Yeah, this completely misses the point. This libertarian "build your own", "everyone can say and do what they want" sentiment that pervades so many people in the gaming community is profoundly naive. There are real institutional structures that serve as gatekeepers to opportunity and access to the market.
We don't live in some pre-agrarian Rousseauian natural utopia where everyone can do whatever they will freely of their own personal volition. Everyone relies on a functioning system of distributors, marketing, a labor force, even political and social acceptance/tolerance.
This mushrooming cultural movement we're experiencing fully understands this. They have roots within serious sociology, and study networks of institutional power very carefully. They know where to apply pressure to key components of the system to control what opportunities other people have and rig the system for their own self-promotion, and the stifling of any other thoughts or ideas. They can target marketing platforms, content distributors, key advertisers, and other key institutional choke-points in the market.
When they start setting implicit or explicit standards, they aren't "participating in an open dialogue" that people are free to disagree with. They are setting up real actionable rules, by fiat, that are going to set the playfield for what kind of content can be released or can be produced, who can participate in the culture etc.
When whole networks of people on Twitter start accusing Cyberpunk 2077 of being "transphobic", that sentiment might not catch on right now, but something like that absolutely could: they could pressure CDN's and payment systems to sever relationships with CD Projekt Red to take down GOG, they could push a pervading sentiment within the professional class that people who work for CD Projekt Red are tainted and problematic so that they are unable to find and hire new developers. They could push that narrative into the gated institutions like The Game Awards to ensure that Cyberpunk 2077 gets left out of any of the promotion or awards, etc.
I don't think that's going to happen to Cyberpunk 2077, because that game is already so hyped and popular the ship has sailed. But when people start engaging in "cancel culture", or whatever you want to call it, they aren't just exercising free speech and playing by common rules the way a libertarian believes the world works, they are pursuing a coercive strategy of institutional capture.
The very real threat of cancellation is designed so that, at the very least, the threat forces CD Project Red to accommodate the demands, bring people into their organization who are friendly and representative of this new coercive movement, and this is one way the social movement captures more and more institutions and expands its coercive reach and control.
If the best we can come up to counter that is "oh well, everyone is entitled to free speech", we're doomed to an increasingly stringent, hostile, puritanical, and creatively suffocating culture.
