Most if not all of the video game industry press are shills for the video game industry. Objective critique and reporting are almost non-existent. This symbiotic relationship is getting worse each year and has been appropriately dubbed access journalism.
Access journalism is a symptom of a dysfunctional society where the powerful have voices and the powerless do not. Access journalism is not real journalism. It is essentially a transactional quid pro quo relationship that the journalists have with the industry they are covering.
Here’s how it works in the video game industry: video game websites post favorable articles and in return, they get exclusive access to upcoming content and exclusive interviews with game developers. In some cases, these video game journalists also take advantage of press junkets, free meals, free hotels, free video games, and lots of swag. In order to keep the access flowing so that gamers will continue to visit them, these gaming websites need to continue to post favorable articles about the video games they are writing about. Journalists who bite the hand that feeds by telling the truth will lose their precious access.
This unhealthy relationship does not serve the gamer because it is highly unlikely that they will get honest, objective, unbiased reporting that could help them make better purchasing decisions. Yet, somehow, each day these shill gaming news sites manage to get traffic from the comfortably numb blue pill poppers.
In 2023, video game journalism is almost dead. Video game websites are essentially the unpaid arm of the video game industry that dutifully regurgitates the press releases that they receive from their overlords.
A prime example of this is Wowhead. Wowhead started off as a World of Warcraft talents website that allowed WoW players to contribute their knowledge via a crowdsourced online encyclopedia — just like Wikipedia. Eventually, it became popular among WoW players and was sold to ZAM in 2008. Fanbyte purchased ZAM, and now Tencent owns Fanbyte. Tencent is a Chinese video game and entertainment conglomerate.
It is not hard to see the conflict of interest where a video game conglomerate owns video game studios, news, and fan websites. What could possibly go wrong?
The Ideological Alignment of the Video Game Industry and the Press
The purpose of freedom of the press in the U.S. Constitution was that the press is supposed to be a check and balance against the influence of government and the powerful. A free press is also instrumental as a way for people to have their opinions heard.
Thanks to a free press that is no longer free and controlled by the globalists, America has never been more divided. The average citizen feels marginalized and orphaned with no one to champion them or let them have their say. Popular opinion is shaped by the elite-approved narrative ™. It’s so endemic that U.S. Government and various federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies now have their tentacles (current and former employees) embedded in every single big tech company.
Up until recently, the digital town square known as Twitter was completely infiltrated by these agencies and neo-Marxist ideologues. The recently unearthed truth about the last two elections and the COVID fiasco are just a few examples of Twitter censorship that changed the course of the USA and the world.
In recent years, it is an undeniable fact that the fourth estate and the powerful have become intertwined. This ideological marriage made in hell has eroded public trust in the media and fractured our culture.
We see the same thing happening in the entertainment and video game industry industries. Studios and critics have ideologically merged and have become strange bedfellows. Instead of standing up for the interests of consumers and gamers, they now represent the industry they cover and their own pet political causes.
One only has to notice the wide gap between professional critics’ review scores compared to review scores from the public. To illustrate this paradox, here’s the Metacritic rating for Amazon’s Rings of Power:
There is no better example of this ideological alignment than the aforementioned Wowhead. Wowhead no longer serves the interest of WoW players, instead, it is beholden to Blizzard Entertainment which produces WoW a few miles south of L.A. in Orange County.
When Blizzard makes a press release, no matter how self-serving and vacuous it may be, you can be sure that Wowhead is always there to “report” on it and repeat it word for word, like obedient lemmings.
How Wowhead Became Wokehead
Once upon a time, Blizzard was a non-political, ideologically neutral video game studio. The Blizzard of 2023 has been captured by the radical left and is now a reliable conduit for LGBTQ activism. Incidentally, when they are not preoccupied with spreading transgender ideology, Blizzard still manages to make video games. Remember video games?
Wowhead 1.0 was the same as Blizzard 1.0: an ideologically neutral company going about its business and serving its customers. In both cases, it was gamers making content for gamers. Back then, even Wikipedia 1.0 was fairly reliable unlike the cesspool of Marxist propaganda and lies that it is today.
Over the years with new owners and new employees, Wowhead has changed with Blizzard and adopted the Irvine studio’s SoCal worldview. For the past few years, Wowhead 2.0 has been relentlessly promoting the alphabet soup ideology. They robotically repeat LGBTQ-themed press releases from Activision-Blizzard. They also have their own home-grown LGBTQ initiative.
Wowhead takes great pains to let everyone know how much they are aligned with Big Daddy Blizzard:
Furthermore, anything against the World of Warcraft Terms of Use or End User License Agreement is strictly prohibited on Wowhead.
Fanbyte is based in Los Angeles and predictability behaves just like woke people from L.A. behave.
As many people have found out, there is no tolerance for disagreement when it comes to LGBTQ issues — especially the normalization of the mental illness of gender dysphoria AKA the transgender agenda on Wowhead. The trans issue is essentially a war on reality and that’s the hill they intend to die on and they fully intend to take Western civilization with them.
Behold the spectacle of an unhinged female lunatic who “cares” about transgender people getting high on her own supply of narcissism masquerading as virtuous compassion:
Various admins and moderators at Wowhead routinely issue preemptive warnings to their readers not to post any wrongthink in their comments section. Failure to abide by these rules means your comments are edited, deleted, banned or your thread is outright locked. This is also the current modus operandi of shill news sites like Massively and MMORPG.com.
Meet Steven AKA Sas 148 — Senior Operations Manager and LGBTQ Propagandist at Wowhead
Take a good look at the self-appointed arbiter of intellectual discourse who doesn’t want anyone to comment on LGBTQ news items over at Wowhead. I’m not sure if this is a COVID mask or a gimp mask:
Predictably, Stephen has pronouns in his Twitter bio:
Does the following draconian warning made by the senior operations manager at Fanbyte seem like a person who is interested in what anyone thinks or cares about viewpoint diversity?
Apparently, he thinks if we have opinions that differ from his, then we should “keep it to ourselves.” So it’s okay for him to share his opinions but not okay for WoW fans to share theirs?
I did some digging into the cryptic dog whistle in white italics at the end. Written by a gay man, it’s now an oft-used gay trope that originated from a character Wesley Snipes played in a film about drag queens called Too Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything (1995). It seems that the clever senior operations manager has a dog in this hunt or is virtue signaling to an LGBTQ superior or a bigshot at Blizz.
Here he is again, admitting to editing/censoring comments. Only comments that affirm, validate, and celebrate sodomy and other forms of degeneracy are allowed:
We can reasonably assume that he’s done this before. How many comments this budding tyrant and his woke henchmen edited and removed is anyone’s guess.
A Compendium of LGBTQ-Themed Articles on Wowhead where Discussion was Prohibited
The last two copy-and-paste LGBTQ press release articles published by Wowhead have had their comments closed upon publication by the admins. Other articles have had the same treatment. But non-LGBTQ articles have no such restrictions:
Here are a few:
Inclusivity Updates in Dragonflight – Body Type, Pronoun, and Voice Options Discovered
Blizzard Employee LGBTQ+ Network Launches Pride Collection In Partnership with LGBTQ Center OC
Shadowlands Nominated as Outstanding Video Game in the 32nd Annual GLAAD Media Awards
I’m sure there are other examples. This is all I had the stomach to bother finding.
Why are Steven and his team at Wowhead afraid of the opinions of its own users?
Could it be that most WoW players don’t appreciate having LGBTQ propaganda shoved down their throats and do not hesitate to express this sentiment when they have the chance?
Identity politics and other manifestations of wokeness have no place in video games. Gamers play fantasy video games to escape the real world. They do not play them to be indoctrinated with relentless LGBTQ and PRIDE virtue signaling.
What this shows is that Wowhead’s senior management is out of touch with its players. If they really cared about what WoW gamers wanted, they would not subject them to endless LGBTQ moral posturing. If they actually gave a damn about gamers, they would be focusing on what WoW gamers want, not what Wowhead wants.
Trans People Are Being Used Like Pawns
Transgendersism in 2023 is both a horrific mental disease and a demonic ideology. People who are m mentally ill deserve our support and compassion. Yet, various activist groups like HRC, GLAAD, and the ADL — ever on the prowl to find more victims they can emancipate and recruit — are using trans people as pawns to advance a greater political agenda. In the process, normalizing their mental illness is doing them and our society a great disservice.
Then you have corporate America that also uses rainbow marketing and trans people to shield them from scrutiny. If anyone really thinks that Bobby Kotick and Activision-Blizzard shareholders really care about LGBTQ people I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
LGBTQ Awareness Fatigue
Most gamers are sick and tired of hearing about 3-4% of the population’s perverted sexual proclivities. Show some maturity and decency and keep whatever it is you do in the bedroom to yourself.
Being LGBTQ is not an achievement. You’ve got nothing to be proud of. Instead, you should feel deep shame for violating both natural law and God’s law:
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! –5:20 Isiah
We’re tired of your pronouns. We’re tired of your whining. We’re tired of your narcissism. We’re tired of your drama. We’re tired of your mindless chanting. We’re tired of your PRIDE flags. We’re tired of your freak show parades. And most of all, we’re sick and tired of the constant pandering by corporations and politicians.
By continually subjecting their customers to this vile propaganda, the arrogant leaders of Activision-Blizzard have crossed a line in the sand of decency and propriety. If Blizzard had real leaders, instead of weak/woke beta males like Mike Morhaime and J. Allen Brack, none of this would have ever been allowed to happen but it did.
Access Journalism Pays Off with Wowhead’s “Exclusive” Interview with Chris Metzen
Before I forget, remember when I said that sycophantic sites like Wowhead get rewarded with exclusive interviews?
Well, look what we have here…
Does anyone believe that Wowhead would have gotten an exclusive interview with Chris Metzen if they had refused to publish Blizzard’s LGBTQ-themed press releases or spoken out against the intrusion of politics into video games?
If you do, I have some swamp land in Azeroth to sell you
Incidentally, when the going got rough, Metzen bailed on Blizzard. What did he do to preserve the unique studio culture that Blizz once had that produced the greatest video games in the world? He saw first-hand the woke mind virus that infected Blizzard and did nothing about it. Profile in courage. Some war chief.
Conclusion
When I go to an MMORPG fan site, I don’t want to think about sodomy, queer theory, puberty blockers, genital mutilation, child grooming, and the myriad of perverted fetishes that the alphabet community is engaged in behind closed doors, and now in public with Drag Queen Story Hours. When I research my favorite video game on a fansite, I don’t want to be indoctrinated. I go there to learn about the class that I am playing. That’s it.
The Southern Californians who run the video game industry and the media think they are far better than us. They could care less about what the gamers in the trenches think. Although we pay their bills, we are nothing but contemptible serfs to them. Our job is to do as we are told, believe what we are told, watch their shitty films, buy their woke games, read their stenographed articles, and keep our mouths shut.
The manifestation of widespread sexual deviancy is a sure sign that Western civilization is on the verge of collapsing. It was only a matter of time before it infected the video game industry and now video games are teaming with gratuitous LGBTQ content and wokeness. Speak against this and you’re instantly banned and labeled a homophobe, transphobe, racist, or worse. What is happening is the fruition of decades of subversion of all of our institutions by a cabal of neo-Marxists and slippery interlopers.
I leave you with a quote that explains everything you need to know about who the real power is in our world today:
You know who has power over you by who you are not allowed to criticize.
There are no sacred cows on this site. This is red pill country. I’m going to keep speaking truth to power as long as I have the energy to breathe. Life is too short and eternity is too long, to live by lies.
–Wolfshead
Update: Here’s an LGBTQ-themed ad running at Wowhead. You can’t make this stuff up folks…
I am worried for young gamers. I noticed worrying trends. Our generation was blessed with great games, World of Warcraft was just one of many. We had way more leeway what and how to say something and what to think. And yeah, journalists were not paid advertisers and activists.
Nowadays cancel culture and terrible group think abound. Christian actors have a hard time in Hollywood, heck, just not praising perversion can get you cancelled. I am right now thinking about Kevin Sorbo and Gina Carano. I am also thinking about the fired Blizzard devs.
Heck, even young gamers and devs themselves decided to go with the flow, virtue signaling nonstop and going for other gamers the very moment they see a chance to call them out for something.
This group think is orchestrated. Non gamer climate activist groups like Letzte Generation and Ultima Generazione are not grassroots movements, they are orchestrated fanaticism.
Diablo IV is releasing in a few days and following the theme: Quality down, prices up, Anti-Christianity to max. We live truly in hellish times.
Let me recommend you Everspace 1 and 2, it’s definitely not your genre, but it was made by gaming enthusiasts who could have earned easily more should they have focused on mobile games. A work of love and passion, apparently not perv enough to see more limelight. It is hard to find games nowadays that are not money grabs or full of vile propaganda.
I am worried for young gamers. I noticed worrying trends. Our generation was blessed with great games, World of Warcraft was just one of many. We had way more leeway what and how to say something and what to think. And yeah, journalists were not paid advertisers and activists.
The Zoomer generation worries me as well. Raised by boomers most of them are fragile snowflakes who are wallowing in shield of safteyism. Notice the “trust and safety” depts. springing up everywhere to shield these little children from reality. Speech they disagree with is violence, hence the need for safety. Silence is violence too. Combine that with the neo-Marxist garbage they are getting at colleges and the isolating effect of technology and you have a recipe for civilizational disaster.
Nowadays cancel culture and terrible groupthink abound. Christian actors have a hard time in Hollywood, heck, just not praising perversion can get you canceled. I am right now thinking about Kevin Sorbo and Gina Carano. I am also thinking about the fired Blizzard devs.
It’s a tragedy.
Heck, even young gamers and devs themselves decided to go with the flow, virtue signaling nonstop and going for other gamers the very moment they see a chance to call them out for something.
This group think is orchestrated. Non gamer climate activist groups like Letzte Generation and Ultima Generazione are not grassroots movements, they are orchestrated fanaticism.
Diablo IV is releasing in a few days and following the theme: Quality down, prices up, Anti-Christianity to max. We live truly in hellish times.
Blizzard are engaging in mock Satanic worship of Lilith. I saw a photo of some kind of publiciity stunt ceremony they had welcoming Lilith to Blizzard. Lilith is a real demon. These silly fools have no idea what they are dealing with.
Let me recommend you Everspace 1 and 2, it’s definitely not your genre, but it was made by gaming enthusiasts who could have earned easily more should they have focused on mobile games. A work of love and passion, apparently not perv enough to see more limelight. It is hard to find games nowadays that are not money grabs or full of vile propaganda.
Thanks for the tip!
Regarding the satanism propaganda, anti-Christianity propaganda, the woke propaganda and everything else, I think everything is very well premeditated, nothing is happening on random.
The other day I watched a video of this YouTuber that I follow for a few years called Overlord DVD or Doomcock, he is mostly talking about how Disney is ruining every franchise they get their hands on.
This video is called:
“Is Disney Destroying Pop Culture DELIBERATELY? Are They Killing the Past to Engineer A New Future?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XPw-WaSrFI
He is on to something, but the problem is bigger than just ruining movies, TV series or franchises, this propaganda is everywhere and the young kids are the prime victims for it. People in late 20s, 30s and above are still susceptible, I had an acquaintance (wouldn’t call a friend really) who is around my age – early 30s who got brainwashed by this propaganda and we stopped talking. Some older people may resist to this, but what I’ve seen on the internet, they get mocked or insulted for it, being called names like “religious nut”, “bigot”, being advised to “get a life”, “go to therapy”, “touch grass” or whatever.
That’s the scary part – those who are already brainwashed are utterly unable to see any other perspective outside of their own. I’ve seen this mostly for the situation between Russia and Ukraine – anyone who isn’t kissing the West and Ukraine’s ass and is displaying support for Russia is automatically branded a “Russian troll”, because there is absolutely no possibility that anyone can freely think anything different from the usual groupthink propaganda and must be paid by the Russians to be a troll.
Whether you call someone a “Russian troll” or a “bigot” or a “religious nut”, it’s the same rhetoric – completely disregard someone with a simplistic name/insult and then continue to be brainwashed. This is the behavior, in my opinion of someone who is not only brainwashed, but also by nature, not very bright to begin with.
We live in scary times that will only be getting scarier.