I think gaming is too mainstream like television/movie viewers to lump it into some type of niche group/activity these days. Especially with the increased communication and connectivity that the internet provides that brings all sorts of wanted and unwanted people together.

I'm someone who enjoys gaming, and when I play games like The Finals these days I disable chat/voice because most people are assholes. Game previously didn't have chat and enabling that turned it from what felt like a wholesome community because I wasn't exposed to their thoughts to it breaking the illusion when they were able to express themselves.

I think this is more a more broad societal issue and a worrying one of being shown what people truly think. Even a minority is a huge amount when the population is billions, so a lot of damage can be done. Games is just another avenue they choose to be toxic in along side other vehicles provided to communicate their thoughts.

This broad dynamic isn't new and it isn't unique either to gaming or to men. Every single creative volunteer community on the net is filled with assholes and drama llamas, of any and all genders. It's just the nature of the thing. You see the same things over and over with game modding, cracking, romhacking, emulation, manga scanlation, anime fansubbing, vocaloid production, mmd modeling, fanfic, fanart, and so on and on.

People often (generally?) are willing to invest the time and energy into whatever it is that they're going to post online at least in large part because they crave the attention they hope it will bring, and specifically, they want to be lauded for their talent and skill.

And that often runs up against the fact that an awful lot of the responses they're going to get are going to come from self-absorbed and entitled assholes bitching because they don't like whatever it is that they're getting for free, and think they have to be accommodated.

And very often, the response from the creator, unsurprisingly really, is to effectively (or even literally) say, "Fine then - fuck you all. I'm done."

And 'round and 'round it goes, and has from the start, and likely will never stop. It's just an unfortunate but pretty much inevitable clash between a personality type that's likely to create and share something online for free and a personality type that's likely to comment on something somebody else created and shared with them for free.

i’m sorry that you have to deal with the outfall of this, OP. gamers are notoriously the most overly sensitive group to generalize, even when they’re meant to think “i recognize that this is pointing out bad apples in my community”. instead, they immediately start defending themselves as if you specifically named them

the sane response is to go “wow that is awful. the gaming community does indeed contain some terrible people, i am glad to be one of the good ones and will distance myself from this behavior”

Man, gaming communities are so fucking toxic.

Thousands of hours, months of hard work. For about 300 bucks and a bunch of incels doxxing and harassing her.

I cannot fathom why she left.

Incels/"gamers" harassing a woman - shocker.

It is bad enough having gamers online foaming at the mouth like you just stabbed their mom when you make a mistake in a group.