How badly did G4TV screw up by forcing one big social justice moment on its audience? According to the latest data, the backlash they suffered was so bad it put them in last place in the ratings, and that’s not an exaggeration.

According to IndieWire, Nielsen ratings show that by the time of its death in 2022, it was raking in only 1,000 viewers, putting it in last place out of 126 channels:

This year’s last-place cable channel was G4, which was revived in November 2021 and didn’t make it 12 months. The brief G4 2.0 run averaged just 1,000 overall viewers in primetime. Last year’s last-place channel, beIN Sports, remained in 124th place (G4 and GalaNovelas — fka TLNovelas — were the new pair measured this year, bringing the grand total to 126) with another 3,000 viewers per evening — just like ’21.

The rise and fall of G4TV can be described as both “tragic” and “well-deserved.” In the past, the network was beloved by nerds and geeks as a place to watch programming by and for escapists of many varieties from tabletop to video games but was shut down after the network failed to procure additional funding from Comcast.

It would announce its revival in 2021 to cautious optimism, but it wouldn’t be long before it was clear that reviving the network in a year where social justice had infected the talent pool was a bad idea. It wasn’t long before G4 allowed one of its hosts, Indiana “Frosk” Black, to go on a feminist rant where she effectively labeled the gaming space and G4’s own viewers as disgusting sexists. She finished the rant by saying that if people didn’t want to watch her or her seal-clapping colleagues, then they could go somewhere else.

And that’s exactly what they did.

(READ: G4TV Shuts Down Again but Why It Failed Should be Well Understood by Corporations)

G4 attempted to course correct on a number of occasions but the damage was done. People were abandoning the channel in droves. Instead of firing the person responsible for their channel’s degradation, they kept Frosk on. Even when mass layoffs occurred, they failed to let go of Frosk, further prompting people to throw up their hands and abandon the network. They would fire her shortly after, but the statement that they supported this nonsense was made whether they liked it or not.

Of all the subcultures, the gaming community seems to have the most visceral reaction to social justice being forced on it. They have, on many an occasion, produced entire movements dedicated to resisting hyper-political takeovers and have fought very hard to keep social justice out of the gaming space. Sadly, this isn’t always successful as radical ideologues have embedded and infected everything from gaming journalism to studios and developers, but as you can see, the consumers aren’t strangers to revolting against the push for politics.

G4TV could have survived and even thrived if it had just stuck to being an apolitical hub for escapist content. It proved that it was capable of producing content that was interesting and hilarious, but its attempt to beat gamers over the head with a modern left-leaning political sentiment that no one was there for drove them away.

While it would be wrong to say that everyone in that network deserved to lose their jobs, it is right to say that their jobs were lost at the hands of horrendous leadership and self-aggrandizing virtue signaling.

It didn’t have to happen, but no one seems to want to absorb a simple lesson: Leave gamers alone.