The controversy started with sexual assault allegations against NeoGAF owner Tyler Malka , with former members of the community building a new online home. ResetEra is the name of the new forum, and as the name implies, is meant to represent a clean slate for this large community discussing videogames, amongst other important issues.
After NeoGAF experienced downtime for several days, Malka (username “Evilore”) not only denied the claims made by filmmaker Ima Leupp, but also had his moderators announce a new policy that disallowed “political and social discourse.” Community members who expressed dissent were banned and their threads deleted. To thousands of users, these statements only made a bad situation even worse, and an exodus of regular users and moderators continued from that point.
Per Kotaku, the minds behind ResetEra are consciously attempting to avoid some of the pitfalls of NeoGAF. The new forum is set as an LLC, meaning that no single person (a la Evilore for NeoGAF) will be in charge of the website. Additionally, the off-topic “EtcetEra” will not remove any political discussions as NeoGAF does now. A post by ResetEra administrator “Cerium” does ask new users to leave their NeoGaf-related grievances at the doorstep in order to help facilitate this new clean slate.
Around 7,200 members are already a part of this new community as of this writing, and the website is attempting to keep up with the large amount of traffic and activity. A mad dash is ensuing for former NeoGAF users to reclaim their old usernames, and the ResetEra founders are taking measures for website security by admitting new users in waves, as the community and staff have apparently already received threats.
But for disillusioned NeoGAF users, ResetEra is aiming to be a new home for free and friendly videogame discussion, which is sorely needed in this day and age, especially with games like Super Mario Odyssey, Assassin’s Creed Origins and Wolfenstein II coming out on the same damn day.