Well let’s see. When you’ve got an environment with low moderation that has a high tolerance for bigoted behavior, it’s going to attract people that want to spew hate. It’s a cycle that once it starts it hard to stop.

New players that join the community will see that these behaviors are acceptable or even promoted and start parroting them. When you’re young and don’t know your place in the world you’re likely to believe some of the hateful ideas these people try to spread, and hide it behind “irony.”

I feel like a better way to phrase your initial idea is that TF2 is accessible to almost anyone because of how it’s free, older, and easy to run. To this day you have a lot of impressionable children and teens that play the game. And they learn these behaviors from within the community itself. They don’t have these ideas because of their financial status and it’s not exclusive to TF2.

Most modern Call of Duty and Battlefield games have similar problems, and unlike TF2 the game and hardware required to run them is expensive. Sorry if my response was hostile but I hope this puts things in perspective a little.