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Has #GamerGate 2.0 Begun? Bizarre Clash Over Sick Fetish Videogames Wrecks ‘Games Journalism’ Site Waypoint

Posted on | July 27, 2025 | 1 Comment

Like the original #GamerGate, this is a complex story, involving (a) a feminist anti-porn censorship campaign, (b) online payment processors, (c) producers of videogames with content so disgusting I don’t want to describe it, and (d) the staff of a videogame review website associated with Vice Media. In case you didn’t realize it, Vice declared bankruptcy last year and its main websites were taken over by a Nashville-based company called Savage Ventures. One of the “verticals” (i.e., affiliated sites) that Vice rebooted under the new ownership was the videogame-focused site Waypoint. Among the writers who contributed frequently to Waypoint was a transgender who calls himself “Ana Valens.”

Phil Wythe, a/k/a “Ana Valens”

You will not be surprised to learn that Phil/“Ana” has his/“her” own lolcow thread at KiwiFarms, which is where I learned about this controversy. Honestly, the KiwiFarmers provide such a unique public service — dead-naming trannies, etc. — that it should be considered eligible for 501(c)3 tax-exempt charity status, but I digress . . .

So I was at KF looking for background on a completely different story when I saw this headline: “Ana Valens, notable transgender rape enthusiast and author, has had their articles removed from Vice after condemning payment processors compelling Steam to remove a collection of incest and rape games.” What the actual . . . ?

OK, several years ago, Australian feminist Melinda Tankard Reist started an organization known as Collective Shout:

Collective Shout, among other activist and government groups, criticized Valve and its Steam storefront for allowing the release of the video game No Mercy in April 2025, which the group described as a “rape simulation game”, leading to Valve removing the game from Steam. In the wake of discovering No Mercy, Collective Shout identified hundreds of games on Steam that appeared in searches for the term “rape”, or otherwise contained themes of incest, sexual violence, and/or child abuse. By July 2025, Collective Shout launched an open letter campaign “demanding credit card companies and PayPal block payments” for games on Steam and Itch.io.

This is where Phil/“Ana” enters the story:

Following the Steam game removals, Vice[dot]com reporter Ana Valens wrote about the group’s claim for responsibility, saying the group had retweeted a trans-exclusionary radical feminist who claimed that “pervert nerds are responsible for most of society’s ills,” and expressed doubts that the games targeted actually depicted child abuse. In a follow-up article, Valens . . . accused the group of “targeting popular video games that depict children in scenarios where they face distress or harm — even if these depictions are intended to encourage concern and care in the player.” . . . Both articles were subsequently pulled by Vice[dot]com’s operator Savage Ventures due to “concerns about the controversial subject matter”, followed by the stepping down of Valens and multiple coworkers from the website.

The offending TERF, by the way, was Meghan Murphy:

Whatever your opinion of “pervert nerds,” notice that what outraged Phil/“Ana” was that Collective Shout had retweeted a TERF (i.e., a feminist who doesn’t play along with tranny delusions). So while Phil/“Ana” claims to be against censorship, he/“she” is totally in favor of censoring anyone who disagrees with him/“her.” In other words, Phil/“Ana” poses as a courageous free speech activist when the issue at hand is videogames depicting the rape of children, but advocates censorship if anyone says anything that might hurt a tranny’s feelings.

The website Aftermath reports:

Valens told Aftermath she was informed by Waypoint managing editor Dwayne Jenkins Sunday morning [July 20] that leadership at Savage Ventures had ordered Jenkins to remove the articles; Valens informed Jenkins that she would quit her Waypoint contributing role if this happened and, once it did, announced her departure. . . .
Valens discussed the situation further in a Twitch stream Sunday morning, in which she claimed that Savage Ventures had previously worried about how Waypoint articles covering sexual or political topics might affect the site’s performance on Google. Valens said on stream that “I’ve been told very specifically with a number of articles that it’s an issue with… Google, Google overlords. We actually had to fight very hard to keep some of our more politically-oriented VTuber coverage up because [Savage Ventures] were nervous it was going to be too R-rated for Google… I was told especially [of issues with] Google Discover.” . . .
Following Valens’ announcement that she was leaving Waypoint, she posted on Bluesky that “Savage Ventures requested I no longer contribute to VICE… several hours after my announcement.” Later on Sunday, Waypoint writers Shaun Cichacki and Matt Vatankhah both announced they were quitting the site. “I can’t sit back and watch Savage Ventures silence Ana and stifle actual journalism out of fear of being ‘too controversial,’” wrote Vatankhah, while Cichacki wrote that “I cannot stand by and watch [Valens] be censored for doing her job and doing it properly.” . . .
On Monday, managing editor Dwayne Jenkins also quit Waypoint . . .
In further conversation with Aftermath, Jenkins said that, following the resignations of Valens, Cichacki, and Vatankhah, it felt challenging to stay at the site. He messaged his boss to resign, offering to stay on until the end of the month, and says that rather than receiving a reply to the message, “my boss gave it the green checkmark emoji, and deactivated all four of our Slack profiles in one fell swoop.”

Recall that the original issue in #GamerGate was “ethics in journalism” after it was discovered that some writers covering the videogames industry might have conflicts of interest (cf., “Can We Ever Forget the Tattoo-Covered, Mentally Ill Ex-Stripper Whose Real Name Is Chelsea Van Valkenburg?”). So what we have here is a controversy that has led to the resignation of the editor and three writers at a games journalism site and what, exactly, is this controversy about? Censorship?

Phil/“Ana” and his/“her” former colleagues at Waypoint aren’t actually anti-censorship. In fact, one of the previous controversies Phil/“Ana” had provoked — in classic psycho-tranny drama queen fashion — involved his/“her” trying to get videogamer Kirsche Verstahl canceled by smearing her as a Nazi. Verstahl responded by hinting at a defamation lawsuit, and the article was taken down. Furthermore, if you dig a bit deeper into the Phil/“Ana” thread at Kiwi farms, you’ll find that he/“she” has frequently been accused of creepy, dishonest or unethical behavior.

What’s really at the core of this drama is “de-banking”:

De-banking, more commonly spelled debanking, also known within the banking industry as de-risking, is the closure of people’s or organizations’ bank accounts by banks that perceive the account holders to pose a financial, legal, regulatory, or reputational risk to the bank. . . .
The closure of accounts is generally performed without giving a reason and without the prospect of appeal. De-banking can have severe consequences for individuals, as it cuts them off from many activities in society.

The Biden administration was accused of using de-banking as a weapon against its perceived political enemies. It appears that what the feminists at Collective Shout have done is to pressure online gaming platforms with the threat of de-banking if those platforms host games with content that the feminists find objectionable. While I certainly would oppose allowing feminists to censor anything that offends them — because let’s face it, they’re very easily offended — some of this stuff is so vile that its existence might very well be criminal. Pornography is addictive and, as with drug addiction, there is the problem of tolerance, where the addict requires more, more, more to get the same high. When Melinda Tankard Reist refers to the target audience of such videogames as “porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists,” she’s not exaggerating in the least.

What has apparently happened is that pornography addiction has seeped into videogame culture, and this has created a market demand for games featuring bizarre fetish content. The threat of “de-banking” inspired panic among the consumers of such products, and Phil/“Ana” quit his/“her” gig at Waypoint (ultimately wrecked the site, with most of the staff resigning in solidarity) because he/“she” was prevented from using Waypoint as a platform for a crusade on behalf of “porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists.” And all this I learned because of KiwiFarms.

Two cheers for this feminist victory — as previously noted, I’m hesitant to endorse a standard where feminists wield the power to censor anything they deem offensive, even though I agree with them on this particular matter. But somehow I suspect we have not heard the end of this. The “porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists” are nothing if not persistent, and the weird drama that wrecked Waypoint is likely to continue playing out in other venues. Stay tuned . . .



 

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Category: Feminism, Journalism, The Transgender Cult

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One Response to “Has #GamerGate 2.0 Begun? Bizarre Clash Over Sick Fetish Videogames Wrecks ‘Games Journalism’ Site Waypoint”

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