In a group of consumers of an industry that is larger than the film and music industries combined (and this was before casual gaming took off), you are going to get some people who are louder and more committed than others.

Maybe they are not online to the same extend?

Because emacs-vs-vim used to a flame-war guarantee, and the stupid thing is that nobody is impacted by another persons text-editor, unless they are sharing a computer that can't have both installed (so anything with more than 30mb hd)

I regularly observe people flipping out because a corporation changed the license of a product to allow them to get more profit and more people being angry about the choice of webbrowser or whitespace character.

A big part of that is comparative population size, and the general "connectedness" of the fanbases. All online communities are trending worse and worse, and gaming is not unaffected.

I double dare anybody to show me an even remotely comparable example of people getting so angry about fishing gear or woodworking tools.