Needless to say, this is regarding apparently, the only two women that have ever disagreed with gaming portrayals recently. Zoe Quinn, and Anita Sarkeesian. Phil Fish's net backlash got him what I think he deserved, though far more than he bargained for I don't condone the hacking or physical threats, but if you insult entire segments of a community you are trying to SELL to, that's going to backfire.

But, back to the point. For a long while, I've been avoiding this, seeing it more as a tempest in a teacup. I've looked up what both ZQ and AS supposedly said about video games. Their comments are not inflammatory, do not demean any individual person or group, and present well-reasoned arguments. If you're looking for a debate that might actually be worth the effort, taking on Sarkeesian's outlook on female tropes, is a title fight. But the gaming community by and large, has actually reverted to a highschool kid sticking a cracked pen into a rival's pants and laughing as the ink stains their clothing. Physical threats because a woman didn't like some of the portrayals of women in gaming? Committing a crime ranging from state to federal level, so you can steal the access to their twitter account or post pics of where they live? And for god's sake, listening to the ramblings of an ex boyfriend as he tars and feathers his former flame, and assuming everything said was 100% genuine?

What on earth is spawning all this vitriol? And more importantly, why are we letting the bottom feeders spewing this nonsense, get the spotlight shined on the gaming community? I have yet to hear anything said or done directly by Quinn or Sarkeesian that actually impacts gaming as a whole. Quinn made a video game, Sarkeesian posted a few Youtube videos. This is not an uncommon occurrence. Why are people so set on bashing these two women?

TLoU is a game that did what few other games did; transition very well from an older console generation, to a newer one. it's a game that people are still praising a year after release. Frankly, it's the best looking game on the PS4 right now, and still one of the most memorable experiences....so why taint that legend with sequel-itis, and turn it into something far less than it was?

Cause you can't feel fear as you realize you maneuvered yourself into a trap. :-)

That is 100% how I feel. Both Sony and MS are trying to innovate their console, in the worst possible ways. Instead of doing things with the consoles themselves, they're doing things on the services the consoles run on. They're not really innovating the X-1 or the PS4, they're innovating Xbox Live and Playstation Plus. For a brief time, almost half a second long, I was actually excited for MS when they announced they were packing a Kinect in with the X-1. I thought that maybe they finally worked out the bugs, and can really soar on motion controls.....then I saw that it was just BUNDLED in, as a stand alone addon. And I knew then that MS was setting early adopters up. Sony, to it's small credit in this regard, DIDN'T try and force the PS Camera into the mix. I'd be PC exclusive for the next ten years if they did. :-)

:-) Well, I wouldn't say that. But, we're getting charged more and more for these consoles, that pretty much look and act the same. Even WITH the exclusives, there's really no way to tell the difference between the PS4 and X-1. It's like trying to compare the NASCAR variants of individual automakers. Whatever positives or negatives each has, a skilled team using the parts, can still put out great effort.

What's interesting, is that in five year's time, all the exclusives, will be out on an open source like Steam or GoG. Whoever has the rights, will sell em off for a quick buck, and whatever exclusivity they had, will be gone. But if the consoles themselves did things different, they'd stand out.

Well, that's just it. Nintendo's a fantastic game maker. I can fault their consoles and peripherals, but even as a Nintendo detractor, I can't really slam their games. All their games, are kind of hamstrung by the fact that they're chained to the Wii/WiiU. Imagine the sales if they went multiplat. As for Sony and MS, without exclusives, they can actually put forth more effort and MONEY, into making their consoles better, cheaper and more engaging. They would have more money to put behind their consoles to make THEM distinct, rather than the games they play being distinct.

@yngsten: "The titles we see at E3 has investors backing them before it hit the fan."

Not true. Well, not exactly true. Yeah, I guess if you're high enough in the investment ladder, you can get the early stuff from some meeting notes or a financial document. But investors outside the company don't have that kind of access. Look at what happened to Microsoft last year. After their announcements at E3, both MS and Gamestop's share price went into freefall over the used game/DRM nonsense. It was just ONE company doing it, but it was bad enough to tank TWO separate stocks. Anyone who was an investor in MS at the time,and knew that announcement was coming, would have been screamin to dump their shares before MS took the floor.

My overall point is this: E3 is where we as gamers, go to get the first glimpse of a few new games, and hopefully get more info about ones in development. Non-gamers, go to Conan and Letterman. They go to Best Buy and Walmart, and ask some clerk who may be stocking PS3, PS4, and X-1 games all in the same column. They don't NEED a games show all their own. And if they do, LET THEM MAKE ONE UP!!! :-) It worked for Gamescon, for PAX twice, and it's worked for Gencon for years,

Alright, we've all seen them by now. The past three to five E3's, feel really weird, at least from the consumer standpoint. We've gotten way less info on games and future gameplay, and instead been given more and more scripted events and pre-generated content for what's "just on the horizon". None of it feels like it's directed at the gaming community at large. Take Watch Dogs for example. I didn't personally get the video issue at first. I was way more interested in the gameplay. Which we didn't get till what, five months before the launch? But the thought of doing a GTA style game, with hacking, was a cool thought for me.

Then I did something really strange. For just a moment, I removed all pre-existing knowledge of gaming. I stopped looking at the Watch Dogs promos from E3's past as a gamer of 30 years+, and just looked at it as a person who might invest some money at a point. And that's when all that vertical slicing, graphical downgrading stuff made sense and would have irked me as an investor. How dare they show an INVESTOR, upgraded, enhanced resolution content for the game!! I expected money to come back to me thanks to the graphics I saw(remember, this isn't a gamer, just an investor)!! I did the same with the X-1's E3 event last year, and Sony's PS4 event this year. They all struck that familiar "This is for people with money to spend on investment, but who know jack about gaming" vibe.

Has E3, an event meant to introduce gamers and the game news services, been sold to investors on the sly? The evidence is certainly stacking up in that direction. Take a friend or relative of yours who knows nothing about gaming. Imagine they hit the Lottery, and ask you for some investment advice while you're watching the past few E3's. Imagine them watching the pre-scripted events, and hearing Microsoft and Sony crowing over TV integration into consoles. Then tell me they wouldn't be looking for a few stocks to buy.

What scares me, is what this means for future E3's. It doesn't just mean more scripted content. It means more layman content. More graphic slices, more enhanced pre-generated gameplay footage. More long-winded speeches by executives who should be speaking to an investor's convention rather than a gaming convention. Worse, as E3's significance diminishes because of these tactics, it'll spread further out to PAX, Gamescon and other events.

I'm gonna call Sunset Overdrive as an example. They didn't even have a dog in the fight; they already had the ability for people to play as females if they chose. But it wasn't till Ubisoft stuck it's foot in it's mouth, that they had to "put out a press release" letting everyone know that you could.

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I grew up with two of the most iconic female characters ever. Two women who didn't even NEED to be trained soldiers, to throw down and show that anyone can step up and do something great. And from Chun Li to Lara Croft, I haven't ever seen a decline in solid female heroines that ONLY add eye candy to a show, game or movie. A bad character, is just as irrespective of a gender, as a good one. Frankly, I consider it almost insulting to think that, if the game CAN support a woman in the role, if it ISN'T written specifically for a guy, they should be excluded to save money.