>>331120
That was all part of the Master Plan(tm).
The overall strategy was to focus a nuclear powered autism laser on the games media and rout the cancer out of it. Directly remove those we could (Leigh Alexander) and kill the rest by slow attrition of targeted advertiser hate and boosting good alternative sites. Gawker and Kotaku were targeted the hardest to be our "heads on a pike", which would serve to warn the rest to clean up their shit before they followed suit. In the meantime, we aimed for good public relations to attract more members and keep pressure up on the games media. It was easy to prove how shit they were when we compared their lies about us to the reality of what we were doing. This was Phase 1 and was planned to last for many months to a few years.
Phase 2 was to use the freshly un-cucked and gamer-friendly games media to shine a light on bad industry practices. Crunch development, DLC issues, DRM, pre-order culture, Censorship, SJW cancer in the game dev scene and academia and so forth. The media would translate our concerns out to the rest of the gamer and normalfag world, and put pressure on the game companies to change their practices. This was expected to take half a decade or more, but to operate mostly on autopilot since the media would simply be doing their normal jobs in sustaining it. All we'd need to do was lurk around and give a friendly journo the occasional nudge or a bit of dug up information.
Then all we had to do was sit back, play videogames, and wait patiently. This was the strategy that /pol/ and /v/ jointly concocted back in September of 2014.
Too bad some idiots jumped the gun and fucked it all up. Nobody knew about the "Cabal" behind the scenes of #GG's imageboard front. While GG was getting bogged down in hedgerow country in the middle of Phase 1 (unpleasant but expected), some of our "thought leaders" who were either out of the loop or just didn't care decided to throw the strategy out the window. Depending on which one you talked to, they either wanted to fight the game development industry directly by trying to boycott games or by targeting individual players (see: Allison Rapp), or to take the whole fight political and turn gamers into footsoldiers for the Alt Right. And when mainstream #GG didn't want anything to do with either of those things, those faggots stabbed us in the back. They started targeting pro-GG voices and began a covert attempt at hostile takeover that ignited a civil war on 8chan and social media, turning GG against GG.
Because of that we lost a lot of momentum and wasted a lot of energy. SPJ Airplay was an oblique success (the talk was a failure, the side opportunities weren't), but we were too busy infighting to fully capitalize on it. The blockbots made directly engaging/salt mining games media difficult to impossible, so we lost a lot of ammunition. We lost several key nodes in #GG's social network (remember when Mombot was only a minor player? Our big voices used to be five times what she was until the Cabal and revolt harassed them off social media) and a lot of normalfags failed to get the message that Gawker's death was only a beginning, not an end goal. A ton of people dropped out or called mission accomplished, and our remaining GG network and the burnout Revolt faction spent more time eyeing each other on Twitter than they did fighting games journos, until Revolt imploded under the weight of the Cabal's autism.
On top of all this the problems with 8chan and Josh's massive fuckup with Infinity NEVER almost killed this site entirely, with our board here losing its last major batch of regular users. We dropped out of the topbar never to return except on last year's anniversary. KiA changed their rules and expanded away from gaming, which kept their subreddit active, but they don't run operations or email campaigns hardly at all anymore due to the choke-chain the Reddit admins have around their necks. They're huge, but weak compared to what 8chan was.
Now /v/ is the Helms Deep. The Generals still have most of the same ~125 #GG people posting in them that established them in 2014. Even there we spend most of our time shitposting and arguing about traps, until some major happening goes off where we think that #GG still has the numbers to make a difference. At least then the Bat Signal still goes out and shit gets done. The General is also responsible for Torrential Downpour and kick-started the fight against localization censorship in Japanese games, which is good.
We still chip away at the games media, little by little. Deepfreeze is a treasure, and does a good deal of the lifting for us. The games press is utterly discredited, with some in academia the only ones left pretending otherwise. As it sits, long-term attrition is going to be the thing that completes Phase 1 of the original plan, with the games press dying off over the next ten years to be replaced by new media, who will then have to be held accountable to gamers. Not the win we wanted, but a win is a win.
Of course, that assumes that we can put a stop to the mass censorship of anti-SJW views now occurring on the major new media sites like Youtube. If the only opinions allowed are those of our enemies
anyway then killing the old games media will do us no good. Their replacements will then be even worse, because Let's Players and their ilk are far more trusted than the dinosaur press was. So now we're fighting there, too.
A lot of the time I think about this stuff, I have to just laugh. We expected a marathon boss, not a
boss marathon. Still, we might as well see it through all the way to the end. With the industry in such a state, it isn't like there's a better place for a gamer to spend their time. We'll keep making it better, little by little, and we'll save the rest of the God Damned Internet while we're at it.