Imagine being an independent political journalist based in Washington, D.C. in 1973, and not one of your news stories is related to the Watergate scandal. That would be irresponsible at best and outrageous at worst. Something similar is going on with many news outlets in the video game industry in 2024. Strangely enough, there are some video-based news outlets and prolific YouTubers who are failing to report on the Sweet Baby Inc. AKA Gamergate 2.0 scandal that has rocked the gaming community
Perhaps the most prolific of these organizations is Bellular Gaming which is run by a man named Michael Bell. This Belfast-based journalist is also a game designer who recently released a video game entitled The Pale Beyond. By most accounts, this game looks to be very good and has a very positive rating on Steam. Bellular Gaming is quite lucky because for some reason the game has a very lengthy Wikipedia article.
A few days ago Michael Bell of Belluar Gaming YouTube channel published a video about job losses at Kotaku.
After watching the video, I believe Michael is out of touch with gamers and instead sides with journalists. The video is a love letter to Kotaku. He ignores the elephant in the room that video game journalists have been infiltrated by identity politics idealolgy. Bells avoids mentioning that woke-obsessed Kotaku has brought this destruction upon itself and pads his video with all kinds of bafflegab to try to bamboozle his viewers but this time, they were not fooled.
Not once did he mention that Kotaku has been embroiled in the Sweet Baby Inc. fiasco. He didn’t bring up the fact that Kotaku is more interested in promoting radical leftist idealogy and despises the biggest gaming demographic: straight white male gamers. He also failed to disclose that Kotaku’s ace reporter former sex worker Allysa Mercante has behaved shamefully on X and even tried to dox Sweet Baby Inc. Detected Discord members.
Even his loyal fans have been shocked by Bell’s one-sided, tone-deaf narrative. Read the comments on the above YouTube video to see for yourself. The video is being ratioed with far more dislikes than likes:
For the past 14 years, Kotaku has been in the vanguard of pushing identity politics on their readers. They were unabashedly anti-Gamergate and took the side of the subversives and malcontents who hate white male straight gamers.
Since then, Kotaku which is supposed to be reporting on video games, has embraced and promoted every kind of degeneracy and radical left-wing cause that the world has come to know as wokeness.
Trying to talk about the state of journalism in 2024 without mentioning Kotaku’s simping for Sweet Baby Inc. is like trying to explain the Great Depression of the 1930s without talking about the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929. It’s negligent and irresponsible. It is inconceivable that Michael Bell does not know about the Sweet Baby Inc. scandal. The only logical conclusion is that this is a willful omission on his part.
Why would Michael Bell and Belluar Gaming not choose not to discuss the biggest story to hit the video game in years — the Sweet Baby Inc. Gamergate 2.0 scandal — in this video and their regular news coverage?
About a week ago, I tweeted my concern about the lack of coverage that major YouTubers had given to this scandal as a reply to one of Mark Kern’s Tweets:
A few days later, it came to my attention via a tweet from @Cyael on X, that an indie gaming company called Fellow Traveller Games published Belluar Gaming’s The Pale Beyond:
Interestingly enough, the term fellow traveler has long been used to describe people who are politically aligned with Marxists and communists. The term was first used by an infamous Marxist named Leon Trotsky in 1925.
It was also revealed on X that Fellow Traveler has utilized the services of none other than Sweet Baby Inc. the company that is at the center of the biggest scandal to rock the video game industry in recent memory.
Here’s a video from their YouTube Channel where Fellow Traveller’s Mohammad Fahmi is interviewing Kim Belair from Sweet Baby Inc.:
It is not clear if SBI was hired to consult with Belluar Games on The Pale Beyond.
Conclusion
Given the fact that SBI has done work for Fellow Traveller Games that published Belluar Gaming’s The Pale Beyond, it is reasonable to assume that Bell didn’t want to rock the boat by reporting on the SBI scandal. If he did report on it, it might be potentially embarrassing for his publisher because then their relationship with SBI might be revealed and they might be the target of a financially devasting gamer boycott.
The fundamental problem here is that Belluar Gaming is both a video game developer and a news outlet. Making video games is hard. I get it. I appreciate that Michael Bell and his studio are trying to earn a living and continue to develop video games and the revenue from their news division helps finance their game development operations. However, there is a conflict of interest here in that they are purporting to be an objective news outlet that requires the trust of their viewers to be successful and they also have an important business relationship with Fellow Traveller. It looks very clear which relationship Bellular Games decided to put first.
Long before this new incident, I noticed a pattern that Bellular Gaming has been seemingly unconcerned about the encroachment of neo-Marxist DEI ideology into video games. Bell is a World of Warcraft expert but to my knowledge has never spoken out against Blizzard Entertainment’s total capitulation to this radical leftist ideology both in their hiring and in the content of their video games.
Even Asmongold has seen the writing on the wall and also put out a long-winded video where he also talks about the death of video game journalism.
He finally mentions Gamergate as being the start of the lack of trust between gamers and the press. For me, this is too little, too late. He knew all along but now that video game journalism is visibly dying he feels it’s okay to jump on the bandwagon and mention Gamergate.
Asmongold and Bell have a lot of clout. They could have used their street cred to stand up for gamers and condemn the ideological takeover of the industry, but they took the cowardly way out and remained silent. But they miscalculated and this time the elephant was too big, and went on a rampage and everyone noticed.
I called out Michael Bell on X for this:
The gamer community has been attacked on all fronts for the last 10 years. Politicians have contempt for gamers, conservative pundits like Matt Walsh have contempt for gamers, the feminist industrial complex has contempt for gamers, and woke studios and their employees have contempt for gamers. The one group of people that is supposed to be looking out for gamers has completely abandoned them: the journalists.
All gamers want is good games and to be left alone. They don’t want your political and social agenda shoved down their throats. If you can’t fathom that basic truth and respect gamers by making good games again, you need to get the hell out of the video game industry and find another line of work.
You cannot bite the hand that feeds indefinitely without facing consequences.
Gamers are sick and tired of being abused by all of them. If this industry has any hope of being fixed, it’s time for a zero-tolerance policy toward the nihilists and Marxists who want to hijack our hobby. To this end, the purge of corrupt journalists cannot happen soon enough.
–Wolfshead
Journalism followed Games Journalism into the dependency on developers to get access and infos, for journalists it was usually more securing funds from this or that NGO or the state itself in some countries.
Bloggers and later Influencers also too often got compromised by now.
Bellular, however, that FELLOW TRAVELER thing… would not have expected that. Virtue signaling communism or a real believer?
Too many people compromise their personal integrity for money or other advantages, or just to not get cancelled. The left created a strong urge to go with the flow, starting with their ongoing infestation of institutions.
For instance, I was shocked when a respected former professor of mine suddenly had a totally off and very woke topic in his retirement speech. I guess it was to secure the future funding of his now fully degenerated and woke faculty, now lead by a female Marxist.
Sorry, not sorry to say: People must feel it is not okay what they are doing. Even if it means they will hate me for causing them discomfort by calling them out. This is nothing compared what leftists do to people going against their grain and politics, after all.
I don’t play WoW anymore and didn’t watch Asmongold and Bellular in a long time. The sad thing is still too many people do. They are getting fed garbage while Gamergate 2 is about, after all.
I hope Michael Bell learned an important lesson in all of this. A person is nothing without their credibility.
He knew full what was going on in the industry with regard to the ideological infiltration but failed to report it. Many other YouTubers did the same as he did and they should all be held accountable for it.
Cowardice from journalists and pundits contributes to bad games.
This is why I keep telling people over and over, and my kids, to stop idolizing youtubers and the like. They do not care about you or great causes and 99% of the time are pos people in real life. They only care about making money and being on the side of whatever makes them the most money or fans. I never could stand asmon or any of the popular streamers/gamer youtubers like drdisrespect, ninja, pokieman, etc etc etc. They ignore the truth, reality and like you said, sidestep on any issue they see as hitting their wallets, while advocating the most disgusting ideals and morals.
Sidenote: Since I am realtively new and can’t comment on old articles, I am still saddened about Lord Of The Rings Online and what they are doing to that game. I quit when they announced the changes after playing since beta. It was tough. I even signed your petition, though I know nothing will change.
You are spot on about YouTubers. They are in it for the money. YouTube is very strict on what you can and can’t say. They are completely captured by the wokesters. Most YouTubers have no scruples at all.
Regarding Lord of the Rings Online, I can guarantee you that the decision to put African and Asian avatars came from Daybreak Games so they could bump up their ESG scores. They spit on the memory of Tolkien. Absolutely nobody wanted that at all, but they did it anyways.
I’m hoping that the new Amazon Lord of the Rings MMOPRG will blow LOTRO out of the water. I sure hope Amazon learned their lesson from the Rings of Power debacle.
I wish to see more journalists to say it straight – they are ruining games, movies and TV series with toxic woke LGHDTV+ propaganda to the point where there is almost nothing for normal people to enjoy. I’m reminded of two pictures I posted on my Steam profile as artworks:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3162081581
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3162081286
The new Amazon Middle Earth MMO will be worse than LOTRO, because it won’t even have genders. This will be where I will decide if I will ever taint my storage units with it or not. Second stage is if women can have beards, if it passes this, I will play until I see something woke and disgusting in-game or lore-unfriendly, like the Rings of Power and quit.