Originally a comment by Marcus Ranum on Don’t change a god damn thing.
Nobody is immune to critique.
Ultimately, if they don’t respond to critique, the “invisible hand of the market” may correct them, anyway. Don’t anyone break it to the gamer geeks but half the gamers in the world are women, now. Sure, there is a smaller market for ‘hard core’ (i.e.: guy) gamers but it risks being marginalized out of the mainstream, which will mean that those games won’t be very well-funded or good. Sort of like how cis porn split off from the Hollywood mainstream and maintained its ‘independence’ in return for acquiring an unenviable cachet.
I thought these guys liked the “invisible hand of the market” since so many of them are libertarians!? Candy Crush has 93 million people playing it every day – a bit more than half of which are women. 8 million people play Farmville. Those are big numbers. They’re right up there with big ‘hard core gamer’ franchises like Call of Duty (100 million) and then there are the mega-game franchises like World of Warcraft that held 12-20 million gamers for 12 years paying $15/month. The point is that it doesn’t matter at all what the gamergaters think: the market is going to change in spite of them; they are nothing but the sound of defeat.
Interestingly, Vox Day appears to have decided to savor defeat on two fronts: feminism in gaming and feminism in science fiction — both markets that are undergoing inexorable change at the hand of the libertarians’ own god. It’s the invisible hand of the market slapping them; the same hand they kiss so fervently.