It is with heavy heart that I bring you this news: Reaxxion, the dopey video game site that racist skeezeball PUA and rape legalization proponent Roosh V set up at the height of #Gamergate, has been shut down.
Wait, did I say “with heavy heart?” I meant AH HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Anyhoo, so earlier today, Roosh broke the heart of dozens of readers by announcing that Reaxxion, his opportunistic and ill-concieved attempt to cash in on #Gamergate, would be no more.
I’ve decided to close Reaxxion after approximately nine months of operation. Traffic has not grown to a level that allows the site to financially sustain itself. We have not been able to consistently surpass 250,000 page views a month.
I take full blame for the site’s commercial failure. The writers and editor did a great job trying to achieve my vision of what Reaxxion should be, but in spite of that, the growth did not occur. I attribute this failure to creating the site from a spontaneous idea (in response to gamergate) instead of developing it organically based on an actual need. The fact the gamergate continues to be successful and influential in other communities shows that I did not even provide a substantial need to the audience it was intended for.
(Emphasis mine.)
Setting aside Roosh’s painfully inept writing — you don’t provide needs, you repugnant doofus, you fill them — I will grant him a few points for at least admitting his failure here; others in the extended manosphere, well, let’s jsut say they aren’t so good at this.
The “editor” in question is the lovely and talented Matt Forney; the loss of this “job” will presumably enable him to spend more time with his family stewing in his own rancid juices.
If Forney or any of the site’s writers were actually getting paid for this, it’s possible that Roosh lost a not-insignificant amount of money on this attempted cash-grab. (The amount of ad revenue you get for 250k views a month is pretty tiny.) The cloud to this silver lining is that the money Roosh may have lost would have mostly been going to people as shitty as he is.
Let’s look back at some of Reaxxion’s coverage of, er, video games, from the last few months to see what we’ll be missing:
Come to think of it, I think I will miss them!
H/T — @tauriqmoosa, for the tip!
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And in other news, Judgybitch made her new(ish) novel free for Amazon Kindle.
It’s crap, needless to say. Though what surprises me is it’s supposed to be slamming feminism, yet there’s barely a single mention of sexual politics or sexism throughout the book. Unless you read her blog, you’d never guess it was an anti-feminist work.
Apparently her anti-heroine is based on her idea of a typical feminist, yet the character exhibits none of the stereotypes even associated with straw feminists, much less real ones, which suggests she really doesn’t know anything about feminism.
… and nothing of value was lost
you don’t provide needs, you repugnant doofus, you fill them
Or you provide *for*.
Talking of a “need” in this way is pretty basic startup 101 speak. Most startups fail because they don’t have a need for the thing that they offer (which is what Roosh is saying happened here).
Others fail because they don’t have the technical ability to deliver the solution (like, say, Aurini and Owen), or the team falls apart (like, say, Aurini and Owen).
Yup, Capitalism 101 “Make what you can sell; don’t sell what you can make”
Deep freeze dot it. The hit site to expose alleged corruption by journalists. I wouldn’t be surprised to see at least one lawsuit over it.
*ahem*
ATTENTION MAMMOTHEERS:
Feminist Frequency now has a giphy account, and now has two gifs, one featuring Zoe Quinn!
Have fun!
There’s a petition up on change.org to bar Roosh from entering Canada during his “world tour” this summer: https://www.change.org/p/the-government-of-canada-deny-roosh-v-entry-to-canada-for-the-purposes-of-disseminating-hate?recruiter=345701908&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink
Paradoxical Intention. You know, I didn’t even know that was Zoe Quinn! I thought maybe that was her, but didn’t know. I’m not up on her. I can spot Brianna Wu at a hundred yards though. so … whatever that means.
The conversation SargonofAkkad has with someone named Veriloh in a google hangout shows that the core of GG believes that “unethical” is when these game sites support minority indie gamers. In other words the writers on these various game sites have a different worldview than they do. Sargon says gg should be strictly about ethics,, ie journalists should not get money for reviews or have personal relationships with people involved in products they are reviewing and Veriloh argues that NO the ethics fail when these sites write “sjw” viewpoints on their sites. So of course, it’s just all ridiculous. (and never mind the fact that people accused of collusion in many cases have done no such thing, see Jfudge’s blog. )
Many game sites just plain don’t agree with right wing ideology.
Bells have been rung that cannot be unrung. Waaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh
Personally, while I would never read it I’ve got nothing against the idea of having right-wing coverage for video games. I mean, it makes sense that a large number of people who would be so heavily invested in the video gaming industry would not skew that way, but clearly there’s an audience for it.
I just really wish they hadn’t basically ruined every preexisting video-game-coverage website in the furor that was kicked up in the wake of discovering that women enjoy sex, sometimes even with people who are involved in the same or adjacent industries to them.
GamerGate isn’t all that big outside of sites like 8chan and Reddit and Twitter sock puppets. I know a few people who are into games like Call of Duty who don’t even know what GamerGate is.
The “ethics” stuff is another way people say they’re offended by the presence of left wing opinions on game sites. They want either explicitly right wing or Randroid sites or sites with absolutely no content about politics or issues like race and gender.
Negativity gets old REAL fast. It seems Reaxxion is a perfect example of this.
@sn0rkmaiden
That sounds a bit like Jordan Owen’s novel Eros Empire, which he wrote before the Sarkeesian Effect. It’s basically a pretentious Atlas Shrugged-like attack on anti-porn feminism, which he’s apparently been obsessed with for the past five years.
What’s the story about those double Xs, anyway? That just makes me think “xx” chromosome, which, with all the transphobia, *definitely* isn’t what they’re going for. O_o
I guess we’ll never know, now.
This might be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, but Reaxxion sounds more like a gaming site for women, what with the double-X. Too bad the name is ruined now.
Could be a subtle hint that the whole thing was a double cross.
Ironically, this conversation between my sister and I happened when I loaded this site:
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Me: *reads headline of this post to her while laughing*
Sister: Wait, he had a gaming site?
Me: *laughs harder*
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I think that sums it up best.
Whatever “Reaxxion” was supposed to mean, it just made me think “Yes, you are reactionaries, admitting it is the first step to recovery.”
The best part is not that there was much rejoicing, as a muffled “wha?”. I didn’t know the site existed.
Beyond my utter joy at Reaxxion’s failure (not that I knew it was a thing, but still I’m surprisingly happy it’s gone), I have a need to make an observation grounded in economics (why did I need that class? I majored in English and Graphic Design…) and capitalism! If you have a product, it needs to be something for which there is already a need (food, clothing, medicine, entertainments, and apparently toilet paper)… or you’d better have a lot of money to throw at advertising to convince everyone, or at least a segment of the population, that they do have a need for what you’re selling (deodorant, lady’s razors, the entire cosmetics industry).
So, let’s see if we can summarize why Reaxxion got nada:
Why can’t all Star Wars captains be male?
Why can’t games be all about jiggly boobs?
Trans people gender-nonconforming — therefore EEEEEEVIL!
We’re so dim, we can’t even interpret a Nickelodeon show without making it all about our penile insecurities and racism!
We project our Game of Thrones bitterness onto feminists!
Candy Crush Saga OH NOES!!! No jiggly boobs or bang-bang guns! Also, cootie-ridden GIRLS play that!
SJWs make better games than we can, and that makes us scared!
Reaxxion is a site for spectacularly stupid men, and we won’t apologize for that!
And finally, here are our inane projections of what we think our enemies do/think/are. Kindly note that they bear no resemblance to actuality.
Yeah, I can’t imagine why Reaxxion bombed.
PS: Any word on whether Doosh is barred from Canada yet? Or on how his sausage-fest in NY went?
@Mike
Beats me. I’m baffled every time I hear that there are still people identifying as gamergaters.
Zoe Quinn’s always had that lovely lavender hair, that’s how I know it’s her (also I follow her on twitter).
Of course they think that when sites support minority indie gamers it’s unethical, because it’s not about them, the cishet white dudes! And that’s all gaming has always been about, and it should stay that way, because gaming is a cishet white dude safe space! [/sarcasm]
Many actual gaming journalists have said this better than me, but that’s impossible. Journalists need to eat, and that’s their job, so they should be paid for their work, and it’s impossible to not have personal relationships with those in the industry when it’s such a tight-knit place, and there’s common ground. Friends will be made.
The best they can hope for is what we already got: That journalists disclose relationships that they have when they talk about products.
For instance: Jim Sterling talks about how he took part in the game’s production as a voice actor when he talks about The Charnel House Trilogy, and he’ll only talk about that game with that disclaimer.
Of course, it’s required by an already in-place ethical standard when it comes to journalism as a whole, but try to explain that to a GGer.
To say that journalists should be completely separate from the developers of games is nonsense, and it would be nonsense to say that in any other industry as well.
Of course. Because Veriloh thinks that they’re nonsense, and doesn’t want to hear about it, thus, instead of just going “Well, I don’t like it!” and moving on to another site that caters to him, he’s declared it “unethical”, and is trying to rid gaming journalism of all of it.
Everybody sing along, because Reaxxion is going bye-bye
The one regret I have is not being able to laugh at this website for just a wee bit more!
So…they write an article about how feminists must be sad and miserable because they obsess over TV, and then 7 days later they write an article where they obsess over a children’s TV show and try to connect it to their other obsession with cuckolding?
Why is it that dumb people never have a sense of irony?