'Zero Punctuation's' Yahtzee, Entire Video Staff Resign From 'The Escapist' Following Mass Firings

Even from a greedy business perspective, this seems like such a completely boneheaded move for the owners of the website. What does the Escapist even have now that all these people are gone? How is it ever going to be able to attract any kind of new talent to make stuff for them?

Friendly reminder that you can scare Zoey Quim by showing her this image:

Never liked Zero Punctuation or Yahtzee, but nice to see someone stick up for their principles.

"In capitalism, infinite money is not enough, there must also be infinite growth."

So, these corpos, on a cocaine induced epiphany, decided that the best course of action was to fire the guy that nearly single-handedly made the group rise from the ashes and make it start growing followers and income because… it wasn't growing followers and income fast enough.

Now I understand why suddenly every video had ads and why they started to paywall swears.

I guess that they didn't expect that if they removed the main supporting pillar of the page, the entire building would come down with it.

Fucking Gamurs man. I worked in the "games journalism" scene for a few years and that group is like a hideous parasite that takes over websites and then slowly strangles everything even halfway-decent out of them. I worked for two different websites they took over a few years back (Gamepur and Dotesports) and they slowly pushed mandates to homogenize the content until you basically can't tell the difference anymore.

All while using rates as essentially a carrot and a stick. They'd raise what they pay on stories and then if the site even had a slight dip in traffic or revenue they'd cut back the rates to the previous one (or EVEN LOWER) for months.

To partially quote Yahtzee, he was brought onto the Escapist ship to patch some holes and make some improvements, over the years the ship rotted around everything he made and all that was left was a half-finished ship of Theseus.

It's funny, ZP was in fact, Yahtzee's show before the Escapist got on, but that's what happens when you sign up with corpos, it becomes "their" property.

I have 2 theories. From the sound of it, it sounds like they fell into the same trap that Yahtzee was winging about the AAA industry was in (as well as mist businesses these days in general). It doesn't matter if you're making money, what matters is the rate of growth. Suits somehow get it into their head that businesses can grow indefinitely and anything that's not consistently growing the rate of growth is considered dead weight no matter how profitable. Such is the trappings of shareholders and a culture of golden parachutes.

There's also the possibility there's office politics that absolutely detonated, not necessarily mass harassment (though knowing how "inclusive" Escapist claims it is I wouldn't doubt it), but an internal HR shift that the crew and such rebelled against and got canned, leading the others to see the writing on the wall and jumped ship.

I don't see The Escapist surviving into next month, let alone next quarter. You can't just not make content and expect to keep the lights on without the shareholders bailing out.

Man, all the new things they were doing (Cold Take, Design Delve, AiN, Stuff of Legends) seemed like the channel was going through a renaissance. All of this collapsing because Corpos gotta Corpo.
And before anyone else here links it, I might as well;

Man. This might mark the first notable disruption (excepting the occasional holiday or rare/busy week) in Zero Punctuation since it started. Crazy to think how tirelessly it had been tromping along from its inception until… basically now.

Escapist has been lumbering along like a dinosaur well after the meteor for some time now. I'm just surprised it hasn't collapsed sooner.

Well the end of an era. I was watching Zero Punctuation very early into it back when it was still on YouTube and featured small bits of unlicensed music that was a pun on whatever he was reviewing.