It's always weird seeing seeing the takes of anti-g*mer gaters or progressives/liberals.

If I personally had made any sincere attempts to try and portray or dictate the events of GG neutrally, I'd attempt to recount that the initial events of the slut dev (forgot who) sleeping with reviewers for favourable reviews and preferential treatment.

By 2014 much of gaming had grown exponentially since 2004, blin terms of the amount of g*mers playing on earth, the size and scope and budgets of AAA publishers began to compete with Hollywood, and subsequently the opportunity for corruption along with it.

In South Africa, we had a magazine called NAG (New Age Gaming) which became the topmost gayming hardcopy magazine in the country ( and pretty much the entire Southern Africa)

For the entirety of my high school, NAG dominated and influenced gayming discussion, and the writers there were even names you'd recognize, perhaps less because of their quality and more so the poor and (technologically) behind nature of Safrica.

Yet by the time I graduated highschool in 2012, things would go bad for NAG, the internet and proliferation of independent websites and Content Creators, meant competition on a scale yet unheard of for journ*lism of all stripes

YouTube would balloon to become the premier video site on the planet, and every year internet 🛜🛜🛜 would become incrementally cheaper - to the point that fricking even the lowest poorest strata of society could afford/access the web from Phone plans/contracts

Thus the internet, and places which consumed large amounts of broadband, like YouTube, would become exponentially more accessible. This doesn't even talk of the proliferation of smartphones, and thus browsers into the hands of non PC tech nerds, as it was just 10 years earlier in 2004

As an example in 2012, when I began my studies at UCT, I was exposed to the shocking privilege of one whole fricking gigabyte of broadband per student! for non-university websites!!! The year before I had been still used to the moderate but expensive 650megabytes of internet at the expensive (for rural strags) R600 per month for our family computer 🖥️💻, shared for the whole family house, and in which I had often gotten into massive trouble cuz I had used up the family broadband for gayming torrents before the end of the month

By 2014, the average student had uncapped WiFi at UCT, though at slow speed, and by 2020 fiber internet trails were being laid into the ground of every major city of the country.

I recall back even in highschool, there had become less and less trust towards the writers of NAG magazine, there had been internet mailed, which the editor actually was brave enough to post in the Letters-from-readers pages, to defend his team back in 2010, when had had been accused of giving large games (the concept of AAA wasn't something I was familiar with at the time) preferential treatment,

By giving soft criticisms towards obvious junk (slop), whilst lesser gaming studios or publishers never got the same treatment. Even IRL discussions for me in high school there were shockingly mature in hindsight suspicions of the now largest and most established journ*lists publishings on earth like IGN and Eurog*mer, having had a "grassroots conspiracy" of brining indepenant journ*lists with vouchers/trips/holidays with the unspoken understanding that unfavorable reviews would not result in repetition of these gifts or even review copies.

There was all sorts of logical (as well as batshit) theorising of whether journ*lism was being infected with corruption and financial conspiracy.

I'm going on this MASSIVE tangent to demonstrate to you guys, that even in 3rd-Worldistan of Safrica, even before fricking 2010, and even for the fricking local national magazine there had started the embers of suspicions for Gaming Journ*lism having a lack of integrity!!!!

Because we started noticing CODslop and other AAA publisher titles gaining collectively more obvious preferential treatment, even though as far as my memory served COD as a franchise was still good? For as long as till like the mid 2010s.

Point being there was a definite feeling of distrust brewing between ground level poorcel g*mers, even in backwards places. And this was a a distrust completely entangled with regards to Journ*lists-and-Publishsher parasitic financial relationships exclusively! The very notion of American culture war being infused with distrust towards journ*lists would not begin until way after 2014

On the other hand, vast majority of gaymers are sheep who literally seldom question reviewers, let alone read beyond the review score, or are such Uber normies, they literally walk into a brick and mortar gayming/tech store and buy the shiniest game on the shelf, without question ⁉️ ❓ and has probably never read a review in their life.

So it's always insane to me when Reddit types, you know the kind, the turbo wokescolds progressives, who deny that Wokeness is not even a real thing or even a definable concept, who go out of their way to oppose whaever the chud group opposes, the /r/gaming circlejerk types,

when Reddit types espouse that the very notion of Journ*lism being corrupt, or that there could ever have or has ever been an extreme lack of integrity from the gaming Journ*list Industry .

Look into the thread I linked, complete denial of the very existence of corruption of Journos, that @VFiddly cute twink states that all of what the initial G*merGate complained about never happened.....and wait what?

Like if you're the type of liberal like @QuadNarca here on rdrama.net, and you believe that GG pretty early got coopted by sexists and and fiends from the onset, I can agree with that. That the initial spurt of momentum of GG which was sparked by the slut Dev's bribery, and the subsequent conspiracy of the near entire Western Anglosphere journ*list industry simultaneously pushing out his pieces, all of that rendered irrelevant to the exposure of the ugly side of gaymers,

that would be a sensible and fair take. But to claim NONE of the initial G*merGate complaints of corruption in Journ*lism or the paracitical relationship of Publishers and Journ*lists was never warranting attention, is actual insanity. I'd even go as far as to say it's a pretty extreme stance.

Anyways none of that matters, Journ*lists literally wrote themselves out of relevance. Very few peeps have organizational or institutional trust in Gaming Journ*lists, or even the largest Gaming News online sites like IGN and Eurog*mer.

What was suspicions and a conspiracy theory about the lack of integrity of Journos, have become the literal norm for gaymers here in safrica, and I presume from the state of online discussions, the same can be said for the rest of the world.

I once came back to my home town in 2015 to look for the NAG magazine and could not find it at the magazine shelves in any shop. I would learn they had stopped printing by 2014, and had downsized to only a skeleton crew for the online articles.

YouTube by 2014 was large enough for independent personalities to make an audience, and I guess in the modern era, it's each g*mer strag's responsibility to find whatever reviewers you trust most, or whose taste most closely aligns with your own. Cuz, you sure as shit can't trust Gaymer Journos, the lowest form of Journos on earth.

As a bit of tiny good/neutral news NAG appears to still exist in Safrica, and makes a few articles every month, some of actually ok. It appears some of the survivors of 12 years ago managed to accumulate a small loyal following.

what do you Dramatards think?