I've been wanting to write this for a long fucking time, and lucky you, I've decided your thread is where I'm going to shit all this out. Ye be warned, this be long.
(TL;DR: This is a social disease of the games industry and goes back further than GG.)
So, waaaaay back in 2010 I was a developer working in a small games company. My coworkers generally fell into a few predictable brackets - "old dude", "fat family man", "hollow-eyed gaming addict" and "hipster". One hipster in particular had just married a radical feminist and was rapidly mutating into what would later be thought of as a prototypical SJW, because the power of pussy is all-devouring. I'm gonna call him Pete.
Pete was largely a good guy, liked his RPGs and his k-pop, fun to talk to. Except now he started shifting his hairstyle around even more than hipster usual and spending a disturbing amount of time ranting on about "republicans", which was a bit weird as we weren't in the US. At the time I was still in my post-Bush Daily Show phase, so I wasn't his target and didn't really pick up on the level of crazy this guy was getting into for a while, right up until he suddenly started to go after "gamers".
This seemed a bit off to me, given it described some 98% of the people in that building, not to mention Pete himself. But no, he let me know he just "played games", he wasn't one of those "gamers" he derided so much. We argued about it, he backed down (because he was getting increasingly surrounded by fat old men with gaming habits that made mine look like amateur hour) and nothing was spoken again... but I began to perk my ears up, because having been around during the Jack Thompson era I was somewhat sensitised to people making gamers the target du jour.
Fast forward a year or so, and I'm at a dev conference and I'm listening to a guy talk about women in the games industry. (Yeah, this was before it was decided that only women were allowed to talk about gender balance.) Suddenly out of nowhere, I hear "gamers" in a disparaging tone of voice come from the platform. I'm listening for it now, so I wander around, and I start to notice a few things.
Before I go on, you need to understand what game dev conferences are like. They cost an insane amount to attend (travel and accom, but especially the ticket price is nuts) and so the only kinds of people that go to them are either A) being paid for by their companies, B) already rich or C) hoping to get a big return of some kind - a scoop, a deal, a new job, whatever. So you get a mix of corporate drones, Notch-like shitlords, and chancers. (If you're wondering, I was somewhere between a and c at the time.) The talks are therefore largely meaningless. Sure, sometimes you get some interesting technical details, but it's not like SIGGRAPH or even something like DockerCon - this is not a place where people go to learn. Instead, they are largely there to network, and to attend. They need to show up to the talks to explain to their sponsors why they paid for it, and to have the opportunity to talk to the right people, but most of the time they really don't give a shit what is being said. The whole point of game dev conferences is to make the right noises and look the part to get what you actually wanted out of the conference, which is either "make your boss happy", "get a free holiday in San Fran or wherever", "feel like you're still relevant", or "make the deal".
Assuming the first two are largely irrelevant, once the "gamers" thing started to circulate, it quickly became a thing that popped up in meetings. Everyone seemed to start using "gamers" as a negative term, constantly, everywhere. I've occasionally wondered whether this was actually what happened, or if I was just sensitised to it and noticing it more, but I swear that was never a thing at conferences before 2011/2012. But I know it was brewing somewhere in the proto-SJW world in 2010 because of my radfem-infected friend Pete. That's how this stuff works; it begins in little fringe places, then people with social cachet introduce it to the larger structure, then everyone has to keep up.
At the same time we were seeing the beginnings of press shitting on the consumers because the consumers didn't like what they were getting. Mass Effect 3 hadn't yet come out, but at the time from the other side of the fence it did seem a lot like gamers were getting more and more demanding, and louder about expressing it too. I think this is the soil the "gamers" thing grew in. For my part, though, I reserved my ire for the other kind of people you met at conferences; game journos.
Again, to fully understand this you need to know what game journos are like at conferences. They are kind of a specialisation of Type C with a bit of A - they get paid for by their company, but they are expected to get something for their imprint out of it. So at dev conferences they are like sharks, circling around the groups looking for someone who looks like they might be vulnerable to being manipulated into letting something slip, talking up this and talking down that, and as a result the kind of people who thrive in that environment are... well, it would be unkind to call them sociopaths, so I'm going to just call them "manipulative emotionless soulless bastards" instead. Between getting shitty reviews because journos refused to actually play the game properly and just gave you a mark based on how your game's graphics look in the photos (which was the predecessor to "Not enough trans-lesbian Samoans in 9th century Britain, 3/10", and the successor to "Didn't buy enough adverts in our print edition, 4/10") and their frankly disgusting behaviour at conventions, I went into 2012 with a passionate hatred of game journos.
I barely even realised GG was happening to begin with. The Zoe Post, the monstering of Eron, the mass censorship, the Gamers are Dead articles... it all just passed me by. In my defence, I was going through unbelievable personal shit at the time, but even so you'd have thought I'd have noticed the games press I so loathed going after my people. I only really started to notice it all when the Game Journo Pros leaks happened, and it became increasingly clear that the manipulative emotionless soulless bastards had been actively coordinating their definitely-not-sociopathy-no-siree behind closed doors, and then I did the worst thing I could possibly do in my situation: I said something.
Remember how I said I worked in game dev? Remember how I said I was somewhere between A and C, getting paid to travel but trying to make a deal? Yeah, I was on the outs, and then I said something negative about RPS and their behaviour. Wanna guess what happened? Got a message from my former mentor telling me to back off or I'd fuck up my whole career. I'm not proud of what I did next. I was sick, and a bit broken, and caught in the middle of a storm that destroyed stronger lives than mine, so I gave in to cowardice. I erased every trace that I disagreed with the narrative on GG, every negative thing I'd ever said about game journos, SJWs, everything. I sanitised my public life and I kept my head down and watched as the journos I so loathe proceeded to monster everyone who disagreed with them. And I remembered all those fat family men and hollow-eyed game addicts and realised that Radfem Pete and his hipster buddies had won, that the industry was theirs now, because you don't get fired for dehumanising gamers and even if they go too far they can fall back on hipster welfare... and the rest of us have families and mortgages and lives that we can't risk for a fucking hashtag.
It's not changed at all since then. You cannot say a single word against SJW bullshit in public as a game dev or your career is done; you need complete independence like Brad Wardell or Notch to even be in with a chance, and that's assuming Brad doesn't get fucked by Mastercard in the next year or two. I can't count the number of times I've been to conferences and there's been talks that have had "Eeeeebil nazi-conservative-altright-gatorz lurk! We have to remove these people from the games industry!" as a topic, presented by a pair of problem glasses and a dye-job. My old mentor has gone full radfem, my old friends from college who went into the same line of work post the most ridiculous "FUCKING HUWITE MAYLE!" shit all over social media. And I remember who they used to be, and I know, deep down, they are doing the same thing as me - screaming internally and making the right noises to keep the horde from the gates. And that includes being part of the horde, when need be - quite a few of them were 100% behind Nolan Bushnell getting #MeToo'd for nothing at all. These are people that own Atari t-shirts.
I don't know what the solution is. How do you get people to come around when they know their colleagues will throw them under the bus the second they step out of line? No fucking clue. Burn the whole fucking industry down, start again. I don't care any more.