[Ekaros]

Game reviews being bought by publishers is a long known fact, even from 90s. Maybe not direct money exchanging hands, but pages for early access and such. And everyone knows to laugh at IGN's and others' reviews. Knowing that they are just paid for hypemachines... Or at least don't dare to be truely critical for fear of not getting access next time. Still they do deliver marketing briefs in nice package so they kinda have a place.

What really triggered the gamergate was that writers directly attacked their audiences, with suspiciously similar articles from multiple-source at nearly same time. And that they care more about themselves and their buddies than their audience. And many don't even self-identify as hobbyist... Which really should be death knell for any hobbyist media.

[ralfd]

I think the underlying cause is that the business model changed. In the past, up to 2010, the gaming media were mostly physical paper magazines and were bought by gamers with hard cash. If they didn’t cater to gamers they would simply lose their audience.

But nowadays gaming media is much broader, from some random blog or YouTube let’s play channel to bigger news sites. And online news attention is everything and controversies are just generating more clicks.