How Gaming Got Hijacked: From GamerGate to the Epstein Files

Oct 26

Scroll any feed, whether it's YouTube, TikTok or Reels, and you'll notice most of the gaming "culture" content barely touches the games. Mechanics, music, level design, the stuff that actually makes a game good or bad, gets buried under Asmongold reaction streams and Grummz quote-tweets telling you woke is coming for your hobby. It isn't, and the people saying it mostly aren't playing much of anything.

What they're doing has a history. There's a documented, sourced line from a 2014 harassment campaign, through a Steve Bannon political strategy, through the biggest workplace scandal in gaming, all the way to Jeffrey Epstein's inbox. At every step, gamers (young men especially) got used for somebody else's agenda. I made a video about it because the feeds got too bad to ignore, and this post is the written version, with every source linked at the bottom.

August 2014: a blog post and a lie

It starts in August 2014, when a guy named Eron Gjoni publishes a long, messy, very personal blog post about his ex, game developer Zoë Quinn. Buried in it is the accusation that lit everything on fire: that Quinn traded sex for a positive review of her game, Depression Quest, from a Kotaku journalist.

That review never existed. The journalist never reviewed Quinn's game at all, and Gjoni later admitted he had "no evidence" of any sexual conflict of interest.

Didn't matter. The post hit 4chan, Reddit and Twitter, and actor Adam Baldwin slapped the #GamerGate hashtag on it. The stated cause was "ethics in games journalism" (always a fun one to type with a straight face). What actually happened was a months-long harassment campaign. Quinn was doxxed and driven from home, Anita Sarkeesian got a mass-shooting threat that cancelled her talk at Utah State, and Brianna Wu dealt with threats for daring to say women in games could be written better.

Somewhere in there, this stopped being about video games. The lie became the excuse for going after women who had opinions about how they were represented in a medium they also loved.

Steve Bannon saw an army

Before he ran Trump's 2016 campaign and became White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon had a gaming résumé most people don't know about. In the mid-2000s he sat on the board of Internet Gaming Entertainment, a World of Warcraft gold-farming operation, and later ran its successor company, whose sites included Wowhead (shoutout to the old-school WoW heads). He studied this audience as a business: how gamers organize, what makes them angry, what moves them.

So when GamerGate blew up, Bannon was running Breitbart and knew exactly what he was looking at. Joshua Green's book Devil's Bargain, built on years of interviews with Bannon himself, quotes him on it:

"These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power... You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump."

Then he built the infrastructure. He hired Milo Yiannopoulos (yes, that Milo) as Breitbart's tech editor specifically to court the GamerGate crowd, and the language you still hear today showed up fast. Harassers became "activists." Coordinated attacks became "free speech battles." Going after women in games became "defending gaming culture."

The people involved described this strategy on the record, and researchers have spent a decade tracing it into 2016 and beyond. The lesson powerful people took away is that gamers who feel culturally displaced (because someone who doesn't look like them shows up in a game they don't even have to play) are a real audience that can be activated and pointed at things. Once you see that, your feed starts making a lot more sense.

Activision Blizzard: the rot nobody in your feed mentions

The games industry does have real problems. They just aren't the ones the anti-woke crowd makes videos about.

In July 2021, after a two-year investigation, California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Activision Blizzard, the company behind Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Overwatch. The lawsuit described a "frat boy" workplace: "cube crawls" where drunk male employees groped coworkers on their way through the office, open rape jokes, women kicked out of lactation rooms for meetings, and a manager allegedly refusing to promote a woman because she "might get pregnant and like being a mom too much."

The suit also alleged that a female employee died by suicide on a company trip after sustained harassment, including coworkers passing around intimate photos of her at a holiday party.

What followed did make news, for a minute. More than 2,600 of the company's roughly 9,500 employees signed an open letter and walked out. The EEOC filed its own suit, and the SEC opened an investigation. In November 2021 the Wall Street Journal reported that CEO Bobby Kotick had known about misconduct allegations for years without acting, which set off another walkout and calls for him to resign. Activision eventually settled for $18 million with the EEOC and $54 million with California.

That's real harm, to real people, at the biggest publisher in the industry. You'll find a fraction of the coverage on your gaming feed compared with videos about whether a woman in some game is "hot enough." Let that sit for a second.

The Epstein files

Early in 2026 the DOJ released millions of pages from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Heavily redacted, but still plenty to dig through, and alongside the politicians and billionaires, the games industry shows up.

There are more than a dozen emails from 2012 and 2013 between Epstein and Bobby Kotick, the same CEO from the last section. They include invitations to Epstein's residence and attempts to set up meetings, and Kotick's name appears in the files hundreds of times.

One exchange stands out. Epstein pitched Kotick on using video games to teach kids, and Kotick replied:

"X prize is a good idea but key is real world rewards. Learn to read: earn cell phone minutes, iphone credits, virtual items in games."

Epstein forwarded that reply to a futurist named Pablos Holman, who answered (Kotick wasn't on this one): "I'm all for indoctrinating kids into an economy."

The files also name Leslie Benzies, formerly of Rockstar North, and Rockstar president Sam Houser. Those references come from victim statements and don't establish a direct relationship with Epstein, but they show how small and connected the room at the top of this industry is.

To be clear about what this proves: appearing in Epstein's emails doesn't make anyone guilty of his crimes. Kotick's representatives say the two were never friends or colleagues, that he didn't know about Epstein's crimes, and that he never discussed Activision business with him. One outlet has already retracted a story claiming the emails were about Call of Duty microtransactions, so I'm not making that claim here.

What's documented is enough. The man running the biggest publisher in gaming traded emails with a convicted sex offender about how games could shape kids' behavior, during the same years his company was allegedly ignoring a culture of sexual harassment. That deserves a lot more airtime than another video crying about an Assassin's Creed character's skin color.

Same playbook, new grifters

Fast forward to today and the faces are different, but Bannon would recognize the playbook. Your Asmongolds and your Grummzes (and a long tail of smaller channels copying them) make a living off your outrage. A woman asking whether a female character could get some decent armor gets framed as an attack on your right to enjoy games. Then come the videos about "woke," DEI, Steam concurrent players and Ubisoft's stock price, none of which has anything to do with how a game plays.

Nobody's forcing you to buy the games you don't want to play, by the way.

Sweet Baby Inc. is the cleanest example. It's a small narrative consultancy that helps writers portray characters accurately, and it got turned into a supervillain. Any game it touched was supposed to flop, except the list includes God of War Ragnarök, Alan Wake 2 and Spider-Man 2, so the goalposts just moved again. Same story with Assassin's Creed Shadows, which survived a boycott campaign to become one of the best-selling games of 2025.

Turns out making a good, fun game matters way more than passing some weird purity test about how hot a female character is.

Who's actually looking out for gamers

Next time someone in your feed brings up ethics in games journalism, or feminism coming for your games, ask why they made that video. Do they care whether you enjoy what you play, or whether you click, comment and stay mad long enough to see the next ad?

The people looking out for games are the developers working crunch hours for mediocre pay because they love making them. The microtransactions and anti-consumer decisions you hate come from the suits above them, the same kind of people this whole story is about, who've figured out how to use you.

So, three options:

Skip the comment about woke ruining games, and go back to arguing about level design, gameplay loops and soundtracks like a normal person.
Clean out your subscriptions and notice how much of your feed is actually about playing anything.
Keep feeding the grifters, and keep wondering why every gaming conversation online feels like a fight.

I'd pick one or two. Either way, stop letting people who don't pick up a controller tell you what you're allowed to enjoy.

Sources

GamerGate

Steve Bannon

Activision Blizzard

Epstein files

Grifters, Sweet Baby Inc. and Steam numbers

Danny Martinez