Depression Quest is fucking free. I am still baffled at how few GGers seem to know his.
I've never seen anyone not say this, not the part that depression quest, an inanimate object, is having sex with an amorphous concept such as, "free" but the part where it didn't cost money to get it.
There was no "scam", what little money the game did make went to a suicide prevention charity. It existed as a browser game for months before making it to Steam Greenlight. It was never reviewed by Grayson, it only has a 78 from Metacritic. And even if it did receive undue coverage (because somehow a fucking charity game is a major priority now), it's a tiny, tiny, tiny drop in the bucket compared to the conflict of interests evidenced by IGN's full page banner ads they shill out for games they're supposed to be impartial to.
The "scam" is where ZQ gets to dictate the narrative to media outlets who will then ignore the other side of the issue. Two screen captures from an anonymous image board that don't even directly implicate users as evidence of generating a raid? Media outlets ran with it. ZQ calls an organization trying to get women into game development transphobic? They ran with it and didn't bother contacting the other side of the issue. No one bothered fact checking Quinn's story, and when they were even presented with the other side of an issue they, largely, ignored it.
I'm not particularly angry with ZQ (to be blunt: I think she's a terrible human being and prone to stirring up shit for her own amusement) for walking through a door someone else opened- exploiting a system someone else built- and I'd really like to stop talking about her, yet she keeps coming up in the narrative for no clear reason while the 5-guys of burgers and fries have remained quiet, and oddly still employed, which gets to the crux of the issue. We're holding people who have no such credentials, no experience, and no training as journalists to journalistic standards. These aren't journalists, they're bloggers and PR pitchmen (and women), many of whom have made it no secret that they have no pretense or interest in being unbiased- read: fair- in their reporting, and favor their friends. GG is absolutely right that a journalist would probably get fired, or severely censured for writing an article who's subject they were sleeping with- the likes of Kotaku, Destructoid, and the whole nine yards are not populated by journalists, even if some of them want to call themselves as such. When I was in college one of the first courses you had to take for the journalism major was sarcastically referred to as, "Info Hell." The overt point- as I recall- was to literally assemble a 100 page bibliography. A journalist is only as good as their ability to research their issue- these people don't even try to hide the fact that they're not really going to do that.
And 78 is quite generous for a game that doesn't even meet the intellectual standards of what constitutes a game. It has more in common with a visual novel that has no pictures.
GG's obsession with DQ was what caused my original skepticism of the whole movement. Even now I still hear people try to talk it up as some major scam.
Because it's hard to ignore it when people repeatedly say, "oh look I'm being harassed on the internet!" before passing around the Patreon collection tin. We're all quite accustomed to idiots being idiots on the internet, which often includes them doing just that. We ignore it.
Its hard to ignore it when Anita Sarkesian hasn't come close to completing her Kickstarter project. Its not like her new videos are even that drastically ahead of her old ones in production values or concept- she's been caught using art and other people's youtube videos without permission-than her old ones.
It's hard to ignore an emailing list like the Gamejournopros list which was basically trying to institute soft blacklisting and tried to bully various outlets into conformity and towing the line. It's hard to ignore 9+ websites all running similarly sounding articles to the effect of, "gamers are dead!" while citing the same source that itself clearly didn't bother reading much of the article it was based on since it was behind a pay wall.
Scam might not be the right word, but the general pretense that these people and organizations are running a clean, ethical ship is nonsense. My question is why it took ZQ to make it obvious. I could have told you that there was issues of corruption in the 90's if you wanted to hold glorified ad space to the standards of journalism.