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.
