The Corruption of Gaming Journalism: The Quinnsqate scandal.

Personally i don't take sides with these scandals, however gaming is something highly important to me. And this time the side against Zoe and her bull**** has undisputable evidence which further makes me agree with them.

So essentially...you took a side.

I am going to take a side here and it is completely outside this entire situation. My side is very simple.

I don't care. I have seen more that enough anecdotal evidence of assorted Triple AAA games that receive rave reviews from "journalists" and shite reviews from the players. I have seen people get comped for all expense weekends, travel, entertainment and assorted other sundries (not the least of which include memorabilia) by games companies. I have seen websites offer favourable reviews in exchange for advertising buys made on their sites. I have seen an entire industry built around selling the multiple downloading of apps just to push up the numbers on the charts. I have seen....well lets face it -- there is a lot of of grey, somewhat unethical crap that floats around in the industry. The trouble is -- if you think that it is exclusive to the gaming industry then you have blinkers on. This sort of stuff happens everywhere and whilst much of it can be seen, most of it will be under-the-table. It may not seem right, indeed it is even sometimes legislated against but the 'game of doing business' simply evolves to new areas of grey when forced.

As to Zoe Quinn, I don't know her, nor am I likely to ever meet her. Personally I feel sorry for her, as to put it quite simply...the "Ex" has simply done his version of revenge porn. At no time did I consider his blog a case of legitimate righteous outrage but rather as a calculated play to damage.

edit: Oh and my personal opinion about this thread. I would have much preferred a thread which actually raised the issue of Journalistic ethics within the gaming industry utilising more evidence than simply this one incident...there are plenty of shenanigans out there which would have leant more credence to this being a legitimate thread for discussion rather than effectively blaming the woes of everything bad in this world on Zoe Quinn.

There is not much of a story here, corruption is part of every action to a degree, and tbh they must have been a bit desperate?

The 'game' is apparently garbage and misinformed.

Ok

As to Zoe Quinn, I don't know her, nor am I likely to ever meet her. Personally I feel sorry for her, as to put it quite simply...the "Ex" has simply done his version of revenge porn. At no time did I consider his blog a case of legitimate righteous outrage but rather as a calculated play to damage.

I'm going to agree with this.

Oh and my personal opinion about this thread. I would have much preferred a thread which actually raised the issue of Journalistic ethics within the gaming industry utilising more evidence than simply this one incident...there are plenty of shenanigans out there which would have leant more credence to this being a legitimate thread for discussion rather than effectively blaming the woes of everything bad in this world on Zoe Quinn.

And also this. If we're going to have a discussion, we need something more to discuss. We need more of a thesis than statements like "this is bad and this person should feel bad." My opinion is that if OP's intention is purely to discuss the issue at hand, then the name of the developer in question should be removed as has been done in this article on this particular topic. I doubt many here are eager to contribute to a character assassination, as the original post does even as it claims not to take sides.

With regards to gaming journalism: when you have something free to read and it talks about products and it has ads for said products on the sidebar, it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that perhaps it is somewhat less than unbiased source. Everyone understood that just fine. It's clear, it's in the open. There's nothing to 'gate here. We all know. It's not even particularly unfair, because it's predictable and a business transaction.

And no, game journalists won't lie negatively about your game. However, some other people will.

There's this phenomenon which is extremely dangerous to indie game developers: when you have 100 000 customers, and millions just walk-in-look-at-the-product-leave people, the absolute worst problem customers are very, very, very bad people. There's no other way to put it. (Within 100 000 of the general population, there's a handful of murderers, hundreds rapists, etc. When you look at the worst out of 100 000, it's very bad. You get an unexpected publicity boost, and with no exaggeration you're going to interact with the worst people you could possibly meet over several normal lifetimes. You will also interact with the best people, but you can't notice that so much, unfortunately!)

So what emerged over the time is that there's this hate crowd - I don't know what's their problem but they're unemployed and sometimes mentally disturbed individuals who don't have much going on in their lives. And they spend far more time online than normal people do. And they will hate you. They're a very small percentage of your userbase, but they're very loud, and they emit a signal attracting more individuals of the same type, who aren't even your customers.

They can't target everyone, they pick targets (who would be minorities[within game development], or troubled, or the like).

So, some game developer got revenge-porned by an ex, and this damn crowd is on it, and the gaming journalism, this crowd doesn't care about it with the exception that they also hate anything that's good about game journalism - that the game journalism is generally on the game developer's side rather than on the hate crowd's side, that game journalists delete violent threats, etc (and which they do out of good will, irrespective of whenever you paid them or not).

So what an indie game developer can do about it? I don't have much time right now but my understanding is that one has to stay away from the social media, and apparently, has to choose their exes as carefully as a movie star would. It's a difficult situation.

Do not start a topic that ... tends to incite flame wars.

If you want somewhere to host your opinion, please use a blogging service. This is a place for discussions. I'd recommend anyone who wants to start a discussion about this alleged "scandal" make it more general and not drag the unfortunate people implicated through more mud here. There appear to be enough places jumping on that witch hunt.