The Escapist staff resign following termination of editor-in-chief Nick Calandra | Hacker News Reader

The Escapist staff resign following termination of editor-in-chief Nick Calandra

gamesindustry.biz

199 pointsfalcor84109 comments

It’s not too surprising that Nick got fired given The Escapist’s desperate attempts at monetization of late. Zero Punctuation videos typically start with a short 30‐second ad for some other Escapist property, read by Yahtzee himself. But recently blatant 1‐minute ads (preceding a 5‐minute review) from external sponsors have been showing up in the high‐profile review videos such as Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3. A review just two months ago even had an advertisement within the video. Notably, Yahtzee did not deign to perform these ad spots for external sponsors himself, a sign of how much pull he had within the company.

Another sign of how much of a moneymaker ZP is for The Escapist is how in the last few years it’s rebranded to use the distinctive “limbless white figure” art style, an invention of ZP, throughout Escapist’s other blogs and podcasts.

Ticking off Yahtzee by firing Nick has taken out what’s almost certainly The Escapist’s biggest source of revenue.

I remember that video with the sponsor in the middle of it, and if I remember correctly showed Yahtzee's active disdain for it because he alluded to it before the sponsor bit, showing that he knew that it would interrupt the content that he was powerless to change it.

I'll have to follow Yahtzee and Frost wherever they go.

Seems like they’re all balding together and starting something new called Second Wind.

>@everyone I'm very excited to announce that name of our new adventure, Second Wind.

The ENTIRE Escapist video team is coming with.

<@233002118808600577> and I will be live on the channel tomorrow at 11 AM CT to discuss our plans, talk about what happened, where to support and when our first videos will drop.

All the links you need:

https://twitter.com/SecondWindGroup https://www.twitch.tv/secondwindgroup https://www.youtube.com/@SecondWindGroup

The escapist was just purchased a few months ago and the new corporate overlords were trying new things to monetize.

Looks like they've made a significant miscalculation.

May the old team thrive and may the brand fail

Without external ads and with only promotion for their own properties, how were they supposed to make any money?

Is making money ‘blatant’?

> Without external ads and with only promotion for their own properties, how were they supposed to make any money?

Among other things, they advertised direct moneymakers like paid subscriptions.

> Is making money ‘blatant’?

There’s making money and then there’s making money. As a somewhat regular browser of Escapist content for over a decade, my characterization of Nick’s tenure would be that its non‐ZP output stood out for being rather thoughtful games industry commentary, as opposed to chasing clickbait and other industry trends. By Nick’s account, this was enough for them to see successful, healthy growth—it just wasn’t enough growth to please the higher‐ups.

Now consider the “blatant” sponsored advertisements, which I neglected to mention were for such products as gacha games and crypto miners. Tonally inconsistent with the surrounding aesthetic; unpopular with the talent, as visible in Yahtzee’s obvious disdain. Worrying indicators of executive meddling that seem to have been confirmed by this week’s events.

So yes, decisions in the name of “making money” can be blatant, if by chasing it you lose all that distinguishes you from the bland, reader‐hostile content mill that is the rest of the gaming news industry.

Right. So clearly subscriptions don’t pay the bills so we get the alternative, ads, and non-intrusive ads don’t pay the bills either so we get intrusive ads.

You would like to decide that a few non-intrusive ads and subscriptions earn enough money for them but hey, it’s not your decision to make. It’s their decision to make and it’s yours to take it or leave it.

If you don’t like it, start your own publication, pour in the money and build the talent. And then we’ll talk about how far you come without these ads.

Simply complaining about how everything should be free, ad free, tracking free and up to your quality standards is pointless. Some great things in life are free but a lot of them simply are not. Chances are you don’t work for free either.

You’re responding to a caricature you’ve constructed, not to the post I made.

In this case, it’s not freeloading (l)users who left The Escapist in response to its new direction, but its own employees. And their immediate next action was to start their own publication with their own talent, but without the higher‐ups. That suggests that they believe their approach of producing quality content was financially sustainable. Time will tell if that’s true.

Nice of them to put their money where their mouth is. We’ll see if it pays off.

>So clearly subscriptions don’t pay the bills

Wrong, you've failed to read the post you replied to. They paid the bills and even had steady growth. Corporate got greedy and wanted MORE growth which was unrealistic.

The post I replied to claimed subscriptions were ‘moneymakers’. That’s obvious, it’s literally people paying money to be a subscriber.

What’s not obvious is if they pay the bills. Chances are that like in most forms of media they don’t. Just like newspapers still have ads because subscriptions don’t pay the bills.

But hey, you’re free to try to set up your own channel completely funded by subscriptions! Good luck! Perhaps the talent that left this channel will even join your channel. If those subscriptions bring in enough money to pay them of course.

As I posted in the Aftermath/Kotaku thread[1], I worked as a contract writer for The Escapist from 2005-2009, and it was literally my first job ever. Yahtzee resigning is what I consider the end of the publication, as he's been the most consistent contributor for nearly two decades and most likely the primary revenue generator. It's very sad to see a huge part of my past coming to a close.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38176053

Edit: I misread, sorry.

Why is it never good enough to just have an ongoing business that works?

Unless The Escapist was really losing money or about to go bankrupt, I don't know why it needed to be messed with. It's not a "growth" project, it's a journalistic outlet. Who cares if it "grows"?

Somebody in the new management probably needed to stir things up and show that they have a vision and direction that will take the company to new heights, which includes drastic measures like firing those holding the company back, or who were unwilling to be reduced in compensation and scope.

This. Over two decades, I have yet to see new senior management who didn't feel compelled to 'make their mark' on their new territory by changing something significant. Occassionally, they'll actually do something useful, but usually they take something that worked and break it.

I don't think it's incompetence or egomania anymore; I think it's outright sadism. Some of these corporate sociopaths (Shkreli) don't even try to conceal their intentions because nothing ever happens to any of them anyway. It wasn't the hijinks with the Epi-pen pricing that sent Shkreli to prison.

Find something sentimental to someone, and smash it while they watch. People can't coordinate resistance against you when they're emotional. Hurt them deep enough and they give up. Then you can replace them with sycophants.

Plenty of journalists have joined Substack, started podcasts, etc. They quickly realize that’s a business as well, and there’s no escaping the hustle and grind.

There's a difference between running a profitable business and running a business that has continuous growth.

Every business’s highest cost - labor - will tend to grow every year. So will the cost of most other inputs.

If you stop pursuing some amount of continuous growth or price increase, you stop making money.

3% higher expenses and 3% higher revenues to compensate is not what people mean by “a growth company”.

No, but it is the dictionary definition of “continuously pursuing growth.”

Why maintain a perfectly good and profitable business when you could suck every possible resource dry and be the CEO that boosted profits by 3%? /s

Silicon Valley, VC culture, American industry in general, has all jaded my view of "business" people.

>Who cares if it "grows"?

Investors who want to make money and do not particularly care how.

Without growth you would need to increase price to continue to pay for workers who want a COLA increase. Increase price and you hemorrhage customers without a growth path. Even if you kept your staff at the same level paying someone the same amount yearly would still lead to decreasing revenue due to the cost of taxes, benefits, etc increasing.

In the long run the only way to run a business is to increase growth or increase cost to consumers. Since the escapist mostly ran off ad revenue (although they did have subscriptions that im guessing helps) unless they increased viewership they likely they weren't hitting the metrics they wanted.

by no means does this means let go of the guy leading the team who is your likely biggest draw -- thats just stupid

This seems pretty disingenuous. Keeping up with costs is just part of stable profitability and in no way implies growth at the rate modern investors demand.

The problem here is you're looking at the system as individual parts instead of the entire system.

Lets imagine an entire economic system that was steady state. Why would profitability have to increase?

Instead we have a system that profit must increase, and profit must increase in every component of the system constantly due to inflationary practices.

That's not how that works. Raising profits is not the same as raising prices to match inflation.

Raising profits can cause inflation.

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/19/1177180972/economists-are-rec...

>He found that in 2021, corporate profits could account for about double that, nearly 60% of inflation, meaning it was not costs driving inflation. It was corporate profits. Now, some economists hear this and think this is proof that companies were just using inflation as an excuse to gouge customers.

You're talking about "profits" when you should really be talking about "costs".

At a macro level, in a large company/business, your employees expect raises for a variety of reasons (inflation, quality of life, promos, etc). A new product or feature may require hiring additional employees. If an employee exits, you may need to spend more money to hire a replacement. In addition to all of that, there are contractual obligations with vendors, your customers may be trying to eliminate product (or leave entirely), etc.

All of that raise the cost to run the business. If you want to keep your margin you need to raise your prices, cut expenses, or both.

Profit only has to increase in nominal terms, not real terms.

You don't have to grow in real terms as long as you don't promise equity investors you'll try to grow.

If you don't even grow nominally, you won't outrun debt and wage growth.

How do small businesses manage this? Restaurants, coffee shops, local bookstores, small gift shops, local specialty clothes store, etc. ?

I went to a restaurant on the weekend where somebody had crossed out $16 and had hand written $18 next to all the mains.

Right, so I think people understand inflation. But apart from that? At least I didn't understand OP as meaning that growth is meant to keep lowering prices and raising wages even in the presence of inflation.

You might notice a lot of small businesses fail. Of the ones that don't, they don't generate excessive profits for the owners.

It's only a small sliver of the small business space that ends up being economically succesful.

I run a small business, know plenty of small business owners and this isn't really the full story.

Small businesses do frequently fail, but it's more to do with the fact that anyone can start one than the fact that they are small. If you allowed random people with no experience to start billion dollar megacorps, they'd fail too.

And there are plenty that generate pretty serious profits, triple or more what you could earn in a traditional job.

A lot of small businesses push the price increases onward. Food distributor says all your burger patties are +10%, all your burgers are +10%, unless you think its very temporary.

One benefit of local "anything" is that the prices are often way better. Ex: Live in a small town, the land rent can regularly be $1-2/sq. ft./month ($10-20/yr) while a quick on Sydney (where Gamurs is located) runs $8-10/sq. ft./month ($90-$100/yr).

Frankly, Sydney's mostly already subdivided into work shares from what I've seen, and its difficult to even find a spot that's not just $500-1000 / worker / month rates (or "contact for price"). Its part of the reason Sydney's childcare is ridiculous, cause the space to even have a facility cost so much (and you have to have a min reg space per child).

It might be a lifestyle business (or a way to keep a rich person's spouse busy) in which case you can live on only employing family.

Also, there just wasn't inflation in some places for a few decades, so they just haven't had to deal with it. (Which also means there hasn't been wage growth.)

> Without growth you would need to increase price to continue to pay for workers who want a COLA increase.

A business that raises prices to match inflation is not growing by any definition.

> Who cares if it "grows"?

Did they raise any money?

It's the VC wheel. You buy a successful outfit. Saddle it with the acquisition debt. It's no longer profitable because of debt service. You need more revenue in a thin margin business. You start alienating users and dumping unrealistic expectations on employees. Company goes boom or dies like a wet fart.

I mean it was purchased by a company that unironically calls itself Gamurs Group.

Venture Capitalists do not buy existing profitable companies. They fund startups. You are thinking of private equity or leveraged buyout companies. In private equity, private equity companies buy a company (typically on credit). The private equity company hopes to make a return on its investment.

I also doubt there are a lot of deals where a previously profitable company is unprofitable after the deal. There are two reasons for this. One, it's bad business. Two, very few people are going to lend money for this type of acquisition. If it does happen, it was either probably a mistake or an error.

> I also doubt there are a lot of deals where a previously profitable company is unprofitable after the deal.

Perhaps - but the fact that a trick has become well-known where companies are acquired only to be burdened with debt from the acquisition is rather telling. And that is not helping profitability.

As someone who's less into business / financial news than eg. curling news, I know of a ridiculous amount of companies where this happened. So I really do not doubt this is a common strategy.

Because why not experiment if others get shit when it goes bad? I'd do it too...

The problem is if companies are bought by credit.

Companies bind a lot of money (in assets but also less concrete goods like people and expertise).

If you buy a company you need to pay for all of that even including _"potential"_ even if realizing that potential also would likely destroy the company.

So if you pay for it with liquidity that would "just" bind liquidity.

But if you pay for it with credit you now have to _pay of the credit_ or at least pay the interests.

So if the company made 100x€ profit every month but you have to pay 200x€ in interests every month to pay it of after 20 years then the investor loses 100x€ every month. Now that is the investor not the company and after 20 years they would make 100x€ profit, but for most investors that would be a major losing deal (I mean ignoring interests on interest, inflation etc. that would be 40€ until crossing even!).

In such situation the investor has a few choices, one paying of the additional 100€ with profit from a different company bought before where any interests are payed of. But humans only life so long, which brings us to the other solution:

Forcefully raise the profit from 100x to 200x to pay of interests squeezing out the company, then either resell a "now more profitable company" for more money or if the value of the company falls have some shenanigans ready to tax write of the loss in value....

Worse similar to a mortgage you can take on a house you can (at least in the US) make a contract where you get a credit you have to use to buy a company (or more like the lender directly pays a part of the cost) and the insurance for the credit is the company itself leading to a situation where the company basically now has to itself pay the 200x interests instead of the buyer. (example Twitter).

Now I'm gross oversimplifying things, but basically our financial system is so messed up that if a sustainable company gets bought there is a good chance it gets fucked up soon afterwards in one way or another. This in turn is not sustainable for the industry as a whole.

Now you might argue what has that to do with this case as not a person but another journalistic outlet bought them, well that other outlet is for profit and is likely to act as much as described above as a person. Buy, squeeze, resell or buy gut-out and write of is as much a case there then if a unrelated 3rd party would have bought it, and gut-out works much better if the buyer is from the same industry branch.

> Who cares if it "grows"?

I understand what you're trying to say here, but it's extremely naive. For one, the employees definitely care, because they want their pay to keep up with cost of living. The owners want the business to be successful so they get a return on their investment.

> Why is it never good enough to just have an ongoing business that works?

Unfortunately, as soon as you employee people it is never good enough to make sure the business operates without growth. Unless, of course, you're wealthy enough to fund the business through the hard times.

We're not talking about "grow a few percent a year, combined with price increases, to combat inflation." We're talking about "grow massively in a way that makes the founders of the company rich."

That's what I am unconcerned about. Being so concerned about attaining wealth that you sacrifice the value of what you already have in a misguided attempt to do so is the naive thing.

If you put $10000000 in a company and it’s not making money and it’s not growing, you’re losing money because you could be investing that money in something that does make money, if only a bank account with interest.

That’s why people care if it grows.

Conspiracy theory (well, SAC theory): The people who own everything made a bunch of bad bets over the past few years, essentially on margin. Payments are due. They're squeezing everyone who will put up with it because the alternative is economic devastation.

Because "investors" expect returns on their investment and the more investors you pull in, the more money you need to generate. At some point it's no longer about how to run the business well or how to make "enough" money for yourself and your people but how to keep the investors (whom typically don't live off of their one investment) from pulling the foundation for your only livelihood out from under you if you don't deliver enough returns.

I like video games as much as anyone, but the entire video games industry is such a hot mess. Terrible working conditions, nasty politics, racism, sexism, toxic fans, zero quality control, monopolies, manipulated reviews, endless push of gambling, microtransactions and other addictive behavior...the list is endless. What is it about the space that brings out the absolute worst in everyone?

I think it's any industry which is a very common childhood dream that doesn't have a high barrier to entry. I wanted to be a game developer - I was briefly too - but I'm not anymore. It's the perfect environment to get 20 year olds to work 80 hour weeks for close to no pay - because it's so cool we're making video games!.

I did it on the hobbyist scene for a bit and then my place of work tried to spin up an indie shop. It can be fun. It can be interesting. However, it is not as lucrative as just writing YACS (Yet Another CRUD Site).

Now, I would like to get back to hobbyist development, just for giggles, but I've wound up with so many obligations, it's hard to find time.

Yeah, this is very accurate. Which in turn is why games journalism is such a broken industry in of itself, because it mixes all the problems of the games industry as a whole (people accepting miserable wages for a 'dream job', fairly low barrier to entry, toxic conditions) with those of the media industry (people accepting low/miserable wages, low barrier to entry, toxic conditions and almost no way to make a decent amount of revenue).

Hence you get situations like the focus of this discussion; the people who actually do the work and draw in the visitors getting treated terribly by out of touch execs, and many sites cratering as a result of similar poor decision making.

Lots of industries with low barrier to entry have their 'rock stars' who people aspire to be and will work hard towards, at least for a while. Carmack or Bowie or Ramsay.

But they're the 0.1% of the 0.1%.

...and that's the good part.

I worked in it for 13 years (worked on one of the biggest non shooter games in the world). (this was ten years ago). I moved to new city to work and did so much overtime that when I go back to the same city now it feels strange to me. no familiarity whatsoever. The main problems I experienced were insane hours, low pay (base salary sounds good till you do the back of the envelop calc of pay over time and realize its less than minimum wage. lol.) and business people (who don't play or like games) making decisions that overrode the decisions of people who actually like games. Yahtzee is the only game reporter/reviewer whose name I still remember. I far as I can tell, he was the channel. you could tell he liked games. He will be fine, he has talent.

My guess? Money to be made, but winner-take-all dynamics. Dark horses are able to emerge relatively frequently, but it’s hard to predict winners beforehand. A workforce willing to be exploited (kid dreams of working in gaming).

All this comes together to create an environment where everyone is working furiously for the payout, but most will lose, and you have few friends on a sinking ship.

Contrast to a more stable market with clear lynchpins that is slow to change. That kind of environment is less equitable and meritocratic, but managers at a tiny company with 0.01% market share will struggle to whip their employees into repeated 80 hour weeks.

IMO it's the same/same-ish dynamic of Hollywood. It attracts a certain type of people, plus the environment is cut to "good people turn bad" plus all the pressure and money ( a carrot most of the time for most of the people )

"Creative" industries always will suffer from this, it's just a matter of how bad someone let's things go. Because of the flip side corporate environments give us Call of Duty 44, that in reality they offshore most of the work to "3rd World" countries where little to no oversight happens.

It’s shut in culture. Whether you agree with me or not, a large part of the user base is depressed men that spend their time playing video games in a closed room. The edge and toxicity is the only way for them to spice up their lives.

Hopefully Yahtzee will get his own youtube channel or at least one that shares the spotlight with other creators of his caliber, I only watched ZP sparingly because subscribing to the Escapist would have meant regularly getting MovieBob in my feed.

According to Yahtzee he doesn't own the rights to ZP, so I hope he doesn't have too much trouble starting something new.

... sure, but it's not like ZP owns the format of fast-paced, 5 minute video game reviews full of dick jokes

He's talented enough to make something new. His novels are original IP and dang good fun.

Cold Take has been such an excellent foil for ZP. I hope they continue to do business together.

When did Cold Take start? I only just found it through recommendations in the last few months and absolutely love the whole vibe that Frost has captured.

It will have been exactly 1 year tomorrow.

Moviebob hasn't been associated with the Escapist for years. Although I don't know why you'd want to avoid him -- he's one of the best Youtube movie critics out there.

He may not adequately conform to the Dogma.

Damn I've been watching zero punctuation since my college days. I suppose it is remarkable that it went on unchanged as long as it did.

At one point it was the literal only thing keeping the site afloat!

Arguably that point extended up to yesterday

Both Yahtzee (ZP) and Sebastian (Cold Take), who both ran my favorite two Escapist publications, have resigned along with him. I sincerely hope that the new management at the Escapist actually have a plan here, for the sake of the remaining employees (naive hope). Wonder where these two will end up, their work is great

Zero Punctuation is youtube reviews of games done in a funny fast way. As if the read text had no pauses, commans, periods. Hence zero punctuation. Some people said it made them think Charlie Booker was making game reviews.

Charlie Booker did do game reviews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Brooker%27s_Gameswipe

Yeah, I'd say Charlie Brooker's stint at PC Zone was more notable. That was the best gaming magazine ever and the world is shitter without it. Dave Woods, Jamie Sefton, Will Porter, Rihanna Pratchett. I'm genuinely amazed PCGamer beat it in the market and continues to this day.

one of a few YouTube channels I have to watch at normal rather than 2x

The article doesn’t have any context about what the Escapist is, or who or what anything else mentioned is (zero punctuation?). Anyone have an ELI5?

The Escapist is an online magazine covering games and the gaming industry. Zero Punctuation was a weekly series by reviewer Yahtzee Croshaw. ZP is a video essay given in the format of no punctuation. It has been around for a long time and probably was the only thing keeping The Escapist afloat for a while.

To give context for "a long time" - I believe it was started in 07/08. I remember when it was still "Fully Ramblomatic Reviews".

To give context for "only thing keeping The Escapist afloat" - this isn't the first time The Escapist has imploded. Around 2013/2014(?) there was a big blowup, I think The Escapist was bought out, and the new owners terminated a bunch of people and only (really) kept on ZP. The owners basically bought The Escapist for ZP. They ran as a skeleton for quite a few years, and recently (2021?) they started doing more stuff. Their 3 Minute Reviews have been pretty good, and the Cold Take series has been great.

This is disappointing for me. I thought they were going in a good direction. It's too bad that management decided that they didn't want to keep funding interesting, well considered voices.

It was officially started in 2005 with a format much closer to traditional magazines. It was a phase when people were making "e-zines", high quality PDFs distributed monthly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Escapist_(magazine)

*Edit: I'm referring to the whole publication, parent comment might've strictly meant the Zero Punctuation show.

That PDF-based "The Escapist" had some really great content some issues. Well researched, highly intellectual, and sometimes fascinatingly deep. That was the era I most followed The Escapist. Somewhere after that was when it fell out of my RSS feeds for being too shallow, I might have even blamed Zero Punctuation a bit for that at the time. That was always a weird dichotomy to me of well researched magazine on the one side and shallow, fast-paced, rambling video reviews on the other. I enjoyed some of the ZP takes at the time and I appreciate Yahtzee's ability to deliver interesting points sometimes, but it was always something I felt was of the vanguard of "shallow clickbait" that every game site had to be soon after that.

Anyway, I thought The Escapist died a long time ago, it's fun to reminisce about the one that I liked the most and to hear from everyone else about this later The Escapist that has died even to the point of angering the golden calf of ZP itself.

Yeah - sorry - I was referring to ZP exclusively. I had an indefinite reference (entirely my fault, I’m having a tough week), but I appreciate the history on The Escapist! Good info!

It’s a computer game thing most commonly known for Zero Punctuation, a review format. It sets itself apart by no punctuation and no pictures of the game being reviewed. Here’s Elden Ring: https://youtu.be/BW_h1zD2luY

Thanks! I feel cheated though, there’s plenty of punctuation! If you switch on the subtitles, it features periods commas and question marks more or less where I hear them. It’s just someone talking annoyingly fast.

The website is "games industry biz", and the first word of the article is "journalists". If you aren't familiar with Yahtzee, Zero Punctuation, or the Escapist, then that's really all the background you need.

I hope Croshaw takes this as an opportunity to expand his horizons. He's a funny, clever guy who has been beating the same drum for years. Zero Punctuation got old a decade ago but he kept wheeling it out week after week like a comfort blanket.

Meh tired of that mentality, we need more people who get good at their job and keep doing it well.

Getting good at your job and doing it well doesn't mean doing the exact same thing for 20 years. Many of the best musicians had multiple "eras" where their styles changed dramatically.

He's been doing game dev off and on and is currently working on Starstruck Vagabond [1], so he might spend more time on that. He's also written quite a few books.

edit: He and some other former Escapist crew are doing something, and their Patreon leaked [2]

[1] https://yzcroshaw.itch.io/starstruck [2] https://www.patreon.com/SecondWindGroup

That's cool, I wasn't aware of his books. I am more talking about his video content, I would love to see him do some funny videos that don't follow the mould of ZP.

His audiobooks are his best content, no joke. They're fast paced, funny, clever and action packed. Both his main book series are worth getting into.

He's a better writer than many famous authors, and narrates his own books as well.

Seconded. The first Star Pilot audiobook is excellent. And of course read by him and he has a lot of experience in delivering entertaining spoken content.

He also used to run two nerd bars in Australia, and has been involved in countless other endeavours.

I'm not sure what else you want the guy to do.

He has multiple video series, a live stream and about six novels i can name.

I thought he was pretty solid in "Extra Punctuation". It was a nice change of pace to hear him gush about Undertale or muse about narrative in games instead of his usual routine.

Give him a segment on Last Week Tonight.

I think this is a weird take. He found his groove, had a strong popular following, and enriched the lives of two generations of gamers. This is more of a positive legacy than most of us can hope for cranking out JavaScript for advertising companies throughout our prime years.

And as others note, he has hobbies and moderately successful side projects outside this envelope.

Reminiscent of what happened at Deadspin a few years ago[1]. The EIC was fired for some weird management BS and the entire staff resigned and eventually started Defector as a worker owned business which has been consistently profitable[2]. Hopefully some of the Escapist folks follow that route.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/business/media/deadspin-s...

[2] - https://defector.com/three-years-of-defector

> "I don't have the rights to Zero Punctuation"

Thats sad. Nothing gamurs does with it will be successful. Yahtzee, both in his voice and in the video content itself, is far too linked to Zero Punctuation.

I'm sure whatever Yahtzee does next will be successful but it will be lesser without the ZP name attached.

I hope it's just the name "Zero Punctuation" that he doesn't have the rights to, since he started making what was essentially Zero Punctuation but without the name "Zero Punctuation" before he was hired by The Escapist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWS9_nrKOPA

This is good. This is like a prey animal developing a bitter taste so predators will cough it up if they try to eat it. Or the villagers banding together to expel a rich businessman who wants to strip mine the local ecology.

I see that "private equity" buyout by Gamurs is going exceedingly well

Does anyone still read web publications that hail back to the golden era of Vice? I feel that they were in their heyday in the late 2000s and since have suffered a gradual, painful decline into irrelevance.

I think at a certain point many of them just changed to primarily or exclusively video and streaming content. It's easier to monetize, and it's where most of the attention of gamers is focused. A lot of it is cheap and terrible, but some of it is really good.

The execs who make these decisions ought to be named and shamed.

I don't know that would help anything.

https://gamurs.group/about

Looking deeper than names, several roles in the executive level changed over the last 12 months ('22 and one in '23). The CEO has been there forever.

So perhaps it's reasonable to guess they are in an acquisition phase, and are squeezing their portfolio to meet their new higher financial goals.

What do you think?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com