The entire Escapist video team quits!

The entire Escapist video team quits!

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cirian75

Original Poster:

4,394 posts

243 months

Thursday 9th November 2023
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The entire Escapist video team quits!

Including Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw has quit the Escapist over the firing of the editor-in-chief Nick Calandra

Unfortunately Cowshaw did not own the rights to "Zero Punctuation"

The former Escapist people including Croshaw have formed a post ZP new venture "Second Wind"

https://www.youtube.com/@SecondWindGroup

Lucas Ayde

3,771 posts

178 months

Thursday 9th November 2023
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Yeah, saw a YT report on it earlier.

Sounds like the corporates were trying to 'improve efficiency' by laying off people, especially those on good salaries like the Editor in Chief. Seems to have been the last straw for many and triggered a mass quitting.

Would be interesting to hear all the behind the scenes dirt that was happening - which I'm sure we now will biggrin

It's being generally presented as 'corporate greed' but I think the problem is that a lot of these corporate video game channel operations simply weren't paying their way because of the cost overheads of employing a large production team to generate professional-grade 'content'. Independent creators seemed to be often beating them with massively lower costs and comparable or better views. Also, a lot of the indies are pretty competently self-produced too.

Plus, doesn't help that a lot of the mainstream videogame 'press' just aren't trusted. You can take a look at the indy Youtubers and quickly figure out which ones are on the level with honest reviews (there are still quite a few shills there too, of course).

CT05 Nose Cone

25,307 posts

237 months

Thursday 9th November 2023
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ZP was the only thing holding the Escapist together, no idea how they'll survive without it. Hopefully their new venture goes better than those of other former staff like Movie Bob or Jim Sterling.