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Drama Brandon Orselli & Niche Gamer: A tale of cowardice, negligence and One Angry Revolt.

Thread Description
A personal tale of a long-time Niche Gamer reader's interactions with founder Brandon Orselli.

Ebicentre

varishangout.com
Regular
Up until the recent debacle with Niche Gamer's Tyler Valle and Jonathan White attacking their audience (including yours truly) over the USA v.s. LGBT flag mods for Insomniac's Spider-Man, I was an avid reader of the website since 2015. This was shortly after GamerGate helped me leave feminism and open my eyes to the left-wing, ideological invasion of hobbyist communities, especially gaming and anime. I frequently posted comments both on Niche Gamer and One Angry Gamer (I wrote two articles for OAG, but I can't find their archives anymore), expressing my discontent with the censorship and appeasements made by companies under the belief that sales would improve and leftist mobs would leave them alone (they didn't). I declare here and now that I'm no longer following Niche Gamer nor Brandon Orselli; I've simply had enough of the nonsense that has been allowed to fester for the past seven years.

Brew a cup and strap in, boys and girls. I have almost one-hundred screenshots of my DMs with Brandon that I wish to share with you all. Six years' worth of back-and-forth chats about comment moderation, potentially hiring me as a writer for Niche Gamer, and sitting on critically important and relevant stories that neither Niche Gamer nor Nicchiban reported on.


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BACKGROUND

Niche Gamer was embroiled in numerous controversies with its audience - the Smug ban, Michael 'you never had sex' Jordan, 'Sophia' Narwitz, the Gematsu plagiarism and now 'FlagGate' - leading some of the die-hards over the years to leave the website for freer ventures. Yet despite all the controversies, I stuck around, even if I didn't comment anymore. I agreed with the readers' complaints over the heavy-handed moderation, and at the time Brandon was sympathetic to these concerns as well as his own. Advertisers and AdSense punished Niche Gamer for its stance on free speech until eventually he relented and started deleting comments. He and his other employees constantly denied responsibility for the deletions and bans, deflecting to the third-party websites Disqus and Insticator as the culprits. I'm sure we all have our doubts about that.

HOW I GOT INVOLVED AND WHY

My first communication with Brandon began when Gal*Gun: Double Peace was removed from store shelves in EB Games Australia, which I personally investigated at the time to find out why. When I found EB Games' CEO on LinkedIn, that was when I asked Brandon to dig deeper if he could.
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Sometime after that was the then recent round of hiring new staff for NG, and I submitted my resumé hoping to get a job. I was of course unsuccessful.
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This is also where we began talking about the forum moderation problem that exploded. In hindsight, I was a lot easier on him than the average NG user for two reasons: I wanted to stay on his good side in hopes of receiving a job offer, and because I wanted NG to be successful from a culture war perspective. I offered suggestions to Brandon about how to make moderation as fair as possible while still acknowledging that such ideas were stupid and unfair - but in the end it didn't matter, as the forums were shut down some time after Smug was banned. This wasn't my proudest moment as someone who believes in free speech, but I was trying to see things from Brandon's perspective at the time.
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The next interaction was in regards to Tekken 7's looming release. There were articles at the time suggesting Katsuhiro Harada had censored his game by not including the kangaroo character Roger due to complaints from animal rights organizations.
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Communication with Brandon was sporadic because at this point he was usually on the ball when it came to breaking stories, so I didn't need to DM him often. I continued to express interest in working for NG even though I was studying full-time at university (I've since graduated). There was also an incident with OAG and KungFuMan that raised an eyebrow, because Brandon at the time was buddy-buddy with the latter for whatever reason while he was going through 'Sophia' Narwitz's hostile takeover and his plagiarism scandal.
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THE STORIES PILED UP

2020 was a bad year for me. One of my cats passed away in January, and right around when Covid restrictions were implemented we saw Australia begin its moral crusade against Japanese media such as No Game No Life. I sent him the stories yet I kept getting no response until the Kiryu Coco/Taiwan controversy. Then OAG's master list for Black Lives Matter came out, events unravelled as they did, and I told Brandon about it. Pay particular attention to the stories I shared about Australia banning light novels and video games, because this will be important later. I ask about sending stories to Ryan Pearson which I recall went nowhere on my part.
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I kept sending stories to Brandon over time and he clearly paid attention, as he mentioned how he 'really should hire' me. He ultimately never went through with this because my resumé was simply not good enough and I had no samples of my journalism he was happy with.
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REMEMBER ETHICS IN GAMING JOURNALISM?

There was an article for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night written by Brandon that I noticed had no disclosure of his status as a Kickstarter backer. He only added it after I brought it up with him. He didn't seem to care all that much about disclosure anymore, as literally today he wrote another article for Bloodstained without disclosing his financial backing.
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SOME STORIES REPORTED ON, OTHERS WEREN'T

I shared more stories with Brandon, but what you'll notice is there are so many censorship stories I brought up with him, only for most of them to never get an article. It was around this time that Necro XIII was writing for NG, whom I've had a spat with over his comment about 'Billies' and how they don't play games and only get mad about 'censorship'. It was at this point I believe a change in NG's priorities began, moving away from covering censorship and over to boring stories about Pokémon GO raids. If you find any NG articles talking about what I sent him, there's a very high chance it was because of me.
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We've just about reached the end of my interactions with Brandon. So many stories left unreported for no particularly good reason.

By the way, did you know To Love Ru Darkness was banned in Australia? If not, you might've known if Brandon bothered to report on Nicchiban about it, instead of garbage news articles about seasonal anime that no-one watches.
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WHERE WE ARE TODAY

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned that I stopped reading Niche Gamer after the Spider-Man flag stories surfaced - but my reasons are a bit more specific. Jonathan White, one of the men involved in this story, sent me an aggressive tweet trying to provoke me into responding to him, believing my Twitter account being private was because I was scared of my opinions being scrutinized by his galaxy-sized brain. In reality, my account is private because the Australian government passed a law allowing the federal police to hack social media accounts without a warrant. Mitigating risks to my personal safety is arguably more important than getting into an Internet bitch-fight with a needle-dick journalist.

But how would he know who I am if my account is private? It's because I quote-retweeted this tweet of him dog-whistling and attacking the evil Angry Billies, and then Brandon tattled on me to him. I don't know of any other way he could've found me. This was the final straw for Brandon, as he unfollowed me after I called him out on this.
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But sure, I confess to advocating for Jonathan and Tyler's termination from Niche Gamer - and I won't apologize for doing so. They're subversive snakes who antagonize and deride the true audience for Niche Gamer: anti-censorship, anti-woke, pro-gatekeeping and pro-free speech. It's not because I'm a 'right-wing SJW' - in fact, to this day I still don't call myself right-wing - it's because any business with a brain knows that you shouldn't keep people on your payroll if they hate everything you stand for. The reason Brandon tweeted this out is not just because the comments section became a warzone, but because I kept reminding him that his writers are 100% in the wrong and are ruining NG. At one point I tagged him asking if this was what he wanted NG to be when he first launched it - clearly, this is his answer. He even posted a now deleted Twitter poll on the official NG account asking followers what they want from Niche Gamer: memes, video game reviews, censorship/tech and a fourth option that I'm blanking on right now. I wish I archived it. To no-one's surprise, memes and video games won the poll - because Brandon has long since abandoned the audience that grew his website in favour of Elon Musk reply guys and Twitter engagements.

That's ultimately why I made this post. I'm sick of Brandon's cowardice. He kicked out Narwitz for trying to subvert his business, yet Tyler and Jon stick around because he has no-one else who'll work for him. He complained to me six years ago about being taken advantage of, and from the evidence I shared you can tell nothing has changed on that front. I'm sure he's loving the fact that his flame-bait articles finally reached over 400 comments for the first time in literal years, but he needs to face the music. His negligence killed the comments section and led to where we are now. He will never get that goodwill back - not from his true fans, and certainly not from me.
 

Migi

varishangout.com
Regular
Wasn't it obvious how badly Niche gamer and Brand was the moment he started censoring comments that were against the woke or the LGBTQ community and their religious dogma? Why bother helping such a scumbag that couldn't even value free speech. I left the moment you couldn't use free speech anymore because everything becomes dull if you don't have free speech.

Ever since One Angry Gamer got off the air and William Usher left the scene, there weren't any free speech gaming sites anymore. II sorta have to say you can use Operation Rainfall for some harder discussions, but even Disqus will remove your comment when you use certain words.

Brandon is like a backdoor hoe, he'll bend over for anybody who gives him money, and he chose advertiser before gamers.
 

solidhyrax

varishangout.com
Thank you for sharing your perspective on this situation. I didn't know it was that bad. I personally always get iffy when businesses embrace "meme culture" as part of them because it just reduces the seriousness and brings in mindless audience.
I also didn't know that it was because of that Australian law that you've been private on Twitter. It still freaks me out how your government can be so authoritarian and the populace be so docile.
 

Tamamo

varishangout.com
Regular
Wasn't it obvious how badly Niche gamer and Brand was the moment he started censoring comments that were against the woke or the LGBTQ community and their religious dogma? Why bother helping such a scumbag that couldn't even value free speech. I left the moment you couldn't use free speech anymore because everything becomes dull if you don't have free speech.

Ever since One Angry Gamer got off the air and William Usher left the scene, there weren't any free speech gaming sites anymore. II sorta have to say you can use Operation Rainfall for some harder discussions, but even Disqus will remove your comment when you use certain words.

Brandon is like a backdoor hoe, he'll bend over for anybody who gives him money, and he chose advertiser before gamers.

I knew he couldn't be trusted after the Smug debacle. OAG's Billy may have been a sperg but at least he had principles unlike Brandon.

That aside NG was often late as fuck with news articles making the site useless as a news source when Gematsu and Siliconera are on time and cover much more news.
 

VidMasterEon

varishangout.com
Regular
I knew he couldn't be trusted after the Smug debacle. OAG's Billy may have been a sperg but at least he had principles unlike Brandon.

That aside NG was often late as fuck with news articles making the site useless as a news source when Gematsu and Siliconera are on time and cover much more news.
I remember billy used rorschach as an avatar. Quite poetic
A mentally unstable sperg who never compromised, not even in the face of armageddon

If you ever need to find out your state religion, check your blasphemy laws
Rainbow shit is one of mosts people's "mr.smith effect" and is a good way of telling friend from enemy
 

Deleted User

varishangout.com
Regular
I was on the old NG forums, some of you might've known me there under a different username, but left when Michael Jordon joined and pissed everyone off and for a time a few of us made out own separate forum but I'm pretty sure that's dead now as we all went our own way. I never commented on any of the articles but enjoyed reading the comments, interesting how there was less traffic after Smug was banned, almost as if people that read NG valued free speech.

I have to say personally, I miss Billy and OAG. Billy had principles and stuck to them even when it wasn't "good optics", this was someone that gave a shit, we don't have much of that nowadays.
 

Cayhr

varishangout.com
Artist
Regular
Sometimes I pick up an article by Niche Gamer and Sankaku Complex, but I did notice that NG was getting chummy with Elon. I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with it (like how the US fast food brands interact sometimes), but it seems to have come at the detriment of the site's own integrity. This gave me a lot of insight on the behind-the-scenes, which I really appreciate.

Also, since I have no experience running sites nor businesses (I just know how to write code and organize pixels on a canvas), it begs the question... how would I keep a site like NG going if I didn't rely on advertisers? Seems like the pragmatics of maintaining the quality of content and incentives for financial support coerced Brandon to try and placate the advertisers, which ultimately lead to this mess.
 

Halo

varishangout.com
Regular
how would I keep a site like NG going if I didn't rely on advertisers? Seems like the pragmatics of maintaining the quality of content and incentives for financial support coerced Brandon to try and placate the advertisers, which ultimately lead to this mess.
Better hope your users are generous enough to donate to you.
I don't know how many servers they have but from the sounds the main cost is paying employees.
If you wanted to "maintain integrity" you'd probably have to sell merch pretty much year round, and even then your profit margins would be basically non-existent cause of the cost of manufacturing.
I don't think you could really do it without ads.
Maybe an alternative would've been him podcasting? Podcasters/streamers get pretty lucrative sponsorship deals so that would've been a decent boost to the sites revenue, and a new way for him to attract more people who don't love the forum/website formats.
 

Ebicentre

varishangout.com
Regular
Maybe an alternative would've been him podcasting? Podcasters/streamers get pretty lucrative sponsorship deals so that would've been a decent boost to the sites revenue, and a new way for him to attract more people who don't love the forum/website formats.
For a time that's what Brandon did do. He paywalled early access to podcast episodes via Patreon, but soon that stopped as well. He has ideas but no-one willing to follow through on them for long enough (or well enough, judging by Nicchiban).
 

NretsewThePerv

varishangout.com
Regular
used to hang out in the NG discord some years back. a lot of fun people over there. was a good time

But, over the years, NG has been going downhill and involved in a few iffy controversies. I recall there was some plagiarism scandal some time ago. among other issues. overtime I just kinda drifted away from NG, still follow them to see headlines on what's going on hit my Twitter feed but dont really go to the site all that often

there seems to be some kind of curse on any site that wants to centre itself around the ideals of being anti-censorship and pro-freedom of expression. they will either sperg the fuck out like OAG did or they will be involved and sucked into so many controversies their reputation will be so bad they fade into obscurity like I think NG is. and it's a shame as we need more places that are willing to cover such stories

we need people who are willing to really signal boost and bring proper attention to the issues around censorship we face now. as speaking as an old hat at this point. things have only gotten worse as time has gone on, but hay it's not all doom and gloom. we have vairs now for the time being and I hope with time and more manpower we can shape this place to be a beacon of hope in this brave new world

and well do it with cunny and cute anime girls, pic related

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Migi

varishangout.com
Regular
I knew he couldn't be trusted after the Smug debacle. OAG's Billy may have been a sperg but at least he had principles unlike Brandon.

That aside NG was often late as fuck with news articles making the site useless as a news source when Gematsu and Siliconera are on time and cover much more news.
I didn't mind them being late in the past when they still upheld their Free-speech mantra. Both Gematsu and Siliconera are left leaning site that get triggered by the free speech, so I never used them. Siliconera had some mentally ill feminists working there that would delete comments that either called out the woke or the feminists' mantra, and with Gematsu you weren't allowed to call out if bad English dubs were or even complain about translation work.

I'm was banned by Gematsu way in the past when only English dub was still a thing, and I was voicing for Japanese dub inclusion because it was already obvious it was inaccurate and godawful voice acting in general English. And from Siliconera in the past for picking a fight with a feminist writer.

Also, got banned by Niche Gamer for calling one of their reviewers mentally retarded for saying that Nier Replicant had a "Riveting dialogue and flavor text throughout" which is bull, seeing as it was full of unnecessary slang and overly Westernized to the point it is removing words that are being said because they were deemed to Japanese.

There are no free speech gaming websites anymore, and debate is dead because you aren't allowed to use politically incorrect words. Which I love to use for the fun of it.
 

Halo

varishangout.com
Regular
there seems to be some kind of curse on any site that wants to centre itself around the ideals of being anti-censorship and pro-freedom of expression. they will either sperg the fuck out like OAG did or they will be involved and sucked into so many controversies their reputation will be so bad they fade into obscurity like I think NG is. and it's a shame as we need more places that are willing to cover such stories
c2llZC5wbmc


but on a more not shitposty note it's because most of the people who make these types of sites are grifters.
To do a bit of defense on my part, I won't lie I did make Varis because I wanted a lil bit 'o clout, but honestly this all is a passion project for me.
People getting use and value out of it has just been a big plus, and I hope it carries on for a while longer.
I gotta enjoy the fame while it last... even though most people don't even know I exist :cirno-laugh:

we need people who are willing to really signal boost and bring proper attention to the issues around censorship we face now. as speaking as an old hat at this point. things have only gotten worse as time has gone on, but hay it's not all doom and gloom. we have vairs now for the time being and I hope with time and more manpower we can shape this place to be a beacon of hope in this brave new world
The people here just need to exist and eventually something will happen that brings attention and more like-minded people to this place.
Some publisher/localizer/company is gonna go to far, and all the posts everyones written and information people have brought together will be there for the newfags to find.
There are no free speech gaming websites anymore, and debate is dead because you aren't allowed to use politically incorrect words. Which I love to use for the fun of it.
make your own sites lads.
even just a few friends shitposting and having fun will eventually draw more people.
 

NretsewThePerv

varishangout.com
Regular
but on a more not shitposty note it's because most of the people who make these types of sites are grifters.
To do a bit of defense on my part, I won't lie I did make Varis because I wanted a lil bit 'o clout, but honestly this all is a passion project for me.
People getting use and value out of it has just been a big plus, and I hope it carries on for a while longer.

yep. tbh this is the right attitude to have. just be honest about the fact ya doing it for clout, but at the end of the day. long as some good comes out of it is a net positive

and yea most of the time the issue is the people starting/running said places turn out to be massive grifters. either cuz they started out that way or over time as they "made it big" and they realised how profitable it could be, become that way. we have seen that so many times on so many of these fucken sites now. and not just news sites like NG and the like. but basically, any site that claims to be anti-censorship. it's a shame but seems to just be how it is

and yea we just have to wait for more of these publishers/localizers/companies to fuck up and for people to talk about it and make threads here. as well as have people shill the fuck out of the site on Twitter and the like. I know I've been trying to do my part when I feel it's relevant to do so. The more people we get in here the better. will have to gatekeep and filter out dumb fucks ofc. but manpower is what we need
 

Halo

varishangout.com
Regular
will have to gatekeep and filter out dumb fucks ofc.
That won't be too much of a problem.
When you can say what you want people like that generally stay away cause they can't get the person they're arguing with banned.
Would be quite fun to see more retarded reports tho if Varis ever gets to that point :cirno-laugh:
but that's all for another day and a different thread.
 

Ebicentre

varishangout.com
Regular
That won't be too much of a problem.
When you can say what you want people like that generally stay away cause they can't get the person they're arguing with banned.
They don't like it when you tell them they can't be this kid.

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Tamamo

varishangout.com
Regular
I didn't mind them being late in the past when they still upheld their Free-speech mantra. Both Gematsu and Siliconera are left leaning site that get triggered by the free speech, so I never used them. Siliconera had some mentally ill feminists working there that would delete comments that either called out the woke or the feminists' mantra, and with Gematsu you weren't allowed to call out if bad English dubs were or even complain about translation work.

I'm was banned by Gematsu way in the past when only English dub was still a thing, and I was voicing for Japanese dub inclusion because it was already obvious it was inaccurate and godawful voice acting in general English. And from Siliconera in the past for picking a fight with a feminist writer.

Also, got banned by Niche Gamer for calling one of their reviewers mentally retarded for saying that Nier Replicant had a "Riveting dialogue and flavor text throughout" which is bull, seeing as it was full of unnecessary slang and overly Westernized to the point it is removing words that are being said because they were deemed to Japanese.

There are no free speech gaming websites anymore, and debate is dead because you aren't allowed to use politically incorrect words. Which I love to use for the fun of it.

I do mind. The site is called Niche Gamer but their often 2 to 3 days late or fail to report at all on weeb game news.
What is the point of the site then? They might as well just stick to running a forum so i don't have to deal Disqus's bullshit or that godawful thing their using now.

I rather lurk on that glorified press release feed called Gematsu while Siliconera is handy to lurk for their news on fan translations, gacha, figures and other weeb merch.

Honestly NG just had to be a non-lefty, tranny free Siliconera and it would have been a great site.
 

Migi

varishangout.com
Regular
I do mind. The site is called Niche Gamer but their often 2 to 3 days late or fail to report at all on weeb game news.
What is the point of the site then? They might as well just stick to running a forum so i don't have to deal Disqus's bullshit or that godawful thing their using now.

I rather lurk on that glorified press release feed called Gematsu while Siliconera is handy to lurk for their news on fan translations, gacha, figures and other weeb merch.

Honestly NG just had to be a non-lefty, tranny free Siliconera and it would have been a great site.
I always think getting news way faster is pretty pointless when comes to content. Seeing as most gaming news article barely give you any detail you actually want to know, especially with newer games. All you ever see on gaming sites is this game is getting release and that's about it. With launch windows of like 5 year, sometimes it becomes even more pointless to announce something quickly.

I avoid those like Niche Gamer, seeing as they have done the same kinda style of censorship Niche gamer is now known for. Noisypixel is what I sometimes use for game related stuff, Nekomagic for figures, and I'm not into gacha because I think it is a waste of time and money if you pump money for instance into it. And Soranews24 for Japan and weeb stuff. Also noteworthy is Frontline Gaming Japan.

In general, I don't buy all that much anime content anymore, and if I want to play it I pirate it, seeing as all I'll be doing is funding the mental cases behind the scenes.
 

VidMasterEon

varishangout.com
Regular
I do understand the predicament brandon is in. Deciding to go against what society has deemed acceptable puts a mark on your head and it is only a matter of time until they try to smoke you out by going after pretty much anything you have
I have no idea how josh moon does it. He is delisted from search engines and banned from pretty much every payment processor but still keeps afloat

It is important to know that once you cross the event horizon of siding with the wrong people there is essentially no way to get back into their good graces
Never apologize dig in and go down swinging. You can at least say you stuck to your convictions and people will respect you
 

Deleted User

varishangout.com
Regular
I do understand the predicament brandon is in. Deciding to go against what society has deemed acceptable puts a mark on your head and it is only a matter of time until they try to smoke you out by going after pretty much anything you have
Is reporting on censorship and anything related really going against what society seems acceptable though?

To me it's more Brandon was either opportunistic or doesn't give a shit and once became e-friends with Musk decided to pivot to a new audience that is just about shitty boomer memes.
 

Quickshooter

varishangout.com
Up until the recent debacle with Niche Gamer's Tyler Valle and Jonathan White attacking their audience (including yours truly) over the USA v.s. LGBT flag mods for Insomniac's Spider-Man, I was an avid reader of the website since 2015. This was shortly after GamerGate helped me leave feminism and open my eyes to the left-wing, ideological invasion of hobbyist communities, especially gaming and anime. I frequently posted comments both on Niche Gamer and One Angry Gamer (I wrote two articles for OAG, but I can't find their archives anymore), expressing my discontent with the censorship and appeasements made by companies under the belief that sales would improve and leftist mobs would leave them alone (they didn't). I declare here and now that I'm no longer following Niche Gamer nor Brandon Orselli; I've simply had enough of the nonsense that has been allowed to fester for the past seven years.

Brew a cup and strap in, boys and girls. I have almost one-hundred screenshots of my DMs with Brandon that I wish to share with you all. Six years' worth of back-and-forth chats about comment moderation, potentially hiring me as a writer for Niche Gamer, and sitting on critically important and relevant stories that neither Niche Gamer nor Nicchiban reported on.







BACKGROUND

Niche Gamer was embroiled in numerous controversies with its audience - the Smug ban, Michael 'you never had sex' Jordan, 'Sophia' Narwitz, the Gematsu plagiarism and now 'FlagGate' - leading some of the die-hards over the years to leave the website for freer ventures. Yet despite all the controversies, I stuck around, even if I didn't comment anymore. I agreed with the readers' complaints over the heavy-handed moderation, and at the time Brandon was sympathetic to these concerns as well as his own. Advertisers and AdSense punished Niche Gamer for its stance on free speech until eventually he relented and started deleting comments. He and his other employees constantly denied responsibility for the deletions and bans, deflecting to the third-party websites Disqus and Insticator as the culprits. I'm sure we all have our doubts about that.

HOW I GOT INVOLVED AND WHY

My first communication with Brandon began when Gal*Gun: Double Peace was removed from store shelves in EB Games Australia, which I personally investigated at the time to find out why. When I found EB Games' CEO on LinkedIn, that was when I asked Brandon to dig deeper if he could. Sometime after that was the then recent round of hiring new staff for NG, and I submitted my resumé hoping to get a job. I was of course unsuccessful.
This is also where we began talking about the forum moderation problem that exploded. In hindsight, I was a lot easier on him than the average NG user for two reasons: I wanted to stay on his good side in hopes of receiving a job offer, and because I wanted NG to be successful from a culture war perspective. I offered suggestions to Brandon about how to make moderation as fair as possible while still acknowledging that such ideas were stupid and unfair - but in the end it didn't matter, as the forums were shut down some time after Smug was banned. This wasn't my proudest moment as someone who believes in free speech, but I was trying to see things from Brandon's perspective at the time.
The next interaction was in regards to Tekken 7's looming release. There were articles at the time suggesting Katsuhiro Harada had censored his game by not including the kangaroo character Roger due to complaints from animal rights organizations.
Communication with Brandon was sporadic because at this point he was usually on the ball when it came to breaking stories, so I didn't need to DM him often. I continued to express interest in working for NG even though I was studying full-time at university (I've since graduated). There was also an incident with OAG and KungFuMan that raised an eyebrow, because Brandon at the time was buddy-buddy with the latter for whatever reason while he was going through 'Sophia' Narwitz's hostile takeover and his plagiarism scandal.

THE STORIES PILED UP

2020 was a bad year for me. One of my cats passed away in January, and right around when Covid restrictions were implemented we saw Australia begin its moral crusade against Japanese media such as No Game No Life. I sent him the stories yet I kept getting no response until the Kiryu Coco/Taiwan controversy. Then OAG's master list for Black Lives Matter came out, events unravelled as they did, and I told Brandon about it. Pay particular attention to the stories I shared about Australia banning light novels and video games, because this will be important later. I ask about sending stories to Ryan Pearson which I recall went nowhere on my part.
I kept sending stories to Brandon over time and he clearly paid attention, as he mentioned how he 'really should hire' me. He ultimately never went through with this because my resumé was simply not good enough and I had no samples of my journalism he was happy with.
REMEMBER ETHICS IN GAMING JOURNALISM?

There was an article for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night written by Brandon that I noticed had no disclosure of his status as a Kickstarter backer. He only added it after I brought it up with him. He didn't seem to care all that much about disclosure anymore, as literally today he wrote another article for Bloodstained without disclosing his financial backing.
SOME STORIES REPORTED ON, OTHERS WEREN'T

I shared more stories with Brandon, but what you'll notice is there are so many censorship stories I brought up with him, only for most of them to never get an article. It was around this time that Necro XIII was writing for NG, whom I've had a spat with over his comment about 'Billies' and how they don't play games and only get mad about 'censorship'. It was at this point I believe a change in NG's priorities began, moving away from covering censorship and over to boring stories about Pokémon GO raids. If you find any NG articles talking about what I sent him, there's a very high chance it was because of me.
We've just about reached the end of my interactions with Brandon. So many stories left unreported for no particularly good reason.

By the way, did you know To Love Ru Darkness was banned in Australia? If not, you might've known if Brandon bothered to report on Nicchiban about it, instead of garbage news articles about seasonal anime that no-one watches.

WHERE WE ARE TODAY

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned that I stopped reading Niche Gamer after the Spider-Man flag stories surfaced - but my reasons are a bit more specific. Jonathan White, one of the men involved in this story, sent me an aggressive tweet trying to provoke me into responding to him, believing my Twitter account being private was because I was scared of my opinions being scrutinized by his galaxy-sized brain. In reality, my account is private because the Australian government passed a law allowing the federal police to hack social media accounts without a warrant. Mitigating risks to my personal safety is arguably more important than getting into an Internet bitch-fight with a needle-dick journalist.

But how would he know who I am if my account is private? It's because I quote-retweeted this tweet of him dog-whistling and attacking the evil Angry Billies, and then Brandon tattled on me to him. I don't know of any other way he could've found me. This was the final straw for Brandon, as he unfollowed me after I called him out on this.
But sure, I confess to advocating for Jonathan and Tyler's termination from Niche Gamer - and I won't apologize for doing so. They're subversive snakes who antagonize and deride the true audience for Niche Gamer: anti-censorship, anti-woke, pro-gatekeeping and pro-free speech. It's not because I'm a 'right-wing SJW' - in fact, to this day I still don't call myself right-wing - it's because any business with a brain knows that you shouldn't keep people on your payroll if they hate everything you stand for. The reason Brandon tweeted this out is not just because the comments section became a warzone, but because I kept reminding him that his writers are 100% in the wrong and are ruining NG. At one point I tagged him asking if this was what he wanted NG to be when he first launched it - clearly, this is his answer. He even posted a now deleted Twitter poll on the official NG account asking followers what they want from Niche Gamer: memes, video game reviews, censorship/tech and a fourth option that I'm blanking on right now. I wish I archived it. To no-one's surprise, memes and video games won the poll - because Brandon has long since abandoned the audience that grew his website in favour of Elon Musk reply guys and Twitter engagements.

That's ultimately why I made this post. I'm sick of Brandon's cowardice. He kicked out Narwitz for trying to subvert his business, yet Tyler and Jon stick around because he has no-one else who'll work for him. He complained to me six years ago about being taken advantage of, and from the evidence I shared you can tell nothing has changed on that front. I'm sure he's loving the fact that his flame-bait articles finally reached over 400 comments for the first time in literal years, but he needs to face the music. His negligence killed the comments section and led to where we are now. He will never get that goodwill back - not from his true fans, and certainly not from me.
Well i figured out Brandon looked a little too ugly for an "Italian" and acted way too jewy aswell
so i did a little digging and whadayaknow he's a fucking jew
 

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