The problem is that a lot of the groups under attack are the ones that allow companies to do the things that your calling justified criticism. To put things into perspective, without say "Farmville" players you probably never wound have seen things like "Dungeon Keeper Online", without "Call Of Duty" players you wouldn't see shooter franchises strangling the market. For that matter without FPS players purchasing overpriced map packs it probably wouldn't have lead to the gaming industry embracing a lot of the DLC practices you see now. There is a point where you have to realize, as balanced and fair as you might want to be, that some groups of people DO represent a "cancer" afflicting the whole. The problem of course being that today people have been socially conditioned to think it's wrong to weed out groups of people and take action against them, and to look at the individual and what you can see on a personal level rather than looking at the type of person as a group or what that person does when your not around, whether that applies to general social politics, or more limited cosms like gaming.
Right now, the fact that the gaming industry can rely on the casual gamers to pretty much support whatever garbage they churn out, and prop up some of these business models, is exactly why casual gamers need to be forced out of gaming. On some levels those making points about "entitled" gamers being a minority are correct because so called "real" gamers have become a minority in their own hobby compared to the casual sheeple that make it viable to pretty much focus only on "Call Of Duty" and similar established franchises, neglect entire generes of games, and make enough money off of things like "Dungeon Keeper Mobile" that it and games like "Trexels" become a viable business strategy which overshadows all else.
If you target the companies and their practices exclusively, it makes no real difference because the core that allows them to sustain those practices remains untouched. Not only do you need to keep the pressure up on a business level, you ALSO need to put pressure on the base propping it up.
It should be noted that picking up a casual game and playing it occasionally is no big thing, that doesn't mean your not a real gamer if you wind up supporting other things as well. It should be noted that the problem here are the legions of people that play things like that, pay the money, and do little or nothing else.
Ideally the industry would take the time and effort to support all gamers, it would produce the casual games (including shooters), the turn based RPGs, the adventure games, metroidvania platformers and similar things in numbers sufficient to at least keep the gamers fairly satisfied, as opposed to focusing on the same money-grabbing garbage each year and maybe kicking over a decent RPG once in a blue moon (and once they do, casualization to make things "even more popular" sets in and generally divides the fan base). Neglect major audiences, especially groups like RPG fans that really were responsible for the gaming industry getting to the point where it is now, and expect backlash. Right now though the industry won't do that, it's content to simply focus on the most profitable sectors, rather than dealing with still profitable but not as profitable groups like serious RPG gamers, and as a result you see these kinds of tensions.
Now here comes the more controversial parts:
1. When it comes to Anita Sarkessian, it should be noted she is by and large a cancer on the gaming culture. It's not so much that she has a position that is different from so many people, it's that her position is pretty much a non-issue and the extent to which she takes it, and before such a large audience, has a chance of doing actual damage to gaming
as a whole.
The typical "defense" of Anita is that "nobody wants to take your games away from you" when really, that is kind of what she's all about. Her basic objective is to "change" the gaming industry based on the projection that games are in some way sexist for how they portray female characters, and the idea that the elements she points out should be removed entirely.
Someone like Anita for example asserts that the physical perfection of female characters is some how "sexist" and reducing them to mere eye candy. That's hardly the case especially when you consider heroic fantasy as a whole and the characters created by and for women. Basically gaming represents both sides more or less equally, where the guys are all buffed with crazy amounts of muscle definition, and the girls tend to also be heavily toned and at least nice looking. It's sort of like putting Mr. and Mrs. Olympia up on a pedestal next to each other when you get down to it, except someone is saying it's sexist in Mrs. Olympia's case because there is a platform for that.
She also tends to rant and rave about damsels in distress, and then when people point out how many strong female characters there are besides that, especially now, she rants and raves about other tropes and how all of them are sexist to, and really she pretty much seems oriented on trying to maintain a feminist platform to get attention and rile people more than she's actually championing any real, constructive, causes, she just plays the game of doing so in order to garner sympathy rather well.
2. I'll be blunt, I'm not sure if the gaming industry can be saved, which is why I am one of those who has been suspecting that there will be another crash. We're at a point right now where "real gamers" really don't represent enough of a financial stake compared to casuals that we can influence all that much. By costing the gaming industry money, all we do is cause it to do is consider re-investing more towards casual games. Indeed we already see industry announcements about this with a lot of companies saying they want to move away from AAA game development entirely to focus on the new frontier of "app space" and micro-transaction fueled cash grabs. They pretty much want to sheer the sheeple as long and hard as they can.
This pretty much means that things are likely to get worse before they get better as the people at the top don't have any sense of shame OR loyalty to the customer base that got them where they are. Really, if the industry crashes the publishers at the top are likely to float to the ground safely with their golden parachutes and leave the flaming wreckage of countless development houses and out of work employees with unreasonable employment standards behind them like when other businesses have gone down before them. The crash here being caused if the "sheeple" eventually move on to something else, or wake up and realize how badly they have been being exploited.
Increasing neglect and they very fact that these companies can go off about "entitlement" while whining about the AAA game market and it's costs, makes me think that really we don't have that much power in this relationship, otherwise they would be more careful already. This means that short of say mass violence, where a bunch of angry gamers put on masks and start raiding publishers and development house, nailing EA executives to giant video game symbols and lighting them on fire in the parking lot, while gunning down police en-masse in order to show we can't be stopped... really there is no way to regain power in this relationship, and at the end of the day even hardcore gamers realize it's just games, it's not worth using terror tactics to try and maintain, it's better to let a crash happen, and hope that the next round of game producers learn the lessons of the past this time, or at least we get a couple of decent decades before they go flying off the handle again.... and really I just can't see a bunch of gamers in executioner hoods or guy fawkes masks storming a corporate HQs like Frankenstein's castle in an old monster movie. I'd actually be surprised to see a hardcore gamer that actually has a decent pitchfork, and really without a few of those to set the scene it just doesn't work, amirite?
Or in short, I keep trying, but at the end of the day when I look at things rationally I think we're doomed. It's sort of like my thoughts on "Occupy Wall Street" where people rallied without the violence, that means nothing (except an eyesore) to people who can just fly over the crowds in their private helicopters. Right now the industry ultimately holds so many cards, that they can kind of ignore us, which is half the problem. Your typical publisher's attitude is akin to "I'm sorry, I can't hear what your saying over the sounds of all these counting machines sorting my money..."
