10 ms·

The Escapist Lays Off Majority of Staff

66 points by jordigh 9y ago

FussyZeus 9y ago
There seems to be a serious contraction going on right now with the mass media surrounding games, and I'm alright with it. We're heavily saturated right now with an echo chamber of websites that parrot each other endlessly about video games, game culture, streamers and their various screwups, etc. I think this has been a long time coming, it sucks that we're probably going to lose some cool names in the process but overall I think it will be a good thing.
- anonemouse145 9y ago
  Quote unquote journalists who now write articles about being flown out to Vegas on the dime of a game maker they're intended to review, given food and lodging and parties, and saying it's all so garish and boring to get paid to eat caviar on a rooftop. No really that article happened. If some of these wealthy idiots could lose their jobs, that would be great. They're going to end up taking down some of the lesser people who are trying to reform the system as they go, that's not so great. But I'll take it.
- anonemouse145 9y ago
  Hold on, it was Santa Monica. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2015/6/1/8687867/rock-band-4-preview https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/20... "I'm standing at a safe distance, drinking fizzy water, eating puff pastry canapes and chatting to another colleague about politics in the Philippines. I'm having an OK time."
- ethbro 9y ago
  As far as I can tell, games "journalism" has been a cesspool of corruption and wink-wink kickbacks since the "old" E3. Semi-professional reporters w/ unsustainable income streams + large studio advertising budgets + massive investments in AAA games != recipe for integrity Steam refunds did more for game quality than most of the game journalism industry.
  - googletazer 9y ago
    right on all counts
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    Rock Paper Shotgun[1] is really good for the most part, co-founded by the writer of The New Games Journalism[2]. Their reviews don't have explicit ratings, which neatly sidesteps the fooforaw over giving things the "wrong" rating. They're on GamerGate's hit list (because somebody's girlfriend allegedly slept with one of their writers), which is another point in their favor. They're PC-specific, though. Any other good gaming sites out there I should check out? [1] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ [2] http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/assorted-essays/the-new-games-journalism/ http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/assorted-essays/the-n...
    - megaman22 9y ago
      Rock, Paper, Shotgun also used to run a regular column called Saturday Morning Crapshoot, which covered a lot of old, weird, and less than stellar games. I think they stopped, but the archive is good for a chuckle every now and then
    - sprafa 9y ago
      rock paper shotgun used to be amazing, but a lot of the early staff left to make their own games I think
      - taohansen 9y ago
        they are still amazing. see any of the recent articles on Observer or playing a spacefaring race of tortoise in Stellaris.
    - Uhhrrr 9y ago
      I think Nathan Grayson writing about his friends is pretty well established at this point: http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson Although he now writes for Kotaku, not RPS. techraptor.com and nichegamer.com are pretty good.
- spatulon 9y ago
  Games themselves are going through some interesting times. Several AAA single-player games are rumoured to have sold poorly (notably the Bethesda games Dishonored 2, Prey, and The Evil Within 2), and I've seen talk that publishers are now reluctant to fund those types of games. That would certainly explain why EA just closed Visceral Games and 'refocused' their single-player, story-based Star Wars game. Meanwhile indie game developers are gambling their life savings, with very poor odds. For every Cuphead - which was funded by the developers remortgaging their houses - there are 100 other indie games that sell ~0 copies. PUBG is sucking all the air out of the room in the gaming market, and I expect we'll see a lot of attempts to emulate its success in the near future, most of which will fail.
  - sgarman 9y ago
    I'd like the add that I don't think they will fail because they can't make something as good or better then PUBG but rather just like startups there is a lot of luck and timing involved.
  - kibwen 9y ago
    If video games weren't so utterly dominant as a medium I'd think that a 1983-esque crash was around the corner. I'm blown away by the bald-faced, not-even-trying-to-hide-it, grab-a-quick-buck shitware that's choking Steam these days. And the entire mobile gaming industry, having long since won the race to the bottom, appears to be a glut of thinly-veiled Skinner boxes banking on bored whales and financially-unsupervised children. And the weird thing is that, otherwise, we're experiencing a golden era of video games. But organic discovery is harder than ever, on every platform.
    - gozur88 9y ago
      I don't think we're going to see a crash, but a correction is definitely in order. Companies producing AAA games have been doing design by committee for a few years now, trying to distill its essence into a factory line product the same way movie studios give us the same Joseph Campbell plot in different skin over and over. Still, you're probably right about the golden era and the difficulty of discovery. It's a shame game journalism is so corrupt.
- indubitable 9y ago
  I think the growth of social media (and consumer reviews such as Steam) is a simple explanation. Gaming mass media is full of reviewers who often do not seem particularly interested in the titles they're reviewing, and are operating in a situation where there is always implicit (and sometimes explicit) coercion from big advertisers. Would gamers prefer that or would they prefer to listen to thousands of other gamers who presumably enjoy the a game's genre and almost certainly bought the game with positive expectations? I don't think there's any real competition there. In a way it's the same problem that media at large is facing. The media had a monopoly on information for decades. The decentralization of information and access provided by the internet destroyed that shockingly quickly. And so they're left to create draws other than information itself. And I would agree this will be a good thing. I don't see any particular benefits to the centralization of information. Like any centralized system it just creates a single point of failure.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Jach 9y ago
There's really just been Yahtzee left for quite some time, glad they made it more official.
- ticviking 9y ago
  He should buy them out or something
- xor1 9y ago
  Reminder that Something Awful could have had Yahtzee / Zero Punctuation and remained somewhat relevant, but Lowtax gave him an insultingly low offer amounting to something like $40 in forum credit per episode.
  - Apes 9y ago
    I don't think Lowtax or SomethingAwful did much after Lowtax had his brains punched into mush by Uwe Boll.
    - Endy 9y ago
      The strength of SA isn't their public content, it's the community and the forum. But if you do want their public content, I find that the main important output is LPs.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  Yahtzee was only funny because it was a brash different kind of game review. Soon realized the shtick wasn't actually that funny.
  - fao_ 9y ago
    I mean, for me it's not quite as outright laugh-out-loud-funny as it was several years ago (Only part of which I find is to do with the vibe of it), but it's still amusing to watch if you have some time to kill outside of a project.
SilasX 9y ago
That would be an expulsion, not an exodus. "Exodus" would imply they all chose to leave.
- jandrese 9y ago
  They just all suddenly left* one day. * After we stopped paying them and took away their access.
  - imron 9y ago
    Your asterisked comment is the whole point. It wasn't the staff all choosing to leave, it was the staff being told to leave. That'd be two very different stories, which is why 'exodus' would be misleading.
    - Kiro 9y ago
      Pretty sure that was the point of the comment. You read it too literally.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  I’m truly shocked that place is still around to begin with, whatever you want to call it.
- skeletonjelly 9y ago
  It'd be like immigrating away from a country...
- dang 9y ago
  Ok we took that word out of the title above.
- smcl 9y ago
  Confusion over these sort of terms is pretty common. One that really grates for me is that the UK media use the word "refusenik" to mean "someone who is stubborn and refuses to do something" (originally it referred to those denied permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union). I wonder if there's a term for these sort of words - those which are commonly confused for something the opposite of what they actually mean...
Jare 9y ago
I still remember the launch of The Escapist. It was so different with its styling and content, sort of an online version of the Edge magazine. Alas that didn't last long.
- loudandskittish 9y ago
  I want to comment on and lament the loss of the "good old days," but I'm biased; I wrote several articles for them. They paid more than pretty much any other online only publication and were not only receptive to, but outright encouraged cold queries.
- rodgerd 9y ago
  It was odd to watch them do a hard turn from applying more thoughtful analysis of games and gaming culture to hopping on the GamerGate train. I assume that didn't pan out for them as they'd hoped.
  - Lazare 9y ago
    Oh, so that's what happened to them. I recall seeing some really good content from them a while back, but it never was quite good enough that I'd go there explicitly to check them out. Then without really realizing it, I stopped seeing links to their content, and sort of forgot they'd ever existed. Some quick googling shows why: They'd gone totally off the deep end. What a baffling way for them to end. I wonder if it was just a (very ill-advised) tactic to try and boost traffic, or if the owner/editors were actually true believers?
- kibwen 9y ago
  It's funny because in retrospect their paginated, dual-column, tiny-viewport UI is the sort of unresponsive skeumorphism that we make fun of today. At the time though it absolutely did lend it a certain air of professionalism, by deliberately styling itself after magazines to elevate it above the emerging gamer-blog tabloids (one of which, in full disclosure, I was paid to populate).
CM30 9y ago
I suspect in part this had to do with them losing some of the early series that brought people to the site and not finding any good replacements. I mean yes, Zero Punctuation is still based there. But stuff like Extra Credits isn't, nor is the Jimquisition or MovieBob or god knows how many other past series. Nowadays, popular web series like that bring in more interest than written articles do. Alas, they didn't quite find a new golden goose after some of their original ones left, so they ended up with Yahtzee as the only real attraction there. Probably also doesn't help that gaming news sites aren't the moneymaker they used to be, with the people that visit them generally not paying for subscriptions or clicking on ads.
- Nzen 9y ago
  http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/galleries http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/galleries has some of their discontinued series (ex rhymedown spectacular, I hit it with my axe, and unskippable).

66 points by jordigh 9y ago

There seems to be a serious contraction going on right now with the mass media surrounding games, and I'm alright with it. We're heavily saturated right now with an echo chamber of websites that parrot each other endlessly about video games, game culture, streamers and their various screwups, etc. I think this has been a long time coming, it sucks that we're probably going to lose some cool names in the process but overall I think it will be a good thing.

anonemouse145 9y ago
Quote unquote journalists who now write articles about being flown out to Vegas on the dime of a game maker they're intended to review, given food and lodging and parties, and saying it's all so garish and boring to get paid to eat caviar on a rooftop. No really that article happened. If some of these wealthy idiots could lose their jobs, that would be great. They're going to end up taking down some of the lesser people who are trying to reform the system as they go, that's not so great. But I'll take it.
anonemouse145 9y ago
Hold on, it was Santa Monica. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2015/6/1/8687867/rock-band-4-preview https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/20... "I'm standing at a safe distance, drinking fizzy water, eating puff pastry canapes and chatting to another colleague about politics in the Philippines. I'm having an OK time."
ethbro 9y ago
As far as I can tell, games "journalism" has been a cesspool of corruption and wink-wink kickbacks since the "old" E3. Semi-professional reporters w/ unsustainable income streams + large studio advertising budgets + massive investments in AAA games != recipe for integrity Steam refunds did more for game quality than most of the game journalism industry.
- googletazer 9y ago
  right on all counts
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Rock Paper Shotgun[1] is really good for the most part, co-founded by the writer of The New Games Journalism[2]. Their reviews don't have explicit ratings, which neatly sidesteps the fooforaw over giving things the "wrong" rating. They're on GamerGate's hit list (because somebody's girlfriend allegedly slept with one of their writers), which is another point in their favor. They're PC-specific, though. Any other good gaming sites out there I should check out? [1] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ [2] http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/assorted-essays/the-new-games-journalism/ http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/assorted-essays/the-n...
  - megaman22 9y ago
    Rock, Paper, Shotgun also used to run a regular column called Saturday Morning Crapshoot, which covered a lot of old, weird, and less than stellar games. I think they stopped, but the archive is good for a chuckle every now and then
  - sprafa 9y ago
    rock paper shotgun used to be amazing, but a lot of the early staff left to make their own games I think
    - taohansen 9y ago
      they are still amazing. see any of the recent articles on Observer or playing a spacefaring race of tortoise in Stellaris.
  - Uhhrrr 9y ago
    I think Nathan Grayson writing about his friends is pretty well established at this point: http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson Although he now writes for Kotaku, not RPS. techraptor.com and nichegamer.com are pretty good.
spatulon 9y ago
Games themselves are going through some interesting times. Several AAA single-player games are rumoured to have sold poorly (notably the Bethesda games Dishonored 2, Prey, and The Evil Within 2), and I've seen talk that publishers are now reluctant to fund those types of games. That would certainly explain why EA just closed Visceral Games and 'refocused' their single-player, story-based Star Wars game. Meanwhile indie game developers are gambling their life savings, with very poor odds. For every Cuphead - which was funded by the developers remortgaging their houses - there are 100 other indie games that sell ~0 copies. PUBG is sucking all the air out of the room in the gaming market, and I expect we'll see a lot of attempts to emulate its success in the near future, most of which will fail.
- sgarman 9y ago
  I'd like the add that I don't think they will fail because they can't make something as good or better then PUBG but rather just like startups there is a lot of luck and timing involved.
- kibwen 9y ago
  If video games weren't so utterly dominant as a medium I'd think that a 1983-esque crash was around the corner. I'm blown away by the bald-faced, not-even-trying-to-hide-it, grab-a-quick-buck shitware that's choking Steam these days. And the entire mobile gaming industry, having long since won the race to the bottom, appears to be a glut of thinly-veiled Skinner boxes banking on bored whales and financially-unsupervised children. And the weird thing is that, otherwise, we're experiencing a golden era of video games. But organic discovery is harder than ever, on every platform.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    I don't think we're going to see a crash, but a correction is definitely in order. Companies producing AAA games have been doing design by committee for a few years now, trying to distill its essence into a factory line product the same way movie studios give us the same Joseph Campbell plot in different skin over and over. Still, you're probably right about the golden era and the difficulty of discovery. It's a shame game journalism is so corrupt.
indubitable 9y ago
I think the growth of social media (and consumer reviews such as Steam) is a simple explanation. Gaming mass media is full of reviewers who often do not seem particularly interested in the titles they're reviewing, and are operating in a situation where there is always implicit (and sometimes explicit) coercion from big advertisers. Would gamers prefer that or would they prefer to listen to thousands of other gamers who presumably enjoy the a game's genre and almost certainly bought the game with positive expectations? I don't think there's any real competition there. In a way it's the same problem that media at large is facing. The media had a monopoly on information for decades. The decentralization of information and access provided by the internet destroyed that shockingly quickly. And so they're left to create draws other than information itself. And I would agree this will be a good thing. I don't see any particular benefits to the centralization of information. Like any centralized system it just creates a single point of failure.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Jach 9y ago

There's really just been Yahtzee left for quite some time, glad they made it more official.

ticviking 9y ago
He should buy them out or something
xor1 9y ago
Reminder that Something Awful could have had Yahtzee / Zero Punctuation and remained somewhat relevant, but Lowtax gave him an insultingly low offer amounting to something like $40 in forum credit per episode.
- Apes 9y ago
  I don't think Lowtax or SomethingAwful did much after Lowtax had his brains punched into mush by Uwe Boll.
  - Endy 9y ago
    The strength of SA isn't their public content, it's the community and the forum. But if you do want their public content, I find that the main important output is LPs.
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
Yahtzee was only funny because it was a brash different kind of game review. Soon realized the shtick wasn't actually that funny.
- fao_ 9y ago
  I mean, for me it's not quite as outright laugh-out-loud-funny as it was several years ago (Only part of which I find is to do with the vibe of it), but it's still amusing to watch if you have some time to kill outside of a project.

SilasX 9y ago

That would be an expulsion, not an exodus. "Exodus" would imply they all chose to leave.

jandrese 9y ago
They just all suddenly left* one day. * After we stopped paying them and took away their access.
- imron 9y ago
  Your asterisked comment is the whole point. It wasn't the staff all choosing to leave, it was the staff being told to leave. That'd be two very different stories, which is why 'exodus' would be misleading.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    Pretty sure that was the point of the comment. You read it too literally.
QAPereo 9y ago
I’m truly shocked that place is still around to begin with, whatever you want to call it.
skeletonjelly 9y ago
It'd be like immigrating away from a country...
dang 9y ago
Ok we took that word out of the title above.
smcl 9y ago
Confusion over these sort of terms is pretty common. One that really grates for me is that the UK media use the word "refusenik" to mean "someone who is stubborn and refuses to do something" (originally it referred to those denied permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union). I wonder if there's a term for these sort of words - those which are commonly confused for something the opposite of what they actually mean...

Jare 9y ago

I still remember the launch of The Escapist. It was so different with its styling and content, sort of an online version of the Edge magazine. Alas that didn't last long.

loudandskittish 9y ago
I want to comment on and lament the loss of the "good old days," but I'm biased; I wrote several articles for them. They paid more than pretty much any other online only publication and were not only receptive to, but outright encouraged cold queries.
rodgerd 9y ago
It was odd to watch them do a hard turn from applying more thoughtful analysis of games and gaming culture to hopping on the GamerGate train. I assume that didn't pan out for them as they'd hoped.
- Lazare 9y ago
  Oh, so that's what happened to them. I recall seeing some really good content from them a while back, but it never was quite good enough that I'd go there explicitly to check them out. Then without really realizing it, I stopped seeing links to their content, and sort of forgot they'd ever existed. Some quick googling shows why: They'd gone totally off the deep end. What a baffling way for them to end. I wonder if it was just a (very ill-advised) tactic to try and boost traffic, or if the owner/editors were actually true believers?
kibwen 9y ago
It's funny because in retrospect their paginated, dual-column, tiny-viewport UI is the sort of unresponsive skeumorphism that we make fun of today. At the time though it absolutely did lend it a certain air of professionalism, by deliberately styling itself after magazines to elevate it above the emerging gamer-blog tabloids (one of which, in full disclosure, I was paid to populate).

CM30 9y ago

I suspect in part this had to do with them losing some of the early series that brought people to the site and not finding any good replacements. I mean yes, Zero Punctuation is still based there. But stuff like Extra Credits isn't, nor is the Jimquisition or MovieBob or god knows how many other past series. Nowadays, popular web series like that bring in more interest than written articles do. Alas, they didn't quite find a new golden goose after some of their original ones left, so they ended up with Yahtzee as the only real attraction there. Probably also doesn't help that gaming news sites aren't the moneymaker they used to be, with the people that visit them generally not paying for subscriptions or clicking on ads.

Nzen 9y ago
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/galleries http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/galleries has some of their discontinued series (ex rhymedown spectacular, I hit it with my axe, and unskippable).