This article was originally published on 11/7 and republished on 11/8.
When people ask me how to get into games journalism these days, my main piece of advice is “don’t.” I’m really not kidding, as while I am privileged to be where I am, it’s an almost impossible path to walk given the state of the industry and the instability found within.
Case in point, a wild scene unfolded last night as long-time gaming site The Escapist fired some of its team members, including EIC Nick Calandra, for reportedly not meeting goals set by its parent company Gamurs.
After Calandra was fired, Escapist staff members, contributors and producers all took to Twitter to announce they were also leaving the site, with many of them indicating they would be working on some new project with Calandra directly.
The departures and firings essentially cleaned out the entirety of The Escapist’s video department, including most significantly at all, the departure of Yahtzee Croshaw, the voice of Zero Punctuation, one of the oldest and most famous game criticism video series, and one I grew up watching long before I started doing this for a living. Croshaw resigned, but he does not own the rights to Zero Punctuation itself, so whatever he does next, it will be without that branding. Though it’s obvious the branding can’t survive without him, even if The Escapist retains it.
By all accounts Calandra was a great EIC, and clearly inspired a lot of loyalty in those working for him, given the events of last night. Gamurs feels like yet another company trying to squeeze blood from a stone with likely unreasonable growth targets in an industry where large increases are more or less impossible. Their video section pivoted from native video to mostly YouTube, which can gain more views but produce less revenue, but clearly the entire endeavor ended up backfiring, and now The Escapist does not have a video department at all, it seems.
As of this morning, The Escapist is still publishing new articles, as the site hasn’t lost all its writers or contributors. It remains unclear what level of staff or freelancers remain at the company, and what plans may be to rehire for a new video section. But it’s safe to say that without the old team or an icon like Yahtzee, it might just be over altogether.
As for Calandra and his new project, that’s certainly the more interesting endeavor, as that team has a lot of fans and hopefully they can put something together that works for them and their audience without dealing with corporate neck-breathing. More on that as details emerge. I’ve reached out to Gamurs for comment and will update if I hear back.
Update: We do in fact have more information about what many of the departing Escapist video staff members are working on now, as it’s now official that the entire video section of the site was fired or quit, down to the last person.
Nick Calandra, the fired Editor-in-Chief of The Escapist, has announced Second Wind, a company that will bring their style of video content back to life in a new format outside of Gamurs management. That does indeed include Yahtzee Croshaw, Zero Punctuation branding aside, who will make videos for the new channel, which already has almost 40,000 subscribers despite not posting a single video yet. There is also a Patreon which already has 904 members bringing in about $1,100 a month.
All of this would indicate that at some level, this has been in the making for a while, given that you don’t just spring up with a new company and logo and content plan out of nowhere, though it’s not shocking that things may have been trending this way for a while at The Escapist. It’s unclear if Calandra knew it was likely he would be fired, or planned to leave anyway, but regardless, The Escapist no longer has a video section at all and Second Wind is trying to create something for at least some of its departing members going forward.
It is difficult to succeed both within and without the corporate gaming ecosystem in the industry these days. Working with corporate may be unbearable but going independent carries plenty of risk in its “eat what you kill” format. Second Wind has the good fortune of a lot of initial loyalty from long term viewers, so hopefully it’s on a good path starting out.
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