failed. "Where the water tastes like wine" sold only 4000 copies.

Hell I have never even heard about that one

I think it's more like 2.3 billion.

Why is it SJW?

It tried peddling to them and having a shitload of them in the "thank you" portion of the credits thinking putting in a bunch of sjw's in the thank you portion of the credits would boost sales… It did not.

No. Even the developer acknowledged it was a failure.

Whoosh! That was the sound of the joke going over your head.

How did it peddle to them? Looks like a pretty normal game to me

This is more sjw related, but I found out why sjw's have been attacking anime. Simply put anime was so effective at removing the stigma around lgbt that in a single generation we saw a massive boom in teens that identify as lgbt to such a extent that it's a "threat to feminism". Considering just how effective anime was at breaking down that negative stigma if anime becomes mainstream in other countries then well you get the point. The USA currently has a higher percentage of the general populace that openly identify as lgbt than anywhere found in say Europe and the past couple of years that percentage has been increasing by half a percent a year. In under fifteen years the number of lgbt will be one of the highest in the world.

Simply put the rate of lgbt in teens is so high in Japan that it's killing the feminist movement in the country. Sex strikes don't work if the guy you're with is bisexual. Anime removed the negative stigma about lgbt in Japan in only a generation.

Are you saying they hate the one thing many close to me love the most? O.K. They clearly want to go to war with me! It has been personal for a while. Now it is double personal!

It's not so much they hate anime, but rather sex strikes don't work if the guy you like is bisexual.

Lo-Ping / GamingAndPandas, the guy who started the sea lion adoption, was reported to the police for being "abundantly gay".

But GG is a homophobic movement. lol. SJWs always use the most repugnant tactics to harm people. No wonder why some people live in fear of what others could do to harm them.

Found this:

I know that ye are wondering what the hell does this have to do with Gamergate, well Count Jackula discusses how Gamergate impacted Channel Awesome and fractured the whole thing.

CHECK
THIS
OUT

People are still on the chat and are getting banned left and right. I got banned from the chat for 663 seconds because I posted a link to something.

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/04/what-bully-hunters-gets-wrong-about-harassment-in.html

I think the lady in the article got it more than a little correct when she said that she expected the worse to happen.

Like, have the group consider that folks can go into their group and abuse the fuck out of the power that they have?

https://s3.amazonaws.com/steelseries-bullyhunter/prod/_assets/downloads/BullyHuntersFieldGuide.pdf

I get the impression that some rules and guidelines are being broken.

The "teabagging" malarkey took an interesting turn.

Here's Dankula's report on the whole BullyHunter's thing:

He goes to talk about how the bullyhunters work:

Mercinaries on the internet to beat abusive CSGO players and the whole Bilzzard kicking people out based on what they post in other platforms.

When a researcher went to follow up, they found out that the figures citing female harassment were all made up and based on a bad study.

Turns out the whole event was staged, with the accounts and matches being set up to sell SteelSeries Headsets.

As a result of finding out what happened, Steelseries and various other partners of the BullyHunters program pulled out.

Appabend also covers this

There's probably going to be a bit more fallout over this.

So apparently EA genuinely can not fuck up again. What is going on stocks wise is that because EA has fucked up so badly so often on a regular basis what might happen is that someone might buy them out. Because EA fucks up hard on a regular basis the next time we see something like the Mass Effect 3 or Battlefront II debacles what we'll probably see is another company aggressively buying out their stocks when their stocks are low.

You got a sauce there @YourHigherBrainFunctions?

It's not really official or anything, just a lot of talk stocks wise. If you know a company is a constant fuck up and never learns from their mistakes, BUT they're always profitable all you gotta do is wait till their next major fuck up to buy their stocks for pennies on the dollar then sell when their stocks return to normal. After a decade of constant fuck ups by EA investors are realizing this is the norm for them and waiting till they screw up again to buy stocks.

Ah so the old "Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything, Tee Hee Hee" – via Yahzee.

Anyway more about bullyhunters fiasco thanks to u/dwarvenhobble on the KIA website:

"TLDR version

Unknown person hires PR company to talk bullshit about gamers while funnelling money to Times Up
Media uncritically parrot PR message
People ask questions *Media goes into lockdown
People get suspicious of the lockdown and ask more questions
People don't get actual answers so dig more
People fine narrative pushing bullshit not based on facts is the actual answer
People find hypocrisy from the host based on her prior actions
People watch the "show"
People already suspicious look into what they saw on the show.
People find the "show" was staged and essentially trying to deceive people
People contact advertisers
Advertisers try to play dumb / downplay stuff
downplaying Fails
Advertisers pull out giving more info
Host gives more info as she realises she's up to her neck in it.
People find the bullshit but now are looking for who was truly behind it.
Media decides to try and do PR / Spin to rescue the PR campiagn by portraying it as "starting a conversation" or "Not based on lies and any-one against it is the true monster"
Long Version

FCB Chicago put out a PR statement about an upcoming organisation called Bully Hunters the basic idea because people who are being sexually harassed or feel they're being bullied in game can use it and call in a "Bully Hunter" who then through their sheer skill ability will kill and dominate the bully in game then leave them a message saying bullying isn't OK after a period of time of wrecking them in game.

PC Gamer (and possibly a few other sites but PC gamer being the main one) put out a puff piece about it basically on about how bad sexual harassment was and uncritically parroting the statement.

People commented on the PC Gamer article some mocking this idea others being critical and saying it looked open to abuse.

PC Gamer shut down the comments

People decided to do some more digging. They found social media stuff and started asking the person who was expected to host the show a number of questions. Mostly they were met with silence or told to "Watch the show and see ;) "

People did some basic digging on the host (Zombie Unicorn) and found she'd called women things like ugly, flat chested and cunts before and found a video of her calling some people "faggots"

People dug more into it and found that the statistics quoted by the Bully hunters had no basis in fact really. They were based on an elementary school teachers survey conducted on Social media and then the numbers from it extrapolated to cover the whole gaming industry. The funnier thing being the extrapolated numbers weren't based on women who'd reported sexual abuse or harassment but Men & Women who answered the survey saying they believed sexual harassment was an issue or they they believed women got it worse. (The survey responses were something like 2/3rd male btw)

Then the "live" show happened where they presented it as tough it was live and showed Bully Hunters jumping into a game to own some-one who was seemingly sexually harassing another player.

Problem is people already suspicious looked into it and found the Bully Hunter and the supposed victim were the same person. They also found numerous other such instances including people named "Bully Hunter Test victim".

People dug further an found the voice in at least two of the cases of some-one being harassed was the same person. Oddly the same person whose voice also appeared in the video advertising Bully Hunters.

The big twist was Zombie Unicorn one of the hosts they said it wasn't meant to be live it was meant to come across as scripted and showed the script they'd been working from.

People were not happy so they then went to the sponsors such as Steel Series and basically said "What are you playing at this company is making pretty extreme hyperbolic claims about how bad gamers are why are you partnered with them if you're trying to sell to gamers when they're kind of making gaming look worse deliberately."

Steel series backed off and so did one of the other sponsors after an attempted non apology / "At least it was starting a conversation"

However it was revealed that FCB Chicago was the main agency who'd got this together. With one of the ex sponsors before leaving revealing the money was all going to Charity. That Charity? Times Up the movement against Sexual harassment in Hollywood, not gaming as such.

Zombie Unicorn also revealed more details on about how FCB Chicgago had approached her, the original idea of a "friendship" app so if you were harassed or abused you could contact some-one to make you feel better. She also revealed that FCB Chicgago had been hired to do this but she couldn't say who by due to NDAs.

Come this week when Bully Hunters or what is left of it was doing the media tour. Some uncritically parroting the initial message but Polygon and Kotaku trying to downplay the bullshit and present it as "Hey they were starting a conversation" or in the case of Polygon "No the true harassers are any-one who objects to Bully Hunters or says there was in any way a deception or something untoward going on". While Zombie Unicorn cries about how much "harassment" she's got for being involved in this to sympathetic media people."

If you didn't want to read all of that, there's a lot of coverage from PEWDIEPIE, Mister Mikour, and various others.

Also u/Kukuruyo, the guy that makes those fun GG webcomics, noticed a fun article in Spain having a weird recollection of Gamergate:

"I've come across this new article about GG writen in an spanish site
link

Edit: added english version link

It's in spanish but google translator should work. i'll summarize some of the craziest points, because this article has shit so insane that not even the biggest haters of the movement would believe.

The article claims that GG was created by "business interests" who wanted to recruit soldiers fo a hate crusade.

It claims that the narrative of Gamergate was the dominant in the media. LOL.

It claims of course that Gamergate existed way before 2014.

It claims that Gamergate is a SELF PROCLAIMED fascist movement, and as "proof" it can only show an image that a guy did mixing the GG logo with a fascist flag; but the funniest part is that the guy who did that is a self proclaimed troll who says he's a troll in the banner of his own site, where the image is XD

It also claims that the actual cultural state is the games journalisms fault, but because, acording to him,they've not done enough to critizice the movement!

It also goes on to lie about lots of specific incidents both in the US and in Spain. It's a complete mesh. Not even the biggest liars about GG would say shit to insane as that the Gamergate's narrative was the dominant in the media, or that it was created for economic reasons, and the troll fascist shit is so obvious that even on ResetEra they would notice it. 100% of whats said in the article is false. I don't think i've ever read an article more insane than this about GG."

I'm not sure where to put this specifically, it probably fits here more, it's more about business. Something a lot of people are starting to notice in the USA is that a lot of mass media in the USA is starting to drastically under perform sales wise.

This obviously applies to Mass Effect Andromeda, but also movies like Star Wars Last Jedi or a lot of tv shows. A lot of companies didn't just double down, they hundred fold down and rather than seeing the writing on the wall they're buying out critics, websites and such to tell the people what they are allowed to enjoy.

This is very dangerous to entire mass media industries, because the past couple of decades large conglomerates have continuously bought out smaller companies until they have a monopoly.

………..

Things that might wind up going very negatively with mass media currently:
With Disney buying Fox they would have more or less a monopoly on the movie and tv industry. This is dangerous to Hollywood considering their movies, like the Last Jedi, are starting to under perform sales wise. If shit goes south with that then a lot of actors are going to lose their jobs. Disney right now their profits for 2017 accounted for about 60% of all Hollywood movies profits, Fox accounts for about 20%.

70% of the video game industry's profits for 2017 was from lootboxes.

As a result of adblock a lot of social media sites are pretty much phising the people using it as we found out with Facebook.

Valve is allowing exponentially more video games on Steam without any level of quality control that we're seeing viruses and completely empty files being marketed as "complete games". However despite the exponential number of games being released on their platform it has only resulted in single digit growth yearly.

Companies that buy online ads are realizing that online ads are just not worth it. What companies are finding out is that online ads only have about a 3% return on investment.

Cause so many companies are doing shitty things to keep profits up and yet they're only having single digit growth we may see another dot com crash. IF we do see shit go south it obviously isn't going to cause a recession or any crap like that, but at the same time it's not going to be fun times.

I am not surprised at publishers and developers not learning why people didn't like their products.

Seriously, look at Treasure Planet as well as Dragon Age 2 at the entertainment Industries biggest mistakes due to taking away the wrong lessons or in the former's case possibly letting it intentionally sink.

SF Debris brings up here how EA and BioWare seem to ignore most of the criticisms of the games like Dragon Age 2 from the fans.

And then you've got this about Treasure Planet:

And you know what the kicker is about how Treasure Planet had a bad release timing and not great marketing? Disney has not fucking learned about this mistake for their 2D movies (although Home on the Range is a whole other disaster of its own).

https://camstheothersideofanimation.wordpress.com/2016/08/07/was-it-really-our-fault-for-the-death-of-2d-animation/

As for video game examples I don't think I need to say much about either Konami or EA's antics recently.

Sorry if this feels like derailing. But my point is that what YHBF is hinting or getting at seems to be true to me since it seems like to me video game publishers and developers seem to take the wrong lessons about their stuff much like the rest of the entertainment industries like movies.

@Rustic
"But my point is that what YHBF is hinting or getting at seems to be true to me since it seems like to me video game publishers and developers seem to take the wrong lessons about their stuff much like the rest of the entertainment industries like movies."
Pretty much. I feel as though the entire entertainment industry would be a lot better off both financially and we'd see a lot less scummy companies if they learned about the law of diminishing returns.

The thing that people forget about is it's a law, meaning that there is genuinely no way to get around it anymore than flapping your arms will stop you from falling. There's a reason why there's only one company in the world that has been around for a thousands years; every single time a company tries to exponentially increase their budgets to make exponentially higher profits they go bankrupt.

IF Facebook, Google, EA, Valve, Disney and a whole bunch of other companies continue to try and seek exponential profits yes they will go bankrupt in the long run cause literally, not metaphorically, every single company that has ever tried to exponentially increase profits forever has died.

Company, "Exponential budgets on products = exponential profits"
Law of diminishing returns:

I think they need to learn several things along with that.

Like being careful about chasing trends until the market is so saturated with copies that don't have enough to make them unique. There is also copying off other new video game mechanics and ideas without considering if they are the right design or not, biggest example I can think of is BioWare's dialogue wheel and stealth vision with Fallout 4 and the Thief reboot games being victims of these design choices that hinder the games rather than improve them.

A good release dates for products like how EA released TitanFall 2 to compete against Battlefield One and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare which was a fucking death sentence for the game.

Or understand what their audience is and what is the potential reach before one hits the danger of trying to appeal to everyone and yet failing at appealing to anyone. I've seen only Resident Evil 4 pull it off and Capcom has tried to chase that lightning with a bottle for years.

@Rustic
Personally what I think is the biggest problem out of the bunch is mass media telling people what they're allowed to enjoy in mass media; like how aGG kept telling gamers they weren't allowed to play certain games. Oh boy is that problem going to cause a metric fuck ton of damage in the long run. We've already seen that this problem can literally cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damages in just singular companies with just a single product from failed projects, considering we're seeing this line of thinking in not just video games, but movies and television oh boy is that one not going to be fun.

If this line of thinking of "It's my duty to tell the audience what they are allowed to enjoy" can cause hundreds of millions of dollars of damages to singular companies seeing this on the macro scale is not good.

So the video game industry may have for once learned their lesson. The vast majority of lootboxes and microtransactions this year in new video games are cosmetic only. The video game industry probably is moving away from pay-to-win.

Some how the video game industry got it in their that the video game industry was "too big to fail" and that countries' governments wouldn't dare mess with the video game industry then they got bitch slapped by reality.

It isn't just the governments they underestimated, you got to give a large amount of credit to the customers who finally fucking snapped after EA's Battlefront 2 pretty much broke the promise of loot boxes not being pay-to-win for AAA video games, but only after the years of bullshit finally build up behind the cracking dam.

The poor sales to EA's expectations with Battlefront 2 along with the governments' threats to have these anti-customer practices looked into showed the video game industry that it better cop on or else it will see itself losing a lot.

And a sad thing with EA's Battlefront 2 to me is that if they left out microtransactions or just stuck to cosmetics they could've had their cake and eat it. But then again, EA is too much of a short-sighted and too self-destructively greedy to see that.

Like I don't want governments to get too involved, I rather that they weren't unless it has to be done as a last resort, but the video game industry is so often fucking pushing it that it is hard to not side with what some would call the lesser of two evils.

Hopefully from what I am seeing the Netherland government is trying to be fair about it and I hope other governments have some restraint if they choose to tackle the issue or not. Or even better, the threat governments looking into it along with customers' outrage having an impact on their sales will make the video game industry heavily reconsider their practices and stray away from going any further so that governments don't have to intervene.

Kotaku may be dead. Univision is having a serious problem trying to turn a profit on Gawker's assets. They may be considering drastic downsizing of stuff from Gawker.

So Belgium has ruled that EA, Valve and Blizzard with lootboxes are in violation of the country's gambling laws and will probably have to pay millions in fines.

This is more heavily related to the video game industry as a whole, but looking over some shit going on with the video game industry a lot of shitty stuff the past couple of years makes sense from a financial standpoint. Simply put: 70% of the video game industry's profits for 2017 were from multiplayer games so a lot of companies want new tech and shit to only come about on THEIR terms.

For instance blockchain probably will play a big role in the video game industry as a whole in ten years, but they only want cryptocurrency and not blockchain as a whole cause it could undermine them.

The thing I disagree on VR is that while I do think it is the future of gaming companies are reducing it down to namebrand and adding on useless features to it. Oculus tried pushing facebook ads a while back and pissed off everyone; I'm glad it didn't happen but imagine if that shit had gone through you'd be watching porn and be seeing ads everywhere. Furthermore a while back they wanted to push shit like disallowing games to be on both Oculus and Vive, which pissed everyone off.

Lootboxes and gaming as a service in of themselves aren't a bad idea, but the problem is that they wanted games to be forever profitable with the profit margin never dropping off.

To phrase this another way: What companies want: paid user created dlc on multiplayer games

What the future of multiplayer gaming is probably going to be is somewhere inbetween:
Oasis from Ready Player One ……………………………………… Vrchat
…
..
………………………….Somewhere in here is the sweet spot
…
…
Second Life………………………………………………………………….. Garry's Mod

Over the next decade we're probably going to see A LOT of anti-consumer activities from EA or such, because they only want stuff like "games as a service" on their terms

Gamergate is an internet controversy born from multiple long standing frustrations and tensions including but not limited to cronyism and transparency in gaming press, the extent to which politics play in games and the materials in which games are discussed, and the problem of anonymous harassment in the digital age, especially the harassment of female pundits, reviewers, and developers

There are a few misconceptions and no reason to define it here. You see. Those "Pundits, reviewers, and developers" were the ones who started the harassment and most of them were actually males.

Well God of War pretty much became a middle finger to the gaming industry:

Can we get an edit of this

But with Kratos' hand and EA or whichever gaming company thought that games like God of War would not work?

Gamergate has a fairly decent writeup on Larry Sanger's Everipedia. Are there any complaints?

Not complaints, but I do have some opinions. It lacks objectivity and neutrality. A few of the claims have been disproved by the FBI so… Well. Let's just say it leans too much to one side. Not that it would be much better if it was totally partisan to the point of distorting facts in favor of the other though.

Recent case in Point: Jason Schreier of Kotaku whom is now at war with Chelsea "Zoe Quinn" Van Valkenberg of CON

Links 1 2 and 3

TL;DR: Schreier Won an Award on the harassment of EA (which didn't exist) and stated that Kotaku was a main target of gamergate. Valkenberg got offended by this declaration and insisted that the Women were the real vitcims and Schreier shouldn't lump his journalists in the mix.

EDIT while typing:
Looks like a lot happened when I initially tried to talk about this bid of "NO I AM THE PROFESSIONAL VICTIM!" ranting. You can read most of it here (KIA link)

Plus side, Gamergate gets mentioned but only has to sit and watch the crazy from the side lines.

If you wanted the whole Jason vs Zoe thing condensed.