Thing is the most aggressive party tends to stand out more.
As for the plot, IRC chats revealed that the guy who started it all was just mad that his ex cheated on him, and as revenge leaked personal details about her to help 4channers develop a conspiracy theory about her sleeping her way to the top of indie gaming. The channers cooperated because they already had a grudge against his ex over prior gaming disputes. Together they discussed how to propagandize the "movement" en masse. When questioned about his support of blatant lies, he basically just said, "well it's the type of thing she would do."
So yeah I don't deny that the core premise of GG was fradulent, ill-intentioned, and not about gaming journalism. At best, the original GG supporters were too quick to grow outraged over unverified rumors. The media was right on that end.
Unfortunately though the IRC logs released over a week after the 14 article dump against gamers, so people were too offended by that point to account for the fact that GG was indeed originally a smear campaign. Newer GGers had jumped onboard over behavior they saw with their own eyes (tons of journos from different publications coordinating in their own private chats about how to shape the narratives of the gaming community). It's just a bad case of miscommunication.
There was a subset of gamers attacking people out of sexist paranoia and/or opposition to calls for diversification/cultural progressivism in gaming. But there was another subset that denounced the prior groups, but still felt they didn't represent vocal gamers as a whole and that their presence didn't justify calling out the whole gaming community.
Yet people lumped the latter in with the former simply for standing up for "gamers" in general, despite them not actually spreading any hate themselves. And to some gamers that felt like people genuinely throwing their "livelihoods" under the bus to make a social statement, and/or simply looking for an excuse to start bullying gamers as a group again.
A better method would've been cooperating with the good gamers to alienate the bad gamers. Focusing specifically on the toxic gamers allows others to feel like they're not being attacked.
There's no real way to know. I'd guess a minority, naturally. I don't mean to claim most GGers were good, just that some portion probably was and took an excessive amount of heat.
I disagree strongly with some of this but fair enough. However, this is all very different from saying gamers were leftist until those mean ole journalists turned them into Nazi-wazis.
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I gotta be righteous, I gotta be me, I gotta be conscious, I gotta be free, I gotta be able, I gotta attack, I gotta be stable, I gotta be black.