Dear Noah Cole,

    I’d like to take a minute to talk to you about Autodesk’s continued advertising on Gamasutra.com. Gamesutra.com is a website whose primary audience is game developers and gamers in general. I have some grave concerns regarding the site and I, among others, will not be going back to Gamasutra as a result of how the site and its staff treat its audience. I’d like to share with you why I do not believe it to be in your best interests to continue running advertisements on Gamasutra.
   Gamasutra has proven very antagonistic to gamers, its core demographic, with articles such as “'Gamers' don't have to be your audience. 'Gamers' are over.” by Leigh Alexander (https://archive.today/l1kTW), which broadly paints a large, diverse group of gamers all as “these obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers”. Needless to say, attacking your primary demographic is a very poor decision and won’t turn out well for you. This is evidenced by the tremendous drop in traffic to Gamasutra since #GamerGate began in response to these attacks on gamers (http://i.imgur.com/JScbNnU.png). I’ll touch more on GamerGate in the second paragraph. Leigh Alexander is not limited to attacking gamers on Gamasutra, either. Her Twitter feed is filled with all sorts of abusive, man-hating, and downright racist tweets. Some examples: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/By6VmThIcAA8Evd.png:large, a blatantly racist statement against black people; https://archive.today/cjyTj, in which she threatens to use her clout to ‘make an example’ of someone disagreeing with her; https://archive.today/CmkHy, in which she doxxes (outs the personal information of someone to the public) someone for trying to have a calm discussion with her about her article attacking gamers; http://theralphretort.com/wp-content/uploads/poooooorleigh.jpg where she again flagrantly attacks gamers; and http://i.imgur.com/TFLkPGb.jpg?1 where she threatens to end the careers of aspiring male games journalists. Leigh Alexander is not only out of touch with her audience but she’s also out of touch with basic human morals and through it all not once has Gamasutra done anything to discipline her awful behavior.
    GamerGate is, simply put, a consumer revolt against corruption in the games industry, particularly in games journalism. Zoe Quinn, an independent game developer, was revealed to have traded sex for positive video game coverage for her games. Shortly after, #GamerGate began on Twitter on the 27th of August to call attention to the gross ethical standards in our games media. Shortly after this, games media decided to take action. Within 24 hours of each other, 13 different articles all came out across multiple websites all decrying the same message: Gamers are dead. “Gamer” as a term is interchangeable with “misogynist”. We didn’t really care for this kind of treatment. Any time a GamerGate-related article or video springs up anywhere on Reddit, it’s taken down and people being shadowbanned left and right for posting about it. Over 25,000 comments were deleted in a single day (http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2dz0gs/totalbiscuit_discusses_the_state_of_games/). Zoe denounces a group by the name of The Fine Young Capitalists, which is a feminist organization dedicated to getting more women involved in game development, and then gets its IndieGogo campaign shut down falsely. No major games media site reported on this. Zoe launched a similar game jam to TFYC and instantly gets coverage from multiple sites (http://apgnation.com/archives/2014/09/09/6977/truth-gaming-interview-fine-young-capitalists). Eventually, GamerGate uncovers something we’ve suspected for a long time: games journalists have had a secret mailing list, GameJournoPros, for a while now where they discuss which events they’ll cover and which events they’ll cover up and ignore, thus controlling the narrative and public opinion (http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/17/Exposed-the-secret-mailing-list-of-the-gaming-journalism-elite). This perfectly explains why those 13 articles smearing gamers came out in that 24 hour period and why nobody is covering pro-GamerGate events like TFYC’s IndieGogo being restored and subsequently funded. Multiple journalists for Gamasutra are present on the list of participants in the journalism conspiracy (http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/21/GameJournoPros-we-reveal-every-journalist-on-the-list). Us gamers don’t like that there’s a massive narrative being painted across most sites that states we’re all “misogynerds” and terrible people, and Gamasutra is very much a part of this.