Entitled gamer

"Honestly the biggest reason we didn't do a Kickstarter is we didn't want to deal with entitled baby gamers holding even more power over us."

- Glumberland, developer of Ooblets

The entitled gamer or gamer entitlement is a term used by game journalists and anti-gamers to dismiss criticism from gamers and silence them.

Known examples

 * The biggest example was with Mass Effect 3. While it was received very well by journalists, gamers complained about the lack of polish and very poor ending of the game. A petition was issued to fix the ending along with a charity drive that raised $80,000. EA created a DLC to change the ending, but IGN, who had ran massive advertisement campaigns for the game, sided against gamers, calling them "entitled" and saying they were compromising the developers's creative freedom, even though it was obvious the ending was heavily rushed. IGN also encouraged on-disc DLC, equating the complaints about on-disc DLC to starving the developers. When the ending to Mass Effect 3 was finally changed, many journalists protested the change on social media, not only booing gamers but also BioWare for "giving into the fans." Alex Navarro, a writer for Giant Bomb, said the ending to ME3 should have been General Sheperd giving the finger to gamers.


 * When fans of Devil May Cry showed disappointment to the reboot made by Ninja Theory, VG247 said the fans were a "crying shame."


 * Nearly every disliked behavior in the industry such as always online-DRM has been defended by journalists, even though gamers found it unacceptable. Diablo 3 was, for a while, unplayable because of the DRM. The criticism gamers had were dismissed with some journalists telling them to shut up.


 * Despite positive reviews, Dragon Age II was heavily disliked among gamers for its reused assets and poor writing. The criticisms for the game were framed up as a misogynistic attack against Bioware writer Jennifer Hepler by articles on Polygon, Gamespot and Kotaku.


 * After Phil Fish cancelled Fez 2 and told fans they don't deserve it, one of his fans told him that "Saying the fans and people who got you to a million Fez sales don't deserve a sequel is idiotic!" In response to this, Fish simply had the following to say to the person in question: "Entitled gamer, much?"


 * During Blizzcon 2018, Diablo: Immortal was introduced, and fans of the series were less than pleased due to it being a mobile game and that it would likely contain loot boxes and microtransactions. The announcement trailers have also been hit with heavy downvotes. Pat The NES Punk and Corrupt journalists of course sided with Blizzard and said that gamers were entitled to nothing.


 * When the developers of the indie game Ooblets announced their game was going to be an Epic Store exclusive, they made a blogpost explaining why they did it but with a snarky condescending tone. On their Discord they frequently insulted gamers using the entitled term.  For instance, when a user asked what gamers would have to do when Epic Games Store couldn't support their currency, one of the developers stated, "You'll have to wait I guess! Nobody owes you the game!" It's even implied they have little to no respect for their previous backers on Patreon as they stated they didn't need Patreon anymore now that they had EGS's money.
 * Another example is when Metro Exodus got into some hot water after the game became an Epic Games exclusive; a YouTuber called HippoZoned made a rant on PC gamers, calling them "entitled spoiled brats". This video was met with such serious backlash from PC players that HippoZoned deleted his channel (and the video along with it) after a YouTuber called Griffin Gaming made fun of the video.


 * In 2014, the entitled gamer argument hit a new low with the Gamers Are Dead articles, which helped in escalating the consumer revolt known as GamerGate.


 * Whenever an online game launches either full of bugs or with barely any content and players are angered by it, some will try to say "Gamers are so entitled they can't wait for updates" as a cheap excuse to justify said game even when it's obviously not ready for release. Sometimes the game is never fixed, and even when the game gets updates, most of the time all the updates do is patch in the content that should've been there at launch.
 * James Batchelor, a writer from gamesindustry.biz, decried gamers as "unreasonable" (and yes, he did use the accursed "entitled gamer" term in the article) in a smear piece he wrote after Ubisoft decided to reverse their decision to censor part of Rainbow Six: Siege to cater to the Chinese market due to negative feedback. You can get more details about that article here.

Why This Term Sucks

 * 1) Most people who use it cannot accept criticism of the games they review.
 * 2) It is also used to justify shady practices.
 * 3) This excuse goes to show how corrupted game journalism can be.
 * 4) Most people who use it also say this because of bribes.