One of the key parties in the #GamerGate affairs is a group called TheFineYoungCapitalists, which is trying to help female game designers get their games made, even though it was sabotaged by neofeminists; the creator’s private information leaked and the website DDOS’d. Cool, right? But he’s been making some comments since then on his blog, and now he’s given an interesting view about the state of affairs in the gaming industry regarding “kingmaking”…
The last KingMakers left are the journalists, with such a giant market they have the ability to push eyeballs to your product. To use their audience to make your game a success or a failure. What #GamerGate is about, is the general public becoming aware of the backroom deals of the last kingmakers in the indie video game market. And showing how a small group of friends have a remarkable amount of pull over what get’s made and where it is discussed. Gaming journalism has responded by attempting to discredit the public. Which is an interesting strategy to say the least but has successfully avoided discussing the real issues.
He says that lack of quality control — and lack of visibility for good startup developers — has always been a problem in the gaming industry, causing the infamous Atari crash back in the old days, and the current problem with Steam being flooded with too much questionable content to keep track of or sort. Somebody needs to filter all those games, and those who filter the games have a lot of leverage that they can abuse.
Just think about it: what would you be willing to do to get your unknown little project on the front page of Kotaku or RockPaperShotgun?
If you want to cheer up TFYC and read more, you may as well follow them on Tumblr and give money to their pro-female developer and tragically sabotaged charity project! It sounds like things are getting bleak over there. I’m kind of shocked, how are they not funded by now, with all of #GamerGate going on?