It upended the industry in 2012, in a way in which it never fully recovered.

>>715985140 (OP)
Zillenial born in 2002 here. 2005 to 2011 was the golden era, I don't know if it was the end of the world prediction, Obama winning reelection or Mass Effect 3 ending, but something changed in 2012.

It lead to GamerGate which lead to Trump winning which lead to an attempted insurrection against the United States itself

Luckily patriots both back in 2012 and 2021 stopped them

i can never tell if these threads are genuine or a rehearsal of ancient internet lore

>>715985218
I was a 93'er and it feels like it.
2012 wasn't Gamergate, but several wokies have called Mass Effect 3 the "pre-gamergate" event, because it was the first game, along with Dragon Age 2, to be confronted by a troll-brigade from 4chan based on a smaller but more genuine internal criticism.

And that snowballed enough so they had to address it just to stop the loudness of it.

But it also felt like the big change because this was one of the first times they started taking the whole "are games ART?" too seriously, trying to make the story seem more artistic than the previous ones, and trying too hard to make the plot "more, real" or something, and simultaneously it was among the first batch of huge releases that started really fucking over the consumer with bad DLC practices. It wasn't microtransaction slop, but it was getting there, and just 2 years after Bungie, the people that were supposed to make something like Halo 3, made Destiny, a game that just blatantly ripped off the consumer, and everyone loved it for some reason.

>In 3 years motherfuckers that were born after Mass Effect 2 will be 18