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Video game journalism is in poor shape. The reasons are broadly similar to the rest of the journalism industry, where one-third of the newspapers existing in 2005 will be gone by 2024, according to a new analysis.
Facebook and Google have sucked up most of the online advertising market, destroying the historic business model of journalism. Making things worse are conglomerate corporate owners, often little more than cynical content mills (or worse, private equity), who are constantly buying up publications and gutting them for a quick buck.
All the worst trends were on display on November 6, when Gamurs Group, owner of The Escapist, fired that publication’s editor in chief, Nick Calandra, along with some other employees. The supposed reason was lack of profits. As Calandra subsequently explained, Gamurs had bought The Escapist in September of last year, and invested more in new content, expecting Calandra to find new revenue sources to balance the books. But without giving him more than a few months for his strategies to play out, they abruptly reversed course and sacked him.
This turned out to be a large mistake. By far the most prominent figure at The Escapist was Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, whose review series Zero Punctuation has been a major success for 16 years—an eternity in the gaming journalism world. Croshaw resigned (even though he does not own the rights to the series) in protest as well, eventually along with the entire video production team at The Escapist. Without Croshaw, The Escapist is almost certainly done for.
In an attempt to cut costs and make the profit line go up, Gamurs executives made the line go dead.
But for Calandra and his colleagues, the enormous fuss kicked up by all this turned out to be something of a blessing in disguise. They had previously pondered setting up an independent publication—only sensible given that Gamurs was a company that some months ago fired 40 percent of its staff, and then put up a job posting for an AI editor, paid between $40,000 and 55,000, who would copyedit 200 to 250 AI-produced articles per week. But the abrupt firing and mass resignations got way more attention than they had anticipated.
Calling their new venture Second Wind, Calandra and company scrambled to set up YouTube and Patreon pages to capitalize on all the attention, and put out a rebranded version of Croshaw’s show, along with other series they did own.
As of November 19, Second Wind had over 300,000 subscribers on the former, and over 11,000 paid subscribers on the latter. Calandra told the Prospect that he had initially hoped to hit the $12,500 monthly revenue mark on Patreon in the first month of operation, but they are already close to $60,000. “Not only has the Patreon exceeded all of our expectations by a country mile, we’ve also done very well on initial merch sales,” he said. “We’re already talking with multiple sponsors and partners behind the scenes … We are most certainly on a path to being sustainable.”
Croshaw is also releasing a game of his own design called Starstruck Vagabond next year; Calandra said that depending on the money situation they hope to set up their own indie game label.
Most of today’s class of corporate executives is either uninterested in or incapable of doing the slow, patient work of building up a community of paying subscribers.
The Second Wind legal structure is still being ironed out, but “our plan is to be a worker co-op with equal shares among our co-founders which would be nine of us,” Calandra said.
The story is quite similar to how the publication Defector got started (which in fact was an inspiration for Calandra). When Peter Thiel bankrupted Gawker by filing endless pretextual lawsuits, the remaining properties of what had been Gawker Media were picked up by private equity goons. The new ownership promptly started meddling with the publications, especially prominent sports brand Deadspin, which led its notoriously freewheeling reporters to publish an investigation into the new management. In retaliation, they instructed Deadspin reporters to “stick to sports” and fired top editor Barry Petchesky. The whole rest of the staff walked out in protest, and later formed Defector, which is still a success funded almost entirely by subscriptions, with some 23 full-time employees.
Being publicly victimized by a faceless, profit-obsessed corporation no doubt helped Second Wind get a lot of sympathy subscribers. It likely also helped that they all stuck together—even Croshaw, who almost certainly could have made a lot more money by himself. It’s more appealing to support a solidaristic enterprise like that.
But there also does seem to be a real appetite for coverage, criticism, and commentary on games that the corporate media sector seemingly can’t produce. After all, the game industry is bigger than films and sports put together—there simply must be a lot of interest in this stuff.
The reason, I suspect, is that most of today’s class of corporate executives is either uninterested in or incapable of doing the slow, patient work of building up a community of paying subscribers and other diverse revenue sources that can fund any kind of media outlet. They want large profits, immediately, without doing any work.
But while Alden Global Capital and other private equity vampires have made a lot of money bleeding publications across the country dry, there aren’t many left to be killed anymore, and fewer by the day. And that’s why I suspect we’re going to be seeing a lot more cooperatives like Second Wind and Defector popping up over time. You can make it in the media business even in the age of Google and Facebook. It just takes hard work, dedication, and a decent helping of luck.
