The answer to this is easy, I don't buy games on services that are anti-consumer and anti-gamer.

By it's actions GOG has sided with journalists who are determined to undermine consumers and the gaming community and therefore I won't buy anything from the GOG store until suitable amends are made.

TotalBiscuit became infamous for inciting hatred during the gamergate cultural suicide. It was his condemnation-before-facts blog entry, the one that went wink-wink-"SJW" at the crappiest of his fans, that led to the organisation of harassment on reddit, so much in fact that the usually narcoleptic reddit mods had to delete these threads, which he commented with some freeze peach nonsense. He was the one to deny credibility to all death threats on the grounds that the person who received the threats was still alive. Then he "anonymously" gave out hints to the mob on reddit. The kindest thing I can say about him is that those "hints" comprised the plea not to focus on Quinn and Sarkeesian, but he still fully participated and heralded gamergate's obsessive fantasy of controlling and/or destroying the press after they dared to condemn the raging mob on and after August 28th, 2014.

The date that was part of GOG's tweet.

Gamergate loved to paint what happened at that date as a concerted effort by colluding journalists, so there are quite a few "obligatory-to-parrot", hence fascist, lies around about that date and what happened. They love to peddle the lie that 12 to 14 articles about "them" were all published on the same day. They love to insinuate that those articles were all written by journalists on the bog-standard "gamejournopros" mailing list (which was somehow evil because some ex-Breitbart now-infowars-snake-oil-peddler guy told them). They love to claim that these were "gamers are dead" articles somehow, though few contain that exact sentence. They love to purposefully misinterpret the wildly varying content of those targeted articles to mean the exact same thing. They love to lie that those articles were a concerted effort instead of a direct reaction to terrorist threats that happened on August 27th, which most of those articles mention explicitly.

On the face of it, these articles published on or around August 28th condemned exactly the despicable actions of "the few" that you now claim to not have been "gamergate". They didn't condemn gamergate explicitly, because the movement had been known under that name for less than a day. But still movement supporters took it personally and wanted at all costs to interpret these articles as a personal insult against themselves and their entire hobby. They took up the fascist conspiracy theory, they've eaten it up, expanded on it, got it expanded by later alt-right figureheads, parrotted it, all because they've understood that they can rile up others and get them to their cause, and it was obligatory to believe or claim to believe in this central conspiracy bullshit in order to properly participate in the gamergate movement.

That is why we understand gamergate as a hate group.

There's no conspiracy against all gamers from GOG or anyone else. If your're not one of the bad apples, then GOG wasn't talking about you in the apology. Come on people, this isn't hard to understand.

You can interpret siding with these so called "journalists" with the delusions you choose.

Grow up and learn to let others to do the same.

Whatever. If you really want an excuse to be angry, don't let me stop you.

That's better: and yes, my money goes with my mood.

Total Biscuit, August 29th 2014: Source:http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1s4nmr1/

"What the hell just happened?

So I initially got a tweet from someone asking me about my opinion on the "Zoey Quinn scandal". I had no idea what they were talking about, I hadn't heard anything about it. I have the parents here this week and stuff with the oncologist so I'm kind of disconnected aside from occasional DOTA. The person tried to outline it over tweets, which never works out well since you can't fit in enough information and I kind of dismissed it as another piece of pointless drama. After some rather inflammatory replies with a few accusations and people using maymay arrows, as was the custom at the time, I looked a bit further and found all manner of insanity, with many people spamming outlets and personalities asking for opinions. It looks like a fairly organized campaign and the missus let me know about it, she'd been getting info too and had read up.

The long and short of it is that Zoey Quinn the developer of Depression Quest is being accused of exploiting the nepotism that tends to plague this industry by getting a bunch of favorable coverage from people she has supposedly slept with. In addition to this, videos supposedly critical of these actions have been taken down from Youtube with copyright claims, including a video by a smaller channel called MundaneMatt. It's difficult to tell what is true and what is not. 4chan is all up in arms over it which means that alongside any truth there's always going to be ridiculous stories and trolling attempts. 4chan is a blunderbuss. It's a giant cannon filled with fuckin screws, nails, bodyparts, shit and waifu. When it fires, maybe 1% of it hits and the other 99% just goes everywhere and makes a mess. Added into this whole drama shitstorm is a cadre of SJW types and whoever it is that is opposed to that, MRAs? I don't even know the terminology at this point and frankly I don't fucking care. The kind of places posting information about this whole thing are also places I'd take with a pinch of salt or who already have a clearly outlined agenda. Internetaristocrat did the main video on this, a channel mostly dedicated to debunking SJW topics and complaining about how prevalent they are in todays media. A fair cause for the most part, though it's a fine line to walk at the best of times. Honestly that whole debate is something I try and stay the hell away from because the people involved in it are fucking terrifying.

What is clear however are two things.

1) Using the DMCA to take down criticism of your product is a terrible idea and is unethical if not in many cases flat-out illegal. Don't ever fucking do this. The Streisand effect is real and even if it isn't, you don't get to run around using copyright law to censor people. My understanding is that Zoe Quinn is accused of taking down one of Mundanematts videos because it used a picture of her game "without permission". With the insane shitstorm currently in the air it's impossible to know if that's actually true or not. If it is, it's bullshit. You do not do this, it is disgusting behavior and previous incidents such as Garrys Incident and Guise of the Wolf that resulted in the public obliteration of the developers reputation should be reason enough not to.

However. It is entirely possible that she did not issue this claim and that it's someone impersonating her. It's easier than it should be to do this on Youtube because Youtubes system is terrible. That's always worth bearing in mind, even though the evidence I've seen up to this point seems to indicate that she is responsible. Again, you can't see very far in a shitstorm.

2) Games journalism as a whole has a massive nepotism problem, encouraged by the publishers and developers and actively partaken in by many outlets. There are plenty who don't, whether they be independent Youtube channels or important websites like Giantbomb, who made the decision not to review Bastion due to their connections with Greg Kasavin. Maintaining your independence or at the very least being completely honest about your relationship with the developer is paramount to maintaining the trust of your audience. So much shit goes on behind the scenes, more than you could ever possibly know about. I personally find things like industry parties thrown by devs and attended by the media, enthusiast press or otherwise to be a waste of money and time but more importantly an element that horribly muddies the waters in our line of work. It's one thing to be more willing to provide coverage because you happen to know a developer, it's quite another to not disclose that and then create a favorable review of a product, whether it be the final product or repeated pushes to the greenlight page. Transparency in all things is important. People are going to have friends in the industry, that's natural. They are also going to try and help them when they can, they just need to be straight up about it and be very careful about keeping their bias in check.

If these allegations are true I'm certainly disappointed in the outlets responsible. Depression Quest is not a good videogame, but I tweeted about it because even though it wasn't a good game it did a good job of conveying a message about depression which is a very real thing that's touched those around me. It's a horrible condition that is misunderstood and any effort to raise awareness and understanding about it is positive in my opinion. Doesn't make DQ a good game, it's basically a choose your own adventure novel and should be treated as such. Whether it should have been greenlit is something that's not really worth discussing at this point. A ton of absolute horseshit has been greenlit, the process is clearly busted in every way, might I remind you that the 1st ever wave of Greenlit titles which contained many worthwhile games (whereas these days good luck finding a game you can even recognize in a list), also contained Yogventures, a game that didnt exist at the time and doesn't exist now either, purely on the basis that Yogscast were popular. The process has been broken from the very start and I've pretty much given up on the idea that it will ever be fixed or that Valve really cares about content curation at all right now. But the quality of the game really isn't up for discussion, nor is its place on Steam, what is up for discussion is whether or not outlets went beyond the realm of "personal favour" into obvious bias, whether they disclosed it and, the thing which really makes my bloodboil, whether efforts are being made to abuse the DMCA system to censor criticism of the developer. If that is the case, I thoroughly condemn it in every respect.

The problem is this. Even after reading a ton of info on this, I still have no idea how much of it is true, how much of the controversy is genuine concern about the state of the industry and how much is just rabble-rousing for the sake of it. Misogyny is very real in the games industry, it's pretty disgusting, but it's also a problem that is not confined to our industry and most of what is being said about it is repetitive noise. Any right-thinking individual knows that hating women is bad, we don't need libraries worth of articles to tell us that. We know that some people that play videogames are also horrible pieces of shit. Problem is some of those people are in on this discussion, it was obvious the moment I started getting Twitter replies about it. Some people make their agendas really obvious from the outside. Stuff like this is a good reason to NOPE the fuck out of most of these discussions. I don't want to be involved in them. Here are the 2 things I'm interested in talking about.

1) Game mechanics
2) Industry bullshit

This falls into the second category but it also has an unhealthy dash of

3) SJW/Tumblr/4chan/arguments/whatthefuckisevengoingon

Last time I got involved in anything like that I ended up with all manner of unpleasant shit thrown at me from both sides, which is maybe also why a lot of those with the loud voices get very quiet when things like this happen. You are throwing yourself in front of the blunderbuss and hoping it doesn't hit you. It's often just not worth the aggro. I got enough real life cancer to fight without having to deal with the fake internet stuff. Chemo gives me less headaches than this stuff.

TL:DR - If Zoey Quinn did engage in censorship via the abuse of the DMCA on Youtube then I thoroughly condemn her actions as being both fucking stupid and unethical. If outlets did provide her favourable coverage because she had intimate relations with some of the writers, they're goddamn idiots for doing it, why the hell would you compromise the trust of your readers for that? The shitstorm is too insane right now to make a huge amount of sense of and I have no idea what is true and what isn't. Cooler heads prevail, heard of that phrase? Calm the fuck down and things might become clearer. Also please stop shouting at me, thanks."

Way to piss on somebody's grave, Vaina. Be Proud. I do not read any of the shit you are flinging at Total Biscuit in his post.

You're seriously going to use the "Gamergate got Trump elected" arguement? Bunch of bs. If you had a point to make you lost it completely with this line.

I do not know much about gamer gate and SJW phrase but I have read a little about it. So let me ask if I understood right by giving example from my own government.

A Professor/journalist/writer says: Economy is going bad, everything in the Country is collapsing because of bad Government moves.
Government: You are all terrorists trying to take down us. Nothing is wrong in the country.
People: But they are right. The amount of people below poverty line is above 70%

After a sudden night operation, all the people contributed in that "economy" discussion against the goverment are locked up, labeled as terrorists and stay in prison for over 8 years without a single evidence against them. Those people are all free after 10 years and were found innocent but spent the 10 year locked up nonetheless.

We professors claim that the education system is going downhill fast. An average high school graduate is not able to multiply 3 x 5 = ? most saying the answer is 35 or 8. Most are not even able to write their own names. Half of the people entering the university exam do worse than a 10 year old kid.
Government: You are all terrorists sponsored by foreign countries trying to take us down.
We: But?... Oh hello police officer. No need to take those handcuffs out. We know the way.

Is gamergate and SJW something similar in concept?

You have a citation for that? Who was arrested for harassing this person? Since it's so obvious "Gamergate" was involved, there must be some proof right? It's kinda hard for people to accept responsibility for something they never did.

How about the "real" story?

Chloe Sagal, a game developer started a crowd-funding campaign for "life-saving surgery" stemming for "metal poisoning" from a car accident. She lied. Instead she was planning to use the money for "life-saving transition surgery to become a woman". She was never in a car accident. Her IndieGogo was suspended. Her lies came out and then she attempted suicide. But here's the real kicker. She attempted suicide a full year BEFORE Gamergate even started! It's truly amazing how uninformed idiots make shit up to blame it on "Gamergate".

So you may ask how this got tied into Gamergate now, wouldn't you? I can answer that too. A journalist for Destructoid named Allistair Pinsof is the one who investigated and discovered the deception. He brought the story to his superiors who wouldn't let him publish the story. So he instead released the information himself to let the backers know that what they were giving money to is not exactly as claimed. Destructoid fired him for it and then contacted other game developers to blacklist him from the industry. Remember, this all happened in 2013. It's only tied to Gamergate because it was one example used of how game journalists play favorites and bully and blacklist anyone who disagrees with them. His blacklist was mentioned on the Game Journo Pros list. A group who included almost every author of one of the "Gamers are Dead" articles and is cited as evidence of the coordination between the game rags.

Gamergate didn't cause the suicide, it didn't even exist yet. This suicide is only part of "Gamergate" as an example of game journalist abuses and favoritistic coverage for their friends. As well as proof of collusion between every one of these click bait rags.

But why let the facts get in the way of a good story, right?

Wow... who would have thought Total Biscuit was such a monster? He sounded so nice and professional in all those videos.


@Engerek01 - Yeah that sound like the jist of it.

I am very disapointed that GOG really did this and surrenders itself to liars and radicalists that do everything to make anything they dont like to hear, see, feel, a hatecrime.


Free Speech, free thoughts and freedom means you have to a high Degree accept that you hear, see, feel, speak About Things that offend you or others - it is the price you have to pay for not living in a tyranny!

That GOG bows down to the tyranny of PC is deeply concerning me!

I would say that a bunch of articles in games media saying that gamers are dead does hint at collusion and the fact that the common word they use to condemn the behaviour is "gamers" does make it quite hard to not take it personal if you are a gamer.

I don't say that the people acting like this aren't gamergaters. I am saying that gamergate was not them. It was a lot bigger than that. But of course it is convenient for games media to paint everything with a broad brush. To me the entire debacle did make a couple of things clear:

1. Games media are bought and paid... This was especially clear at the time from things like the Shadow of Mordor review boot camps, the XBox One influencer program and Machinima actually accepting it etc. The entire Zoe Quinn affair I find quite weird how it blew up in the way it did. Not that I think it is okay for journalists to have a personal relationship with a source or an object they cover and not disclose it. But I think the ENTIRE blame for it goes on the journalist so I don't get how Zoe Quinn ended up getting so much crap for it. All these things pretty much hit at the same time. I did have my reservations before. And I definitely don't now. The picture has changed since I no longer pay for their service. I know longer pay their salary. The games companies do through advertisement. That is what leads to hype pieces and stuff like that. So I guess pissing on a gravestone for games journalism to me makes a lot of sense...

2. Any time a story blows up on the internet there will always be elements taking things to an extreme. And when it comes to this you have to remember that guilt by association is a thing that is only accepted in law in the most repressive regimes in the world. I am only responsible for what I say and do. So when it comes to the anti-gamergaters I shouldn't hold that movement responsible for those complete assholes who are now dancing on TotalBiscuit's grave. And when it comes to gamergaters the entire movement shouldn't be held responisible for the harassment carried out by a relative few self-proclaimed members of the group. Asking every GG'er to answer to questions of mysogyny is as out of place and weird as asking all Muslims to react whenever there is a new terrorist attack.

Just to clarify. "Zoe Quinn affair" means : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy#Zoë_Quinn_and_Depression_Quest

?

No one was arrested because the authorities don't take online harassment seriously at all from what i've seen.

Yes she lied, but she was desperate, and it was no reason to "out" and harass her over it. You honestly don't think it's possible some of those responsible joined GG later on? That these weren't the early beginnings of GG?

Allistair was fired and blacklisted because he "outed" her and nearly caused her death with his actions. You don't do that with anyone LGBT because of what awful things they might face from being out, but he didn't care, as long as he got his scoop. I think he even later joined the GG crowd fully last I heard. The poor woman recently burned herself to death in fact, not that you care i'm sure:

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2018/06/woman_who_set_self_on_fire_in.html

The lack of empathy shown by him and yourself in your post is exactly why I and many others want nothing to do with GG.