Seeing the smear campaign against anyone who dared say "Hey, Anita Sarkisian seems to not be into games and is just making money complaining" was the first look at this door. Sure, getting down at someone making a web show that was completely different from everyone else, and people saying "Wait, but aren't games supposed to be art?" was a plausable thing.

But the universal tactical nuke against the general concept of people who like videogames, because a few people paid to write videogames porked some shitty developer, and the rapid discovery on just how deep the rabbit hole... It's hard to imagine, but back then, games journalism was still passable. "This game we got paid to play early is a 8.5/10, cool game!" Partially because video games still were fun and about the games themselves. It was starting to be 60% multiplayer, and getting a bit concerning, but there was still enough good games to hoist game journalism. And then it was like a switch was flipped. Games couldn't be fun, MTX for all, pieces of crap had to make up 70% of the roster and blue hairs outnumbered the old wizards of coding 9-1.