The line here about people who think of gaming companies as friends is the one that utterly chills me. Because I know it happens, and we can see it everyday on this very forum.
And it's not solely because it's a gaming thing. I think a lot of us here that can spot it and recoil from it saw it happen first with gaming due to our tastes, but I think we can spot it across the entire spectrum of that multi-tentacled monster that is fandom. Any facet of culture that people can create a subculture around - gaming, wrestling, cars, sports, anime, manga, and even YouTube "personalities" - almost inevitably leads to not just communities that veer towards exclusionary mindsets and actions but also toward a sense of personal ownership that gets really scary really fast.
As a kid in the 90s I had my great loves - The Simpsons, Nintendo, Jurassic Park, Goosebumps and later Star Wars novels - but at every point along the media spectrum I recognized that I did not control the art. Other people did, and they did not necessarily need to take my evolving tastes into consideration. It was cool if they did, but if the story they were telling or the gameplay they were crafting lost me, then so be it. Other stuff existed. No one, to use the shitty parlance of a decade ago, "raped my childhood". I had my childhood, unique to me, and of the stuff that existed then some I still love, and some is best left as a pleasant memory.
But as you said, there's that insidious grain of the relationship with the creator that has metastasized with the growth of the internet. Immediate access to the creative process in its nascence means that people feel a stake in the outcome. Remember Mass Effect 3? Or, for that matter, any time a story beat in a television episode or long-running film franchise (ahem, Star Wars) doesn't somehow conform to a preconditioned set of expectations there is a sense of betrayal. Which is simply absurd. I have seen people in the run-up to a film release claim that if the movie doesn't do exactly what they assume from laborious hours of speculation and insane expectations that the product is a failure. There's a sense that if you're niche isn't exclusively catered to then the creators had an agenda against you.
Where this all ties back around is that need for pandering beyond the artistic realm. It starts with those subcultural media - gaming, wrestling, cars, sports, anime, manga, and even YouTube "personalities" - but quickly transforms into further ideas of personal identity. "Women aren't funny", thus comedy is for men. "Women only play casual games", thus gaming is for men. "Star Wars is part of the SJW agenda" because it dared to give representation to women and people of color, thus Star Wars is for white, straight men. And the feedback loop of people like PewDiePie and Ninja and others becomes an inculcation of a strange, grotesque white, male identity built around fiefdoms of media and culture.
I honestly have no clue how to combat this. It is so farcical on its face, overgrown children demanding that the world caters to their eccentric whims, that it's mockable right up to the point that it becomes increasingly dangerous. Extremism in its myriad forms is always deplorable, but at least you might be able to say that its roots were often founded in very real pain, marginalized people driven to drastic measures as a means of asserting that they too exist and they too need the rudimentary staples of living.
But what the fuck are these miscreants? They utterly ruin Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. They're fed, they have water, they have shelter, they have community, and by dint of their gender, sexuality, and often race they have privileges that the people they hate couldn't dare dream of. They harbor murderous sentiment because someone swapped the gender of a cartoon character.
