It seems like a lot of the "Baldur's Gate 3 is causing developers who hate their audiences and want to make dogshit titles to panic because now they can't be lazy!" stuff is coming from one specific op-ed piece at IGN by one Destin Legarie. I've put a few of his YouTube thumbnails above to give a sample of his work.
And who could have foreseen that a pundit who has spent the past few months on his personal YouTube channel defending the Activision merger seemingly at the exclusion of all other content would have some dogshit takes about video games?
To be clear: he doesn't seem like a hardcore culture war reactionary dude. He's not out here openly posting hate speech, and he's not overtly evil in the various ways YouTube video game people can be. It's not like IGN gave a platform to The Quartering or something, and I don't want this rant to be conflated with that sort of thing.
Instead, giving Legarie a platform sucks in a much more quiet, passive, insidious way. He makes bad arguments designed to stoke outrage based on his shitty, incurious worldview and then takes no responsibility for it.
edit: since this is getting more attention that i thought, i want to clarify that i don't think gamergate "caused" anything that followed it. it was a moment, a criticality event in the goofy metaphor i use below, that emerged from cultural dynamics decades in the making.
gamergate's alpha radiation dissipated relatively quickly, as its manufactured scandals and crises fell apart under scrutiny. its beta radiation contributed (though far from single handedly), in various now-widely-documented ways, to the alt right movements that coalesced into US executive branch government power last decade.
its gamma radiation, though, is everywhere now - a sense of belligerent ignorance and incuriousity wearing the skin suit of "consumer rights" that pretty reliably allows new clowns to pantspoop their way to high visibility with discourse like this. it's important to call each new sample what it is before burying it in a lead-lined hole, which @Campster and others have been doing well today.
