The sad reality. Truth is secondary when it comes to good branding.
The internet smells blood in the water. This isn't going to simply die off this time, I think. Zoe Quinn will escape, certainly, but, rather like
Pac-Man for Atari 2600 was with the Gaming Crash of '83, she's practically irrelevant in the bigger pile of madness going on all around her. The meat on the bone isn't Quinn, or Kramer, or even Sarkeesian, though all of them by now have long been proven to be disreputable fuckers who speak for feminism about as much as Jace speaks for the military.
The true crux, the true fight, will be centering around IGF, Indiecade, and Indiefund, and in these,
the first round of punches to the balls has already happened. Any attempt to spin this is going to fail. Not because it won't get tidied up - there are people making that happen right now, after all - but because the people that matter already know the truth of the matter.
The blade has dropped, and Indiecade and IGF's heads are already in the bucket. Think about it. Now that this is public knowledge, do you think any Indie developer worth the hole in a chicken's ass is going to
ever take one of these events seriously or look at them as anything other than the massive corrupt cluster-fucks they are from here on out? Do you think anyone is going to look at IndieFund's games again, and not scream to the heavens about possible bias if one wins an award for
anything from now on? Do you think any Indie dev looks at this debacle and rubs their fingerless gloved hands in glee going
"Oh man, that Depression Quest thing, I have to get in on that noise!"
It's very true that as a rule, the public has a short memory. The Internet, however, never forgets.
Forevermore they will be scrutinized and treated as the public embarassments they are. At best, they'll be able to
try to rebrand the IGF and IndieCade. Depending on how quick internet detectives flush out the rats, however, even that might be doomed to failure.
Seeing Phil Fish in handcuffs, however,
would be almost erotically cathartic after all his faggotry.