Spoiler to next move on the chessboard

They are going after archival sites.

there's more to right-wing ideology than radio and TV, read books

The book-reading intellectuals are a tiny minority of the right-wing, which promotes anti-intellectualism and hostility to academia and education system.

it's a bunch of people who want your money -- they're not all the same company, but it's still consumer garbage and just leisure, not something meaningful

Gamers know that, that why piracy exists and microtransactions are ridiculed. No one wants to pay extra. I only play free or pirated games, i never pay for in-game virtual stuff. Many games depends on minority of "whales" who spend thousands on microtransactions.
https://venturebeat.com/2013/03/14/whales-and-why-social-gamers-are-just-gamers/

imagine basing your existence around living for pleasure and doing nothing of use

Not really. If you have a hobby like chess, you'll call yourself a chess player despite chess being 'useless' pleasure.
Gaming is a broad category of hobbies: map/level design, speedrunning, competitive matches, pro-gaming, streaming, game commentators, critique/review blogs,etc. Its an entire cultural layer that you dismiss as something useless: i could instead call all of arts/theatre/ballet/dancing/sculpture/singing/embroidery/etc useless 'culture' hobbies and could point out its a waste of resources and time.

probably counting angry birds on phones,

Mobile gaming is more advanced than you think, with rise of processor power it has mobile versions of every genre.

but I doubt the average "gamer" is more than 25

Old-school gamers and retro-gaming skew it somewhat, but gaming penetrated most age categories(e.g. my dad plays web games obsessively)

you know, the degenerates who spend all their time playing games, and base their whole personality and identity around it

pathetic
These are outliers, addicts that try to escape their problems in gaming worlds.
Its much better than drugs and street crime, trust me. Gaming is a form of virtual escapism that appeals to many civilized people because it provides safety, immediacy and novelty of experience.