The sneakiest thing about it is the issues it brought were geniune, but its desire to solve them was not.

It was a movement that wanted to target game journalism acting in political interest more in gaming one, hiring journalists who were blatantly unqualified, giving games terrible review scores either for being “too difficult” or for not being “politically correct” enough

Some infamous examples include a time when a game journalist was

The problem? Gamergate was always a scam, the people behind the movement had no interest in addressing these concerns, but rather using them to indoctrinate gamers into the far right, and sadly it worked as we’re still having to fight off bigots in gaming who shit themselves whenever a rainbow shows up or god forbid anyone have a skintone that’s any darker than the quiet kid who hung out at Hot Topic loudly praising the Columbine Shooters back in 2005.

And the actual problems Gamer Gate wanted to address continue to go unsolved, especially as we see remasters and remakes that are heavily censored compared to their original counterpart (Dead Rising 2006 Vs. Dead Rising 2024 is a good example) or worse, we see games that actively remove content for being too raunchy (Skull Girls basically lost its playerbase overnight by censoring out all of the fanservice in their fanservice game, which even went as far as removing fanart from the art book that they charged money for, falsely accused the original creator of being a pedophile, and claimed the fans upset about this change were also pedophiles… weirdly that didn’t win them back and the game has entered something of a dark age.), with games journalism carrying water for such atrocities.

(You can say what you want about the morality of selling a game where you see the women’s panties during high kicks, the fact that the game was sold as a fanservice game for the better part of two decades and then suddenly EVERYONE’S COPIES were patched to remove that is wrong, it’s been rightfully compared to George Lucas breaking into your house to steal your VHS copies of the original trilogy and leave behind Special Edition Blu-Rays. While one of these characters was canonically 16 which is usually the defense for that, this only covers one character and even then her age came up so little in the story that I didn’t know until it was given as a reason for the change, but counter-point… Why draw attention to it instead of just quietly upping the age of an animated cartoon of a woman who doesn’t exist who is only ever given a solid number for her age when you check the wiki anyway?)

There was also the infamous debacle of a game journalist who was mocked for giving Cuphead a bad review calling it too difficult, when the same journalist while filming himself trying to play it couldn’t pass a tutorial with literal written instructions on screen, he later was terrible at Doom Eternal and gave that a poor score too.

So the company he worked for, instead of reprimanding him and teaching him to get good went “The gamers are to blame!”, and wrote slander articles trying to portray Cuphead as being racist. A claim that was basically laughed away from the fandom and quickly walked back.

I was with Gamergate when it originally launched, but left when I found out the truth. Thankfully I’m a transwoman so it didn’t take me long to figure out that this wasn’t worth my time as my particular faction of it actually banned me for being a woman. I was told by some incel chud that I “Likely was just pretending to be a gamer to get a boyfriend” and that “Sorry honey this aint your dating app.”

Then Gamergate as a whole tried to tell people that Mortal Kombat X wasn’t sexy enough and was trying to indoctrinate people into being gay, the latter of which was based on a single character having a single throw away line in the storyline not even said by him that implied it. (Same story mode also has the game being brought to a screeching halt so Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade can scream in each other’s faces about how they totally used to fuck, meaning ironically it’s heterosexuality that’s being shoved in player’s faces.), the former of which was based on the fact that the women are in their underwear but in the last game they had more revealing underwear.