Without taking pot-shots at her failures or appearance, there are exactly three things Brianna Wu excels at: exuding an aura of confidence, adhering to a general plan, and maintaining a cover-story. Frank legit loves Brianna, but is just as abusive, manipulative, and duplicitous as Brianna is - a rare case of two sociopaths meeting, determining both are of equal status and ability, and forming into as close to a "normal" relationship as one will ever get into. The two complement one another beautifully, with Wu being brash, arrogant, and something of a social butterfly whereas Frank is content to be on the sidelines handling the fork-and-spoon work.
Frank and Brianna started up GSX, with Amanda, to take advantage of the Mobile boom circa 2010. By now the bubble hadn't burst, and the group saw the potential in IOS to get a game out on-the-cheap and to use it as a platform to improve their status. Frank was already filled with powerful connections in the Sci-Fi community, and Brianna was already an outspoken feminist who, as one of the histrionic shrieking tranny brigade, was fully on-board with identity politics, so both of them were able to reach out to what
should have been a perfect storm of support - Frank could get his sci-fi buddies and journalist friends to help support Wu, and Wu could take advantage of the usual climate Social Justice Warriors love to get the word out. The only issue was that they didn't know what to go with. Wu wanted
anything that would let her make use of Holiday and friends - these girls were, of course, who Brianna Wu became trans to emulate, as will become blatantly obvious to anyone who reads
Election Eve and notes that Brea basically
is Brianna Wu, idolized.
Originally, Brianna Wu had an idea for a tactics-RPG using sprites, in a more contemporary suburban setting, but Brianna Wu herself quickly fell into the Ion Storm/3DRealms mindset, where only the biggest and most powerful hardware was good enough for her baby, and she went with Unreal for IOS. Worse, Wu's own taste in Narrative games (she's a fan of David Cage) meant that she saw
Heavy Rain as a great game and something to emulate, which as everyone who has ever covered Quantic Dream's content knows is dangerous ground. Not since
Oogieloves has so many bad ideas countered so many obvious assets going in. Wu's massive ego and desire to see her characters brought to the world of gaming was not to the game's benefit. This is a more common issue than most realize; Klace, for example, of
Minor/Major fame (a review of that fucking tranwreck is coming, believe me) took advantage of the desire to see their characters in a commercial product to get the help of many unsuspecting furries.
GSX was convinced that even with this, development of
Revolution 60 wouldn't take long or cost much. However, no one at GSX knew how to use Unreal and nobody working at it had the time to learn; between Frank greasing palms for good coverage and talent (how the fuck do you
think GSX got its voice-cast?) and Wu appealing to her feminist buddies for support and coverage, there was nobody to work on the project. The Wus got around this - at first - by using some friends initially, but when this failed, they plugged the gap by hiring programmers on-the-cheap - and right off Craigslist, even paying to train them if necessary. Because nobody in GSX has any idea how to manage a project and knows fuck all about games development, GSX was running into constant problems; staff quit constantly, or Brianna Wu would fire people over bullshit reasons. Brianna was adamant about her game looking its best, but she did so inefficiently; her character models are over 10K polys a piece and whilst very expressive are also terribly resource-intensive, crippling the game's performance. Brianna Wu maintained her "console hipster" mindset, focusing on IOS rather than Multiplatform because of the distant, ever-vanishing prospect of potentially getting an in-roads with Apple later.
As time went on, GSX went into bigger and bigger overruns of both time and money. Brianna Wu was essentially rotating people who would otherwise have been interns at another company and these were GSX's programming mainstays. She increasingly relied on a core contingent of contract programmers and a host of lesser ones, as admitted by Emma Clarkson and the anonymous GSX employee interviewed by Brote and later, the ones that approached the Farms. Tragedy then occurred: the Mobile bubble burst, confirming the suspicions of many that it had long been the equivalent of a wet fart in someone's trousers, and worse,
Revolution 60 was still in development. GSX pushed forwards anyway, and the results are well-known....
...By the time Rev60 was ready to ship, it had cost almost $325,000. Back wages, severance, and several other issues forced the game's cost higher to over $400,000. The game launched to minor fanfare, Frank and Wu used their connections to bolster the launch's visibility, and Brianna Wu retained several of the core staffers for the purposes of transcribing the game for PC later. GSX's programmers get the PC version ready and then proceed to fuck off for greener pastures.
Unfortunately, GSX quickly learned the disastrous truth that has been learned over and over: that
identity politics ideologues do not buy video games. The game failed to catch on despite constant crowing from the Indie press (Wu Family buddies all) and multiple attempts to get the game out to the public. It was
Sunset before
Sunset happened, and all the PR in the world wasn't going to save this game from obscurity; nobody was interested in an IOS-only narrative game that would only run on the latest and greatest IOS hardware.
Revolution 60 was dead in the water. The only thing to do was get things ready for the PC launch, but here, again, GSX ran into problems. The game was entering a climate that Frank and Brianna both knew would be hostile, and they had no real way to drum up support. Thanks to the GSX informants, we know that Wu tried to backchannel and talk to popular game reviewers like Markiplier, TotalBiscuit, and PewDiePie, but of all of them, only TB would give Brianna Wu the time of day and he
still shot her down.
All attempts to promote
Revolution 60 had failed.
Giant Spacekat was over, as SOCCON was before it.
But then, something happened: Frank and Brianna saw the Anita Sarkeesian controversy back in 2013, and an opportunity was seized upon; they could use the chantards as a weapon. Piss them off enough via antagonization and by using Social Justice tactics, and the inevitable blast-back would cause SJWs and third-wave feminists to flock to the cause and bolster the sales, like they had for Anita. So Frank started with the false-flagging attempts, Wu researched Anita's tactics, and did some overhead articles bemoaning men in tech because institutionalized sexism and the like were now something they intended to ride like a mechanical bull.
Then Gamergate happened. Wu had a personal reason to get involved; she was a literal demarcation of the kind of corruption that Gamergate had formed to oppose, so Wu immediately had a self-interest reason to get involved, but Frank and Brianna also saw an opportunity: Here, they felt, was the best chance to save
Revolution 60. The two launched a minor Kickstarter for the funds needed to push Revolution 60 through its development for PC (which had already been done in 2012, and we know this thanks to GSX's employees).
At this point, to promote the game, Brianna claims Gamergate was attacking her game and company, and attempted to continue her false-flagging operations via Frank on 8chan after 4chan banned GG discussion. To try to pull the Anita maneuver, she outright antagonized GG supporters, gamers, and indeed, anyone she could get away with, hoping to ride negative publicity to prominence as Anita had done. Unfortunately,
because of Anita, everyone immediately recognized Brianna Wu for what she was. In her eyes, it didn't matter, as long as it meant more attention for herself and GSX.
To a minor degree, her gambit worked; the Kickstarter got paid, and
Revolution 60 had gotten more popular, reaching 834th place on the IOS game rankings. Sadly for Brianna Wu, this was not due to her intended audience buying the game; it was due to people like me and
@Smutley who analyze shitty games like Wu's for where they went wrong and grinding them into the dirt until they cry or we drink ourselves to death locking onto the game and checking it out because god what the hell is this shrieking idiot talking about?
As Gamergate went on, Brianna Wu continued to try to be the new Anita, but it just wasn't working - for one because the
actual Anita was still around, and because Wu's tactics were so scorched-earth and obvious that she was pathologically unable to not look like an asshole. Wu took counter-assaults that demolished her narrative, and when Milo kicked her right in the Vagenis, Wu took a
serious hit. The cover had been opened on Wu's personal life, and the lolcow covering communities smelled blood in the water. Worse, Brianna remained the aggressive person she'd always been; was easy for trolls to rile up and she'd then look like an idiot in short order. A lolcow was born.
Quickly, it became known that Brianna couldn't
handle working without a handler involved; her interviews on HuffPo and David Pakman made her look unhinged, divorced from reality, and violent. Not a good combination. This paired with Brianna's natural inclination to lie and fabricate huge tracts of her own life led to where we are now; Wu sitting atop a failed game that's been "ready-to-go" for several years but she's terrified to launch because she'll know it will fail, and with it, so will she.