Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn were meaningless in the grand calculus. They were inflection points in a conflict that was absolutely inevitable. Game journalism and game dev fell prey to the same leftist takeover as academia and corporate HR. Once leftists ascend to the ranks of hiring/firing/promotion, they rapidly transform any organization to become 95%+ leftist. Their complaints about gatekeeping are raw projection; no one gatekeeps harder than leftists.

So Sarkeesian and Quinn might have been the faces of this culture war, but their absence would not have meaningfully changed anything. If not them, it would have been something or someone else. Because ultimately, the ideological divide between game journos/devs and gamers is unsustainable. It’s probably a 40 point gap in terms of political leaning. That’s how far left the game journo/dev industries have become. Sarkeesian’s ideas found purchase because the industry was already saturated with radical feminists. Quinn found total unquestioning loyalty and support for the same reason.

Edit to add: I still contend that Gone Home played a bigger role in triggering gamergate than anything Sarkeesian or Quinn did. The gaming press deliberately misrepresented a walking simulator about lesbians, framing it as a groundbreaking horror game. Gone Home received universal acclaim and strong GOTY support in mainstream media. I still remember buying and playing it on the strong recommendations of basically every available review at the time. The incongruity between those reviews and my experience was an undeniable indicator that something was seriously wrong with game journalism.