LogFAQs > #913813842

such things are hard to explain as
1) in most arguments, each faction has a different narrative resulting in a disagreement as to what the disagreement about
2) Gamergate was not about 1 thing but a mixture

as far as I can tell the three main threads are

1) a jealous es-boyfriend claims a female developer has been having sex with game journalists for good reviews.
investigations confirmed she was in a relaionship with one game journalist but he hadn't written a review of her game suggesting they were having sex each other because they wanted to have sex with each other.
Many Gamegater's did not want to object to 2 adults in a consensual sexual relationship so looked for something else to campaign about.
Some called for Game Journalists to avoid the appearance of corruption by declaring whether they have any personal interest in a game (through crowd-funding, etc). Whether there actually was a problem to be fixed is unclear. It is extremely unlikely that any game journalist ever had sex in return for a good review.

2) for years, maybe decades, game journalism has had some corruption, in that game publishers have been giving the publishers of game journalism exclusive coverage, etc in return for a positive coverage and threatening to withdraw advertising if they received negative coverage.
As a result, game journalists were required by their publishers to inflate scores and be positive and not voice their actual opinions. Some (possibly many) game journalists felt frustrated by this but had to follow their publisher's rules or they wouldn't get published and wouldn't get paid.
Then the game industry decided that the journalists didn't matter so much and stopped pressuring their publishers and instead offered you-tubers early access in return for positive coverage.
This meant that journalists were no longer forced to be shills and started expressing their opinions.
Many gamers hated this - some did not understand that a journalists opinion was just an opinion and became offended by their interpretations of what the journalists.
And so many in Gamergate started demanding journalists stop voicing their opinions and go back to how things were before when they were corrupt.
Much of this apparently manifested in harrassment and abuse of women.

3) game journalists started fighting back declaring that they did not want to write for "gamers" who wanted corrupt journalism and harrassed and abused women but instead wanted to write for "game players" who wanted good journalism and didn't harrass and abuse anyone.
misunderstandings and misrepresentations of this followed leading to many joining in to argue without truly understanding what the argument is about.
this was expanded with misunderstandings over what "freedom of speach" is
some Gamergaters tried to "gag" the female journalist who started the fight back (because of her wish to be a proper journalist) by using advertiser pressure and thus restore corruption to games journalism.
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