Full disclosure: I'm acquainted with some of the peripheral parties involved, though neither Zoe nor her ex.
This is going to sound Charlie-esque, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with how this conversation is being framed (more elsewhere than here, but here has a little bit of it, too).
Accusing a woman of trading sex for promotion, not just using existing personal relationships to put herself in a better position but phrasing it as sex-for-trade, without absolute proof is an intensely gendered personal attack. It's something that women who attempt to succeed in traditionally male industries are subjected to, regardless of actual culpability, on a regular basis, and it is often used to downplay and diminish the role of individual women or women as a whole in that industry. There is an extremely clear agenda in making "sex-for-trade" part of the discussion, because once you make it about leveraging personal ties, it becomes merely incestuous and mildly distasteful in the popular discourse instead of THE WORST THING EVER that some people are trying to push it as.
The games industry *is* intensely nepotistic and incestuous. It is really small considering the money involved, and people are constantly changing their precise relationship to it. Games journalists often want to *be* developers and developers often want to *be* populist bloggers, so the interrelationships can get extremely messy. The indie-scene is actually even messier *because* its full of former AAA-studio people and former games journalists (and tons of VC money) coming together to try and make something, so every relationship those people bring to the table gets tied up and tangled with everyone else's. Throw in the fact that this is an industry where major publishers pay thousands of dollars to fly journalists out, put them in a nice hotel, and treat them to a 5-star media presentation performance to show off a game for two days, and it is pretty clear why games journalism is generally shoddy and fawning.
Even if someone found a chat conversation where Zoe specifically asked Nathan G. to write a review in exchange for sexual favors, the pearl-clutching reaction to it is incredibly out of proportion to what is actually happening.
