The Gaming Industry’s Dirty Little Secret

Video games might seem like a fairly apolitical hobby, but conservative gamers are constantly under attack from their own community. It is next to impossible to follow the gaming industry without being bombarded with leftist ideology. Much in the same way that Hollywood is filled with leftists, so is the gaming space.

In 2024, Sweet Baby Inc, whose stated goal was to work with game studios to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, began infiltrating everyday games. The organization worked behind the scenes on at least 30 games, which caused independent YouTuber Kabrutus to curate a list of games it had contributed to so people could boycott them. These games range from the independent scene (Neo Cab, Alan Wake II) to massive AAA games (God of War Ragnarök, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2). Creators such as Geeks + Gamers and HeelsVsBabyface amplified these conversations, with larger-platformed individuals such as Daily Wire host Matt Walsh and Elon Musk even addressing the story.

Two of the top-ranked gaming podcasts, Giant Bomb and Kinda Funny, contain, in almost every episode, “Super-Chats” (paid messages sent in by viewers and listeners), comments, or emails that include sentiments such as “f*ck ICE” and “trans rights are human rights.” Near the opening of the March 25 episode of Kinda Funny’s daily gaming news show, the hosts proudly tell those who are vaccine-hesitant to “get f*cked.” These podcasts aren’t alone in their leftism. They are the norm.

The message from gaming news outlets to podcasts to studios is clear: If you don’t conform, we’re not interested in you.

Are you someone who doesn’t orient your whole personality around the Jews? For a period of time in 2025, it was nearly impossible to hear about XBOX gaming news without getting a lecture on the BDS movement. Gaming media writers were conflicted over whether it was OK to cover XBOX because it was owned by Microsoft, which happened to be “partnered” with the state of Israel. Their statement was “genocide is not a game.”

Are you a believer in capitalism? The gaming press has a lot to say about that. Here is a Polygon piece using Animal Crossing to support Marxism. A more recent Gamespot feature contrasts Animal Crossing with the new game Pokopia to praise its non-capitalist structure. An author at Kotaku wrote this article to blame the video game industry crash of 1983 on capitalism. Here is a listicle from TheGamer of the top 10 “Best Games With Anti-Capitalist Themes.”

Yes, even presumably capitalist companies that exist and thrive solely because of that system will create games that resonate with the gaming press. The recent viral news of XBOX implementing sizable layoffs elicited incessant vitriol at for-profit companies that prioritize maximum growth. Jason Schreier, Bloomberg’s video game industry reporter, said of XBOX on the Triple Click podcast, “I think I believe pretty strongly that there should be a cap on the amount of money that a person can have.” Senator Bernie Sanders stepped into the conversation to criticize “trickle-down economics,” and many outlets were quick to amplify his statements. It seems impossible to listen to breakdowns of that story without relentless anti-free market tirades.

Were you one of the millions of people who voted for President Donald Trump in 2024? The gaming industry despises this man and his supporters. During the 2016 election season, the founder of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, one of the modern progenitors of the VR headset, was essentially forced out of his company when it was discovered he had donated money to a pro-Trump organization. Scott Cawthon, the developer of the wildly successful Five Nights at Freddy’s, was made to apologize and ultimately retired from public game development for the same reason.

Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), one of the creators of what would become the modern independent game revolution, became a target this year after his right-of-center political views were used to attack him. In 2025, 1047 Games cofounder Ian Proulx took heated criticism for wearing a hat that read “Make FPS [First-Person Shooters] Great Again” because it was evocative of the “Make America Great Again” slogan.

Despite all this, everyday gamers aren’t all on board. Gaming journalism clashed with player-bases in 2023 during the release of Hogwarts Legacy. The game was based in the world of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter,” but Rowling’s stance against transgenderism had left many on the Left struggling with whether or not they could continue to enjoy her work. Unsurprisingly, the attempted boycott failed miserably, and Hogwarts Legacy continues even now to sell in massive numbers.

Hogwarts Legacy’s afterlife tells the story of a boycott campaign, amplified across gaming media, failing to make a dent in sales. There’s a gap between what gaming coverage insists its audience believes and what that audience actually does with its money. That gap almost certainly exists across the entire relationship between the gaming press and the people who actually play games. Are the tens of millions of people who buy Call of Duty every year made up entirely of anti-gun, anti-military liberals?

For clear proof that people want alternative takes, look no further than Asmongold. He’s a Twitch streamer who averages tens of thousands of concurrent viewers per stream and has drawn peak crowds north of 450,000 people watching concurrently, making him one of the platform’s most-watched channels. He plays a number of popular games and reacts to gaming controversies as they arise.

When Obsidian Entertainment’s Avowed art director posted that the industry had “too many crusty white dudes” who needed replacing, Asmongold said what a large chunk of that audience was already thinking: “Total performative bulls***.” That clip went viral in a way gaming journalism could only hope to achieve. The demand for anyone to say the obvious thing about how the industry treats its audience isn’t a hypothetical. What doesn’t exist is anyone doing that with the regularity of the liberal media.

This is where the Right has an opportunity. Conservative pundits almost universally treat video games with contempt. Sometimes they acknowledge that, in moderation, there is nothing wrong with the hobby, but the obvious disdain they have for people who take the gaming industry seriously is clear.

If politics are downstream from culture, conservatives should want to be actively involved in that front of the culture war, not just for engagement on the most recent controversy, but out of interest and principle. Movie reviews from conservatives are valuable and rightfully sought out.

Gaming pulled in roughly $190 billion worldwide in 2025, dwarfing the global box office‘s roughly $33 billion by a factor of five or six. Treating the largest entertainment industry on the planet as beneath serious attention is a poor strategic choice.

The demand is there. The supply isn’t. The Left runs the industry and never misses a chance to remind you of it. Tens of millions of people just want to follow video game news without a Marxist undertone, but nobody is serving them.

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