And then there are people, gamers, who were actually just dismayed with the conflicts of interest that ran rampant in the orthodox "games journalism" space and didn't give two shits about the personal drama side of the story, although that's mostly solved by finding your favorite youtube reviewer. And those who were genuinely focused on improving discovery of good indie games were subjected to some pretty horrible commentary that completely missed the point. Now there are smaller dedicated publications or channels that actually do regularly (weekly/monthly) review a decent volume of new promising indie games to help discover standouts, but that turned out to be a niche that the existing publications didn't want to keep up with, and a niche that suddenly many people denied even existed, for some reason? People who can't contemplate that there are amazing passion projects out there to be discovered, I suppose because those people can't imagine actually working hard on something people would enjoy, because they would rather spend their time raining on others' parades instead.

But it was too close of a tangent towards criticism of establishment journalism in general, so of course establishment journalism countered back with the only weapon it has, and suddenly the vast majority of people forgot any of it had to do with reviewing and promoting good indie video games.

People who make indie games are not losers. People who want good games to be promoted are not losers. It is an art. It's not for everyone. People who just want to play the latest AAA sequel can stick to those. But if you've ever tried a niche indie game and been more impressed than you expected, you know it's art, and you'd want other people discovering and promoting the good ones, and talking about what makes them special.

What I remember is that there were a subset of people I was acquainted with online who when this started all /immediately/ started posting things exactly like the comment this is a reply to; "these people just don't respect women, you all need to sit down and listen to women and center women" kinds of things. They were all men; mostly straight men although some were bi, and all generally thought to be fine although known for being a little performative and mildly, as they say, horny on main a little too often.

Every single one of them later turned out to be a sexual predator. This is now known as the "softboi" or "male feminist". This kind of person is still out there and is dangerous as ever, so it's important to keep an eye out.

(None of these people were in tech; instead all my tech coworkers who were men and lived in SF also heard "we need to respect women", but being kind of autistic engineers took it too literally and didn't seem to know any women, so they seemed to think the right thing to do was go out and find a woman and literally just start respecting them. This didn't work out for them and they mostly ended up getting scammed by scammers who happened to be women.)

I agree. It's bad in either case. No issue with a game or game engine should ever result in threats of violence or harassment. It's vile to publicly shame, cancel, still less attack individuals for the mistakes of their companies.

My initial skepticism was based in the voluminous amount of false allegations of harassment and misportrayal of valid criticism as harassment that happened at one point several years ago in the games industry.

I'd cite that as an example of the tyranny of diminished expectations. To be clear - I was criticising not providing named recognition. Of course providing some recognition is better than none. Perhaps you're right, perhaps the engineer involved can leverage this in interviews (or perhaps not, it might be difficult to prove / DNA'd etc), but you're giving the CEO the benefit of the doubt here.

I very strongly agree all creative workers should receive fair recognition (and compensation) for their work. I disagree with directionality as a moral framework. Doing something similar to the right thing is not necessarily doing the right thing. In this case my immediate assumption would be that the CEO is boasting about their anonymous hardworking impassioned employees as a way of 'glazing' the company, rather than shielding them from public criticism. It's impossible to know, but CEOs are not generally known to be good and ethical people. Larian may well be exceptional in this regard, but giving the benefit of the doubt to CEOs in general is a poor heuristic.