If you look into it, you will find claims that it started because of the hate of gamers for a woman who's boyfriend released an expose of personal information, but in reality what got the ball rolling was an illegal DMCA take-down on a video touching on the idea of corruption in the industry using small pieces of the information as examples. A take down notice, by the way, that days later YouTube itself canceled because of how ridiculously invalid it was; though by then the ball was already rolling.
Ignoring how it started and all the rest, the latest findings are a number of indie devs and games journalism sites all share the same PR company, which itself has relations to IGF via its members personal relationships. There has been an issue of objectivity in the gaming press where in IGF has awarded specifically games created by developers using this PR company, and the news outlets have favorably mentioned or just incessantly name dropped games made by developers using this company (even if they didn't win an IGF award).
Now, after a week of gaming press and devs calling gamers biggots, sexists, and misogynerds, and threatening them bodily harm, developers have started to sign a petition to stop hate speech in the gaming community. This is just another attempt at PR to hide their own corruption.
Here is a petition that requests that the gaming industry stop their hate speech. Please take a moment to sign it and leave a personalized comment while doing so. Be sure to copy your message into notepad before you submit as the traffic appears to be causing some issues with the process.
http://www.change.org/p/the-gaming-indu ... e_petition
Just one image showing an example of the hypocrisy:
http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/ori ... 29/106.png
(BTW, those 20+ "Gamers are Over" articles posted across numerous gaming news sites mere hours or even minutes apart are probably under the direction of this PR company.)
A news story that exposes much of the events of the past 2 weeks. It is not the best article or source, but it is the most encompassing. other articles tend to focus on small facets of the events or are hit-pieces by the gaming press to try to deflect from their misdeeds.
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Lond ... try-Apart/
Here is an anonymous blog post by an Indie Game Dev who is afraid that should their identity be revealed they will be blacklisted:
http://gabrielaknight.wordpress.com/
This is a sentiment shared by many that publicly remain silent on the issue.
These events are so crazy, 4chan has donated over $17,000 to a 'game jam' (for lack of a better word) designed to help push the idea to investors in the industry that yes, women can design games from the ground up. Members of 4chan have gone so far as to sit in 3+ hour Q/A livestreams and ask meaningful questions of a 2nd wave feminist (the crazies are the 3rd wave) acting as the PR head of the project. When asked for a topic for a video series (due to their donation level) they requested videos on "Women in the Gaming Industry".
This **** has 4chan and reddit users working together. Think about that.
EDIT:
This game jam is called "The Fine Young Capitalists". You can get more information on it here. 4chan /v/ together raised enough money to have a character created for them and they created the single most general character I have ever seen, and the most apt for the situation. You can read up more on that from the article on Vivian James on Know Your Meme. It looks like at this point reddit has managed to donate enough (calculated via http referral, so unlike /v/ which used a special link it is not known what boards it came from) to get a character of their own. As some observers have commented, "The internet waifu wars have begun". I hear FacePunch is in 3rd, but not sure, as no one else has broken the donation level needed to get character art.
And finally, here is a far better string of articles about the events on Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/20 ... deo-games/
I'm not joking either, this is 4chan /v/'s character:
