He said, "notable teams". Look at your list.

Stadium revenue isn't even 5% of the teams earnings anymore.

I just learned today that the distribution of the TV money to teams is almost exactly equal to their salary cap. That means, the stadium earning is the profit, along with merchandising deals.

That means the stadium revenue is actually a very big part of their profit margin.

Where did you get the 5% figure, by the way?

Blackouts only apply to local broadcast TV. Cable stations like ESPN or the NFL Network or Redzone were never affected by blackouts.

it's time to try another tactic and stop defending this particular, indefensibly stupid quest to change the world through internet blog posts.

It's still not up you or me or any other reader of those sites. It's up to the people who own and run them.

You say they are "damaging the brand" and it's working against their goals. You must admit that they may see it differently. They've made the conscious decision to include other voices, other points of view. If it damages the brand for some bro who thinks it's his right to harass women, there may be a dozen women who say, "Hey, it' s nice not getting harassed. The movement away from misogyny is going to happen with or without their support. They've just decided to get on board early. It's unlikely the'll be the ones left behind. There were people back in the day who hated the fact that there were suddenly black music artists showing up on their previously white radio. For them, hearing Sam Cooke or Otis Redding "damaged the brand" of that station. Today, nobody notices any more. There were stations in the US that would not play a song by a black artist period. They have disappeared and now we look back with a little bit of shame.

Any "brand" that is based on misogyny isn't worth preserving. Gaming is not the men only club that it was once perceived to be.

Men who harass women are throwbacks. It's just not acceptable any more. anywhere. Even the casual wolf-calls and whistling on the street by construction workers is becoming very rare. In my lifetime, it was absolutely common behavior. Now, since there are likely women working on the site too, you just don't hear it. Now I'm sure there are some men who will say, "By not harassing women you're only making the problem worse". But nobody's listening. Why should anyone care what they say?

If you are so weak you can be hurt by mere words it is YOU who should leave and find some other group to play with.

And yet, in the case of Gamasutra and other gaming web sites, when they do find some other group to play with, all the non-weak bros start whining about how they're the real victims because their gaming web sites don't want them any more and nobody wants to play with them.

Expecting everyone to conform to your ideas isn't only selfish but futile.

Trust me, nobody expects anything from you. And you never fail to meet their expectations.

On the basketball courts I've seen there is plenty of trash talk, but none of it is of the "I'll bend you over and rape you" variety.

Mostly it's the "you can't touch this" stuff. Call someone a "cheating fag" on the basketball court and there liable to be bloodshed. It's a lot different when the object of your trash talk is standing right in front of you and has prison tattoos. Even the men.

I'm pretty sure the anonymous nature of online interactions allows the worst in some people to come out. Heck, it brings out the worst in me sometimes. I generally try to stay away from demeaning someone over their gender or their sexual orientation, though. I don't understand why those are even insults. The gay people I know tend to have about the same breakdown of smart/dumb, competent/incompetent as the rest of the population. They're just less likely to pick their nose or fart loudly in public, which I actually consider a plus. Same with women. Maybe I just happen to know a lot of capable women, but for some reason I just don't think "here's someone I can pick on" when I encounter a woman, which is pretty often considering I have a wife and daughter.

I was thinking more along the lines of anyone on Craig's list looking for someone to come and rape them is possibly a cop looking for predators.

They decided to start their ventures reviewing games, and built names for themselves in their niche. But they can not solve misogyny in gaming.

I don't know that they cannot. Critical theory, my field, is practically a history of how criticism changed culture. There have been a lot of behaviors that were acceptable once and are no longer so. In Rome, they used to have slaves fighting each other, and wild animals, to the death for people's amusement. At some point, it became unacceptable and now is unthinkable. I believe the same can happen to this kind of casual misogyny.

I believe you when you say that gamers like you are turned off by the immaturity of the greater gaming community.

Nosiree. It's not the immaturity of the greater gaming community that turns me off. I'm immature (yes, it's true). Rather, it's the ugly verbal violence towards women that turns me off. The ugly verbal violence of gamers toward each other, too. I'm not talking about, "Man, I totally headshotted you, fucker". I'm talking about, "Man, I totally turned you over and fucked you up your ass". There's a difference. You will be surprised to know that women gamers don't like being called "cunts" and "whores" and "hose-monsters" and don't really enjoy it when other gamers talk about raping and torturing them. They don't mind so much when someone who just headshotted them says, "Nailed you, noob". There's a difference, you see?

As far as companies go, if you don't like pandering to gamers then get out of the business.

Those companies have the right to decide for themselves what that business is going to be and more important, who their target audience is going to be. The fact is, nobody wants to be around creeps. Even other creeps don't want to be around creeps. Did you ever read any of the creep gamer forums? They all talk past one another and will turn on each other in a heartbeat. There's no "business" catering to those people except maybe porn. And maybe the game writers don't want to be porn for creeps any more.

What if gun-control advocates start getting editorials into gun magazines, and then when complaints roll in the magazines start calling branding their readership as a bunch of paranoid crazies.

Well, you're offering me a fat, slow-pitch right down the middle there. The straight answer however, is that if there was a growing readership of responsible gun owners who were just as interested in the safety of their children and communities as they were in how to properly Stand Your Ground when encountering a black youth in a hoodie, I'd say it was the prerogative of the owners of the magazine to aim their editorial decisions to the most desirable demographic. Wouldn't you? Don't you believe that the owners of a publication of web site should be allowed to decide who they want to sell their product to and who they don't? Of course you do. As the consumer of a product you have a very binary choice: either you want the product or you do not. The choices of the editorial purveyors are a lot more complex. Are the members of the Woman Haters Club growing in number or shrinking? Do they spend money on the products our advertisers sell? Is the growing number of female gamers a better audience for us going forward?

I'm sorry to tell you this, friend, but you just don't get a say. You can read the site or you can not. You can write letters and make noise and demands all you want, but at the end of the day, the ugliness is just ugliness and nobody's going to cater to it forever. Some day, the Colosseum is going to be used for X-Sports instead of blood sports and you can stare into your lap and commiserate about the good old days when men were men and got to watch slaves getting murdered.

Or, you can go over and read PC Gamer or IGN. But be warned, they're starting to feel the wind blow, too.

And, by the way, as a gun owner for more than 4 decades, I would be thrilled to see gun control editorials in gun magazines. It's a discussion worth having. In fact, if you look at the gun magazines that are not wholly owned by the gun manufacturers, you will see gun control editorials. One of the reasons I enjoy the independent gaming media (RPS, etc) is that it's about more than just the latest AAA title. They talk about all sorts of things related to games and gaming and that's a bit more interesting than the latest Destiny twitchfest stream or endless arguments about whether the Xbox One or Playstation 4 is for real gamers.

Enough. You're a grown man. Act like it. Someday, you may find yourself like me, the father of a female-type young human. Then you'll feel a little differently about how women are treated online. And my daughter loves gaming. And though I would never tell her, she's better at it than I am, and instead of making me want to hate her, it makes me proud.

And when I say "you", I'm not referring to you, because I don't know for sure that you're a rapey adolescent. I'm referring to those for whom you are advocating.

More precisely, I choose to spend it on the comments on Slashdot. With the people who comment here, because I always learn a little something. And there is a persistent core of some rather excellent people here.

"Gamer" isn't just a dated demographic label that most people increasingly prefer not to use. Gamers are over. That's why they're so mad.

These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers -- they are not my audience. They don't have to be yours. There is no 'side' to be on, there is no 'debate' to be had.

I didn't realize that the writing at Gamasutra had become so terrific in the few weeks since I've last read it.

There is no higher compliment I could give than, "I wish I'd written that".

Here's some more:

‘Games culture’ is a petri dish of people who know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online ‘wars’ about social justice or ‘game journalism ethics,’ straight-faced, and cause genuine human consequences. Because of video games.

and,

You don’t want to ‘be divisive?’ Who’s being divided, except for people who are okay with an infantilized cultural desert of shitty behavior and people who aren’t? What is there to ‘debate’?

The "offending article" as you put it, is top-rate opinion writing. Direct, forceful and sincere, even where the rhythm of the words leaves a little something to be desired. I must make the time to start looking in on Gamasutra more often. Thank you.

Please, cite my "sexist generalizations". I made it clear that it's a noisy subset of the gaming community that has made online gaming into a toilet.

I've made great friends gaming online, but at some point, when the drunk suburban kids show up at the bar, it's time to go somewhere else, you know?

Because, uhh, you're afraid of catching a virus from a plaintext document on a site that's known to be safe? Or seeing an ASCII art goatse?

No, because I prefer more verifiable sources than an Anonymous Coward and a pair of unlabeled links. There's only so much time, you know?

It's not just about Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarcasessian. There is a great deal of credible evidence that harassment of women gamers is very common and very ugly.

https://undergrad.stanford.edu...

Here's the Boothe Award-winning paper:

https://stanford.box.com/share...

Thank you for the correction.

The last sentence should read, "Intel" and not Microsoft.

And I clearly mentioned that I do read Gamasutra, but haven't in the last little while.

Fun fact, gleaned from years of reading Craigslist personals ads: there are a lot of women with rape fantasies.

You assume they're women.