Gamers have tried to do boycotts against large companies all the time and they've never been successful. Left 4 Dead 2 and CoD MW2 to name two. So Gawker, a big company that owns lots of stuff including Kotaku, Polygon, and numerous other indie game journo sites, got their advertisers mass-spammed by gamers due to Gawker smearing and insulting their advertisers' target consumers, costing them "seven figures" with Hulk Hogan now going in for the kill over something unrelated, but Gawker are now terrified and are doing everything to delay the trial.
The reason this is important for the small developers is because they don't have that many options for exposure outside of the near-monopolized journos, and these indie expo events that said journos and their judges infest. Quinn (who I couldn't care less about) being exposed as performing sexual favours for judges raises huge concerns. It could have been rectified very quickly, but it's a threat to those companies. So it seemed smarter to them that they could launch a synchronised set of smear articles on all their websites to attack their critics (and audience, and customers, and other developers...) and make it fit into the ever-popular feminism debate.
So it made more people angry, made them angrier as time passed, and drew the fiasco out far longer than it had to be. It's been nearly a year, and the only thing asked for was transparency and reform.
It could have been anything else that fit into the same boat, and they would have just found another way to bury, deflect, or smear the critics.
