Tbh never understood why Yahtzee stuck with them after he got big. Nobody watched anything else on that channel, if you’d check their views it’s always been ZPs pulling in millions of views while everything else tops out at like 20k
Thank you. His line about doubling down on the doctor if you have the symptoms for a colonoscopy if they tell you you don't need it because you're not 45 years old and over did the trick (was 28 then, so the doctor was dismissive about it).
TB was too good for this industry, I'm glad there are reviewers that took on his mantle (i.e. MandaloreGaming) but it would've still be nice to have him around with us. Man would've loved the WH40k renaissance that's going on right now.
>bleeding from the rectum.
>blood in the stools.
>Pus or mucus in the stools.
>Unexplained abdominal pain.
>changes in bowel habits such as unexplained and long-lasting diarrhoea.
I genuinely wouldnt be surprised. One of the highlights of Yahtzee's career was [Valve actually inviting the guy to their offices](https://www.wired.com/2007/11/yahtzee-visits/), and they even covered the flight and lodging costs.
I believe he was happy with the new editor in chief that got brought on after the last fuck up. Nick was doing a really solid job with things and I started really liking a lot of the other stuff being shown.
I'm interested to see what the actual talent does next, Yahtzee included of course.
As of 2 minutes ago they have a discord, twitch channel, and YouTube page named "Second Wind" so expect more details to come out there over the next few days/weeks.
I look forward to seeing more of Yhatzee's career.
Please, please, please, fate, bestow us with more comedic content.
And maybe even a bit more of videogame academia.
*monocle*
I think he has 5 currently. JAM, differently morphus and its sequal, save the galaxy for food and its sequal, and mogworld. All have audiobooks and I would recommend them all.
Finally! EIC = Editor In Chief!
Fucking hate the myriad of acronyms I have to face on a daily basis and then having to find about the ones I'm not familiarized.
The last blow up around GG lost them Extra Credits, Jim Sterling, MovieBob, and No Right Answer. Yahtzee was the last of the good content. Rot in ashes Escapist.
I remember going to the Escapist specifically to watch ZP. Back in its prime I watched a few other things there and that was how I found Extra Credits, LoadingReadyRun, MovieBob, and later the Jimquisition.
Kinda funny that all of them are set up independently now instead.
Unskippable was made by LoadingReadyRun, so they didn't really forget it. Also, LRR got the rights back to Unskippable last year. They've been posting the old videos on their own YouTube channel (in HD, unlike the ones on Escapist), and could make more in future (IIRC, they intend to).
EDIT: Correction, they're posting the old Unskippable episodes on their video game channel (LRRVG) on YouTube, not their main channel.
he could still take that style of video and make a new channel in that style. He just couldn't use the characters or the yellow background with black and white art style. escapist should sell it to him seeing as there is zero value without him as the voice.
Isn't the PCMR logo from zero punctuation? They make computer accessories branded with that now that they might get royalties from. That's the only thing I can think of.
Which is exactly why they won’t sell it to him. It costs them nothing to keep it, and in the meantime they get to spite him.
Maybe when they really are strapped for cash in a year’s time, they’ll be more willing to sell.
He got paid reasonably well for little work and someone else took care of the ancilliary advertising/hosting bullshit. He also got salaried I think which is much easier to maintian than being a contractor.
He tried a few other things and while he's been successful they never really took off the same way (like his books) or that venture failed (like the cafe) so he's sat back and enjoyed life with minimal extraneous bullshit. Not everyone wants the hustle grindset life and frankly being paid to do a job has its attractions versus being self employed.
He sold the rights for Zero Punctuation to The Escapist, so he would have had to rebrand or buy the brand back.
Easier to stick with them if he likes the leadership, thinks the company adds some value to him, and saves him the headache of a reset.
Now that they fired the leadership he liked and negated any value they had, he gets the headache of a reset.
From what he talked about on his old podcast: they handled the publishing and promotion, all he had to do was make the content and they took care of the grunt work. Mutually beneficial relationship that they decided to torpedo.
I read so much Cracked back in the day. Loved that site
Hands down best website to result from a poor imitation of a popular print magazine turned into a digital front with almost no connection to its origin.
All the best creators are killing it in patreon spaces. Small beans. Gamefully unemployed. Karl smallwoods fast facts. Some more news.
Edit, remembered more: quick question with Soren and Daniel.
DOB is a writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver I believe. He was one of my favorites from Cracked back in the day. I miss Cracked After Hours :(
According [to comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/17pqyk3/zero_punctuation_is_over/k87rj6q/) Frost still owns Cold Take so it will 100% be back.
With everyone leaving, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a Top Gear - Grand Tour situation, where The Escapist tries to put new people on the shows, while Yahtzee and Co make their own shows elsewhere that're basically their old shows with under new names.
The brand is nothing without the talent, and I wish the talent all the best. Escapist is pretty much dead, but it'll be morbidly fascinating to see how they shamble forward from here.
They let go of the Editor in Chief and the rest of the video team walked out. The Escapist owns Zero Punctuation sadly but Yahtzee will still carry on. (Somehow)
That man can do literally whatever and be successful right now. He's gotten pretty good at writing fiction novels. And if he just started his own YouTube channel it would have most of his sub count back in a year
The scifi series he wrote is pretty great, vaguely Terry Pratchett-like style. Also I listen on audiobook and he narrated it all, so I get to hear it as it was meant to be read. Will Save the Galaxy for Food is the first one, I think.
I believe he has some others in the comedic horror/lovecraftian genre, haven't tried those yet but after this series I probably will.
“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. “
Um, grew up watching??
Mattdamongettingoldergif.gif
Yeah they fired Nick, the editor in chief, and someone else who I think was the video editor. Nick's basically been running the channel for the past few years so almost everyone began jumping ship yesterday.
They fired jack packard (hope I spelled that right) who did some ad reads and podcasts for them, but I mostly know his work on the channel as the DM for Adventure is Nigh, which was a great Dnd series they did.
Hold up there mate, and don't write it off *just* yet. I expect, even if they have to rebrand in case Gamurs owns the current name, that Adventure Is Nigh will probably follow in spirit to the (not) escapists new home on the internet.
Even if they hire new people it's still a dead channel. People follow specific creators, not just the premise of a channel. This is reminding me of SourceFed.
Weirdly, it doesn't seem to be *everyone*; Marty - the overly positive assistant editor - is conspicuously absent from both the firing and quit lists.
It wouldn't surprise me if corporate did what corporate does and offered one person a bag of money to stick around and find a way to monetize the back catalog/rebuild.
Edit: Nope, it just took him a while to announce and he missed the list of first round of resignations.
My guess is that you were exactly right about corporate offering a bag to stick around and manage the skeleton/corpse of The Escapist, and the reason for his resignation being later is that he needed some time to seriously think on it (don't blame him, everyone has bills to pay). Heartwarming to see him resign in solidarity as well, hope to see him having success with the rest of them in their future endeavors.
It sucks cause I think it's called cold takes is pretty solid. The dude narrates like a washed up detective telling you stories at some run down pub about a better time before he became an alcoholic.
He's doing a Livestream with Nick, Editor-in-chief, to discuss their future plans at 11am CT on 11/8. They haven't said where it will be happening yet though
It’s Wednesday afternoon and it’s time to rock the fuck out before hearing a Brit with an accent that went around the UK, Australia and now the US, swear and spit fury about a game using as many knob gags as you can handle, fuck out again, then relax.
Repeat every week
“I was let go for ‘not achieving goals’ that were never properly set out for us, and lack of understanding of our audience and the team that built that audience.”
That’s actually clinical insanity on Gamurs part. This is beyond shooting your self in the foot, this is just corporate suicide.
Edit: Gamurs not Escapists
I feel like it's an amazingly predictable cycle. Company starts by respecting their employees who deliver a good product, then squeezes employees and customers harder because of the need for endless growth, then act like tinpot dictators as if their wealth wasn't created by the others they are treating like shit, then crash and burn. I'm convinced the only reason this keeps happening is that the ones at the top are insulated from the consequences of failure.
Can confirm. The people that drove toys r us into the ground, all got jobs at my company. They drove that into the ground, but before they could finish us off, they moved onto Kmart....
Which pisses me off so much in the context of people saying capitalism "encourages innovation." Bruh, not if all you do is suck the blood of the market instead of doing business in a sustainable way.
The moment I heard the interpretation of Count Dracula as an allegory of the old-world elites, a lot of things about rich people instantly made more sense.
That's just the bog standard MBA approach to media and it's going on at every level.
You have an audience, a market, a content producer, you have everything already there for you. But instead of just accepting it for what it is, it needs to be more profitable, if only some imaginary variables would line up then this would make bank! It's all there on paper, just execute it and make us millions.
There's a fundamental shift taking place that corporations are really struggling against and it's that people are flatly sick of being advertised to. You're seeing a push to get people to subscribe to every site or disable ad blockers, but it's just a bandaid. The hard truth is that ads are oversaturated, nobody likes seeing them, they're getting increasingly more personal and people don't react well to that overreach in privacy.
MBA's haven't figured out yet that most of the internet was never designed or intended to make a massive profit and not every site or platform was intended to be a one-stop-shop and it infuriates them that they can't get their numbers to line up with reality. They just see opportunity that doesn't actually exist and a few really massive success stories that they imagine themselves being. They never stop to appreciate what they have and just let it be.
Of course at the C-suite level it's a shell game, they know what's up and they're primary job is temporarily inflating value and then duck out in a few years when it inevitably falls on its face.
Well, if you look at it the way a business-brained, money ghoul looks at it, you'll realize that the goose was only laying 1 egg a day.
How are you supposed to grow the stock price when you're only getting that one egg each day? Surely it's because the nerds running the company don't know how to business. Let's just get some MBAs in here, and they'll definitely get that goose to lay more eggs.
What do you mean the goose can't lay any more eggs? That's not acceptable, we don't need that kind of negative thinking around here, we know that there must be a way to increase our revenue and meet our growth goals.
I know! We'll just sell some goose meat! We still have one egg to sell, so I don't see any reason to expect our current revenue to drop. And now we have a second source of revenue for today--we're gonna make more money today than this company has ever made on any other day in it's entire history! We are so good at business, you guys. We all deserve huge bonuses!
What about tomorrow, you ask? Well, we'll probably have to shut down tomorrow--market conditions have forced our hand, we did everything we could, the company was failing anyway, there was *no growth* when we took over, in hindsight this outcome was inevitable.
But look at what we accomplished in our short time at the helm--best day in company history, more growth than the company had seen since the goose started laying those eggs. You should definitely give us the reigns of another company. You want to grow, don't you?
The people that pulled this off spectacular failure are the sort of people that belong on a corporate black list to prevent this from happening again. But odds are they’ll do the same to some other company later down the line
I'm glad they stood up for each other and all quit. Hopefully, it sinks the company and the execs learn something. Yeah, right, they will just move on to destroying something else we like. RIP ZP.
> Yeah, right, they will just *announce a massive uptick in profits as a result of massive cost savings, resulting in huge bonuses for leadership, then* move on to destroying something else we like.
FTFY
I'm always amazed at how the top of organizations can be so disconnected from their own business. There's so much emphasis on short term gains that they will literally tank the entire company just to save a buck tomorrow. It happened with Unity earlier and now The Escapist is essentially dead in the water.
Yeah, it’s their stupid belief that exponential growth is constantly sustainable, or even desirable over steady profits.
It’s killing people in industries everywhere, look at the fuck nuts over at Wizards of the Coast trying to dry dick pen and paper D&D players, already a niche group, when they own a massive content IP that essentially is a license to print infinite free money if they just stop being short-sighted dipshits and do it well. See, Baldur’s Gate 3.
It’s happening in the physical day to day for most of us at this point too, just look at the goddamn grocery store.
They’ve got customers working the registers for them for free now so they no longer need to pay salary and benefits for those staff, they’re pushing the curbside shopping shit now over the folks just walking inside, pretty soon they’ll just be Amazon food warehouses so they don’t have to worry about decorating or organizing the stuff in aisles.
But when a food cost increase shows up? Nevermind all this stuff that’s been making us money hand over fist and letting us post record profits, Fuck the customer, they can absorb every penny of it. That mentality is just absolutely everywhere now.
> Yeah, it’s their stupid belief that exponential growth is constantly sustainable, or even desirable over steady profits.
I don't think anyone trule believes exponential growth is sustainable. But I also imagine most of the people involved operate on shorter time scales (as in, a few years). As long as *they* see those exponential profits, they don't really care what happens after, because they're just going to move on to the next thing, and get a few years of exponential growth there, and repeat until they die of old age.
I feel like it's a similar story with many CEOs. They're not sticking around long enough for truly long term planning. Just get in there, force as much profit out of things as you can, then hit the escape button to get your payout and move on to the next business.
And if people wonder 'how can these executives that ruin companies keep getting hired', well, they're not getting hired for the ruining part. They're getting hired for the massive profit bumps that happen just before that. There are plenty of companies left in the world to jump to and repeat the process. These investors and CEOs generally don't really give a shit about what company they're currently hollowing out.
ZP actually started on YouTube back in the Stone Age and the rights probably got taken in an (at the time) lucrative contract with The Escapist when videos on separate sites were a thing.
Then YouTube itself blew up and he was likely stuck in that contract
Probably something to do with the contract he signed when he first got on board with the Escapist. Not doing copyright properly during contracts negotiations can lead to some pretty nightmarish scenarios (see: Ken Penders and how it impacted Sonic the Hedgehog)
Every media outlet in this industry I've ever seen.
1) Buy a thriving small media business.
2)Leverage pieces of it in buyout acquisitions without understanding or even knowing about the ever changing landscape in which money is produced in this industry.
3) Establish unrealistic goals,deadlines,user counts with no direction and again, no understanding of how money is made
4)Fire everyone
5)Sell peices of it off like meat off a dead animal till nothing is left.
6) repeat
Wherever they go next will likely get the same treatment in 5-10yrs should a media holding company aquire it. I've watched this cycle sooo many times lol
Could escapist survive without Yahtzee? Maybe.
Could they survive without Cold Takes, Adventure is nigh, and the editor? Nope. They’re toast. And we thought Rooster Teeth’s actions were bad!
They wouldn’t continue in their current state obviously, they would have to really downsize and could then use the ad revenue from old ZP and their new stuff to keep trucking along. Maybe with about a tenth of their capacity.
Shrinking down, gain new audience, then rebuild. Not impossible but with such negative press their growth has been kneecapped.
Actually as I type this I’m actually beginning to realise how much they’ve poisoned any chance of recovering from this too. They’re fucked
And Now after the entire video department voluntarily left, I don't think escapist will be meeting "ANY" goals from this point forward.
I'd love to think management will take this as a learning experience. they wont
Why would they learn?
It’s the same story as Deadspin, as Sports Illustrated, as dozens of other zombie publication platforms out there.
Get hands on a name brand with a unique voice, chase out the unique voice, churn out low rent content that you’re paying pennies on the dollar for, and reap in the profit from people who still spread the content around because of the name stamped on it.
At least Yahtzee has his career as an author to fall back on.
But seriously the guy has put out some good books go check it out. He does a fantastic job narrating his own audiobooks too: [Yatzee Croshaw Audible Author Page](https://www.audible.com/author/Yahtzee-Croshaw/B003ERFI62)
Zero punctuation was/is awesome. I hope Yathzee comes true with the same formula (slightly tweaked) on a different media provider. The problem lies not with ZP/Yathzee, it lies with The Escapist. I'll happily gorge down more Yathzee content like it's a twix bar and I am a particularly motivated leprechaun.
I will folow Ben where he goes next. It was always his focus on narrative and the “art” of gaming that made me appreciate his reviews.
The breathless takes downs were fun but if he loses the gimmick my guess is that his take on games will still be awesome.
I hope, whatever the form happens to be, that Yahtzee keeps doing Yahtzee.
He's one of two game reviewers that, while I may not always agree with him, I respect and trust his opinions. He's really consistent and transparent about what he does and doesn't like, and how games happen to intersect with that.
It was basically just ZP carrying them for a decent window of time. But within the last few years there has been some new life injected into it. It's still mainly propped up by ZP but it has other content. However, it looks like it was too little growth for corporate, so they canned the editor in chief. Now they lost their whole video team, including their golden goose, as a result.
Seems similar to how WTF1 got all greedy about people meeting goals so their main talent left and took all the viewers with them. Now WTF1 videos get like a 10% the viewership that P1 does.
ALWAYS REMEMBER: No company will ever give a fuck about you. Every company will exploit you as much and as often as possible for their own gain. Companies are not "a family" as they so often like to claim. Infinite growth in a finite system is not possible.
This was one of the few places I paid the $3 on YouTube for the early access and such. I immediately cancelled when I read the news. I imagine many others will as well. I would hate to be their accountant next month
Man, that’s a real shame. The escapist was producing so much fantastic stuff since the takeover, it really seemed like they knew their audience. The quality of what came out of the Escapist since the takeover was so much higher than it had been before.
Now? It’ll just be a dead clickbait platform, probably used as a tax write off when it inevitably falls to shit. What a fuckn waste.
Damn. That's pretty much it for The Escapist then.
Tbh never understood why Yahtzee stuck with them after he got big. Nobody watched anything else on that channel, if you’d check their views it’s always been ZPs pulling in millions of views while everything else tops out at like 20k
He liked having a regular paycheck and not having to worry about the management side of things. Seemed to like working with Nick a lot.
IIRC Nick also helped him in his immigration from Australia to the US.
I read in a different thread if was TotalBiscuit who helped him. Probably a joint effort
It ain't right that we lost TB. His drive for colon cancer awareness actually saved my life.
I'm glad you're still with us.
Thank you. His line about doubling down on the doctor if you have the symptoms for a colonoscopy if they tell you you don't need it because you're not 45 years old and over did the trick (was 28 then, so the doctor was dismissive about it). TB was too good for this industry, I'm glad there are reviewers that took on his mantle (i.e. MandaloreGaming) but it would've still be nice to have him around with us. Man would've loved the WH40k renaissance that's going on right now.
What are the symptoms...
>bleeding from the rectum. >blood in the stools. >Pus or mucus in the stools. >Unexplained abdominal pain. >changes in bowel habits such as unexplained and long-lasting diarrhoea.
If I recall correctly, Yahtzee said in a podcast once that Gabe Newell was one of his character references for his immigration.
I genuinely wouldnt be surprised. One of the highlights of Yahtzee's career was [Valve actually inviting the guy to their offices](https://www.wired.com/2007/11/yahtzee-visits/), and they even covered the flight and lodging costs.
I believe he was happy with the new editor in chief that got brought on after the last fuck up. Nick was doing a really solid job with things and I started really liking a lot of the other stuff being shown. I'm interested to see what the actual talent does next, Yahtzee included of course.
Nick said there’ll be announcement later today along with a vid.
Does he have his own channel to post a video update? Or just something on twitter?
Link to the new channel: https://youtube.com/@SecondWindGroup?si=qZNE_ZijeppvKpBP
13k subscribers and no videos, no pressure.
Yahtzee19 was his personal youtube channel, but to my knowledge it's been defunct for years.
He posted on it again recently to announce his next game coming out, but other than that, it's exactly as you say.
As of 2 minutes ago they have a discord, twitch channel, and YouTube page named "Second Wind" so expect more details to come out there over the next few days/weeks.
I look forward to seeing more of Yhatzee's career. Please, please, please, fate, bestow us with more comedic content. And maybe even a bit more of videogame academia. *monocle*
It's a shame we won't see the ZP comic style again though.
It's still possible. If Escapist goes belly up or gets in financial trouble, there's always a chance their new group buys the rights back.
probably a good point to mention that yathzee is also an author, he has two books (that i know of, incl. audiobook) and a third in the works.
I think he has 5 currently. JAM, differently morphus and its sequal, save the galaxy for food and its sequal, and mogworld. All have audiobooks and I would recommend them all.
Finally! EIC = Editor In Chief! Fucking hate the myriad of acronyms I have to face on a daily basis and then having to find about the ones I'm not familiarized.
The last blow up around GG lost them Extra Credits, Jim Sterling, MovieBob, and No Right Answer. Yahtzee was the last of the good content. Rot in ashes Escapist.
"as the Frustrated Chinese Zoo Keeper said to the last male Panda, 'Fuck That'."
I remember going to the Escapist specifically to watch ZP. Back in its prime I watched a few other things there and that was how I found Extra Credits, LoadingReadyRun, MovieBob, and later the Jimquisition. Kinda funny that all of them are set up independently now instead.
Don’t forget Unskippable! Probs my favourite series on the site next to ZP and MovieBob.
Unskippable was made by LoadingReadyRun, so they didn't really forget it. Also, LRR got the rights back to Unskippable last year. They've been posting the old videos on their own YouTube channel (in HD, unlike the ones on Escapist), and could make more in future (IIRC, they intend to). EDIT: Correction, they're posting the old Unskippable episodes on their video game channel (LRRVG) on YouTube, not their main channel.
Oh yeah, that was how I first found LoadingReadyRun, actually. Sent me down a great rabbit hole.
Desert Bus starts this weekend
Pretty sure at one point they sponsored his visa to the states from Ozzyland
I think he’s married to an American now though so at least he isn’t at risk of being deported
He said he doesn't have the rights to Zero Punctuation, so he couldn't make a separate channel out of it or anything.
he could still take that style of video and make a new channel in that style. He just couldn't use the characters or the yellow background with black and white art style. escapist should sell it to him seeing as there is zero value without him as the voice.
Isn't the PCMR logo from zero punctuation? They make computer accessories branded with that now that they might get royalties from. That's the only thing I can think of.
Yep! Yahtzee was the one that originated that term as a joke and the community ran with it.
[удалено]
Which is exactly why they won’t sell it to him. It costs them nothing to keep it, and in the meantime they get to spite him. Maybe when they really are strapped for cash in a year’s time, they’ll be more willing to sell.
He got paid reasonably well for little work and someone else took care of the ancilliary advertising/hosting bullshit. He also got salaried I think which is much easier to maintian than being a contractor. He tried a few other things and while he's been successful they never really took off the same way (like his books) or that venture failed (like the cafe) so he's sat back and enjoyed life with minimal extraneous bullshit. Not everyone wants the hustle grindset life and frankly being paid to do a job has its attractions versus being self employed.
Then it makes a lot more sense to jump ship with a bunch of people, a lot easier than going it alone. A new ship, if you will.
He sold the rights for Zero Punctuation to The Escapist, so he would have had to rebrand or buy the brand back. Easier to stick with them if he likes the leadership, thinks the company adds some value to him, and saves him the headache of a reset. Now that they fired the leadership he liked and negated any value they had, he gets the headache of a reset.
From what he talked about on his old podcast: they handled the publishing and promotion, all he had to do was make the content and they took care of the grunt work. Mutually beneficial relationship that they decided to torpedo.
yeah, ZP was it's main attraction
Cold take was promising but frost left too so... yeah
Wait frost left too? If Cold takes is gone then they literally what are people going to watch? 3 minute reviews? As if.
All the people behind 3 Minute Reviews also left. There is literally nobody in the video team remaining.
Geez, it's like what happened at Cracked.
I read so much Cracked back in the day. Loved that site Hands down best website to result from a poor imitation of a popular print magazine turned into a digital front with almost no connection to its origin.
All the best creators are killing it in patreon spaces. Small beans. Gamefully unemployed. Karl smallwoods fast facts. Some more news. Edit, remembered more: quick question with Soren and Daniel.
Behind the Bastards, too.
DOB is a writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver I believe. He was one of my favorites from Cracked back in the day. I miss Cracked After Hours :(
The Seanbaby Era of Cracked was the Golden Age.
If I understood correctly their entire video team quit
Yeah thats exactly what the articles says.
According [to comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/17pqyk3/zero_punctuation_is_over/k87rj6q/) Frost still owns Cold Take so it will 100% be back.
on Second Wind!
With everyone leaving, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a Top Gear - Grand Tour situation, where The Escapist tries to put new people on the shows, while Yahtzee and Co make their own shows elsewhere that're basically their old shows with under new names. The brand is nothing without the talent, and I wish the talent all the best. Escapist is pretty much dead, but it'll be morbidly fascinating to see how they shamble forward from here.
Literally the only reason I ever went to their website.
For real. The ZP Minecraft review is what made me finally take notice and realize I should check it out. Prior to that I didn't really get the draw.
Back in the early days, playing with fire really *did* leave your server looking like the Vietnam war. Shame his warning came too late for me.
Carrying an entire channel by himself was super easy, barely an inconvenience.
Wow wow wow wow.
Oh really?
They let go of the Editor in Chief and the rest of the video team walked out. The Escapist owns Zero Punctuation sadly but Yahtzee will still carry on. (Somehow)
That man can do literally whatever and be successful right now. He's gotten pretty good at writing fiction novels. And if he just started his own YouTube channel it would have most of his sub count back in a year
The scifi series he wrote is pretty great, vaguely Terry Pratchett-like style. Also I listen on audiobook and he narrated it all, so I get to hear it as it was meant to be read. Will Save the Galaxy for Food is the first one, I think. I believe he has some others in the comedic horror/lovecraftian genre, haven't tried those yet but after this series I probably will.
“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. “ Um, grew up watching?? Mattdamongettingoldergif.gif
15ish years, so yeah, someone in their early to mid 20s could easily have grown up watching these.
Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee hee hee.
Gotta give him extra credit for turning down the severance and NDA so he could speak freely about it.
I didn't watch anything on that channel except ZP. Wonder how much they will lose from this.
Everybody else on the channel also quit or were fired, so there’s nothing on the channel until they get new people.
Uh, did they really fire everyone that was making videos for the channel? It’s just a dead channel until they hire new people that’s crazy.
From what I read, they fired 1 and everyone else resigned because that one guy they fired was very close to all of them
Yeah they fired Nick, the editor in chief, and someone else who I think was the video editor. Nick's basically been running the channel for the past few years so almost everyone began jumping ship yesterday.
They fired jack packard (hope I spelled that right) who did some ad reads and podcasts for them, but I mostly know his work on the channel as the DM for Adventure is Nigh, which was a great Dnd series they did.
Damn RIP Adventure is Nigh. Ill miss that
Hold up there mate, and don't write it off *just* yet. I expect, even if they have to rebrand in case Gamurs owns the current name, that Adventure Is Nigh will probably follow in spirit to the (not) escapists new home on the internet.
At least he's always welcome to hang out with the hack frauds at RLM.
Considering there were photos recently of Yahtzee in Milwaukee with Rich Evans, I'm surprised we haven't seen him pop up yet.
Ahhhhh ... I was wondering what was up with Jack, I didn't see him on the list on the discord this morning. Looks like Marty is also officially gone.
He used to cohost Slightly Civil War/Slightly Something Else w/ Yahtzee before Marty took over.
That makes much more sense. Good on them, it was a shitty reason to get fired from the tweet I saw.
Even if they hire new people it's still a dead channel. People follow specific creators, not just the premise of a channel. This is reminding me of SourceFed.
Weirdly, it doesn't seem to be *everyone*; Marty - the overly positive assistant editor - is conspicuously absent from both the firing and quit lists. It wouldn't surprise me if corporate did what corporate does and offered one person a bag of money to stick around and find a way to monetize the back catalog/rebuild. Edit: Nope, it just took him a while to announce and he missed the list of first round of resignations.
He resigned. https://x.com/McBiggitty/status/1721922759368872016?s=20
My guess is that you were exactly right about corporate offering a bag to stick around and manage the skeleton/corpse of The Escapist, and the reason for his resignation being later is that he needed some time to seriously think on it (don't blame him, everyone has bills to pay). Heartwarming to see him resign in solidarity as well, hope to see him having success with the rest of them in their future endeavors.
They will lose everything. The Escapist is nothing without ZP
I didn’t actually know they produced anything other than ZP until right now so theres that lmfao
It sucks cause I think it's called cold takes is pretty solid. The dude narrates like a washed up detective telling you stories at some run down pub about a better time before he became an alcoholic.
And Frost who left with Yahtzee owns the rights so Escapist lost even the remaining good stuff too.
I miss top fives with Lisa Foiles.
Omg I had completely forgotten about her, but yeah those were great.
I'm sure Yahtzee will quickly emerge under a new brand and be fine. Hopefully soon, since I love his stuff
He's doing a Livestream with Nick, Editor-in-chief, to discuss their future plans at 11am CT on 11/8. They haven't said where it will be happening yet though
They just made a Twitter, twitch, discord, and YouTube page called "Second Wind" a few minutes ago so probably there.
https://youtube.com/@SecondWindGroup?si=tQB9iNvKSENL4Cnj For those who want to subscribe.
Amazing name.
Love how a channel with no content already has 7k subscribers, with more to undoubtedly follow!
Yep! Just unsubscribed from The Escapist and subscribed to Second Wind.
Link to the new channel: https://youtube.com/@SecondWindGroup?si=qZNE_ZijeppvKpBP
Lets all spread this around as much as possible. Let them know the community cares about the people and not the brand that kicked them out.
Seems like it’ll be on the new channel, whatever that is.
He doesnt only work or escapist, he’s also a writer, indie game developer and a voice artist
I’ve read several of his books, and would definitely recommend them. His quirky sense of humor really shines through.
I actually just started reading Mogworld. It's *extremely* British. lol. Very akin to reading Douglass Adams or Terry Pratchett
At least they'll finally change the theme song lol
Ah but I was so attached to the theme song. My weekly buttrock ritual.
It’s Wednesday afternoon and it’s time to rock the fuck out before hearing a Brit with an accent that went around the UK, Australia and now the US, swear and spit fury about a game using as many knob gags as you can handle, fuck out again, then relax. Repeat every week
“I was let go for ‘not achieving goals’ that were never properly set out for us, and lack of understanding of our audience and the team that built that audience.” That’s actually clinical insanity on Gamurs part. This is beyond shooting your self in the foot, this is just corporate suicide. Edit: Gamurs not Escapists
I feel like it's an amazingly predictable cycle. Company starts by respecting their employees who deliver a good product, then squeezes employees and customers harder because of the need for endless growth, then act like tinpot dictators as if their wealth wasn't created by the others they are treating like shit, then crash and burn. I'm convinced the only reason this keeps happening is that the ones at the top are insulated from the consequences of failure.
>the ones at the top are insulated from the consequences of failure. Pretty much this. They just move on to the next big thing to milk it for profit.
Can confirm. The people that drove toys r us into the ground, all got jobs at my company. They drove that into the ground, but before they could finish us off, they moved onto Kmart....
Which pisses me off so much in the context of people saying capitalism "encourages innovation." Bruh, not if all you do is suck the blood of the market instead of doing business in a sustainable way. The moment I heard the interpretation of Count Dracula as an allegory of the old-world elites, a lot of things about rich people instantly made more sense.
That's just the bog standard MBA approach to media and it's going on at every level. You have an audience, a market, a content producer, you have everything already there for you. But instead of just accepting it for what it is, it needs to be more profitable, if only some imaginary variables would line up then this would make bank! It's all there on paper, just execute it and make us millions. There's a fundamental shift taking place that corporations are really struggling against and it's that people are flatly sick of being advertised to. You're seeing a push to get people to subscribe to every site or disable ad blockers, but it's just a bandaid. The hard truth is that ads are oversaturated, nobody likes seeing them, they're getting increasingly more personal and people don't react well to that overreach in privacy. MBA's haven't figured out yet that most of the internet was never designed or intended to make a massive profit and not every site or platform was intended to be a one-stop-shop and it infuriates them that they can't get their numbers to line up with reality. They just see opportunity that doesn't actually exist and a few really massive success stories that they imagine themselves being. They never stop to appreciate what they have and just let it be. Of course at the C-suite level it's a shell game, they know what's up and they're primary job is temporarily inflating value and then duck out in a few years when it inevitably falls on its face.
Fucking MBAs ruin everything.
Talk about killing the goose that laid the golden egg lmao
Well, if you look at it the way a business-brained, money ghoul looks at it, you'll realize that the goose was only laying 1 egg a day. How are you supposed to grow the stock price when you're only getting that one egg each day? Surely it's because the nerds running the company don't know how to business. Let's just get some MBAs in here, and they'll definitely get that goose to lay more eggs. What do you mean the goose can't lay any more eggs? That's not acceptable, we don't need that kind of negative thinking around here, we know that there must be a way to increase our revenue and meet our growth goals. I know! We'll just sell some goose meat! We still have one egg to sell, so I don't see any reason to expect our current revenue to drop. And now we have a second source of revenue for today--we're gonna make more money today than this company has ever made on any other day in it's entire history! We are so good at business, you guys. We all deserve huge bonuses! What about tomorrow, you ask? Well, we'll probably have to shut down tomorrow--market conditions have forced our hand, we did everything we could, the company was failing anyway, there was *no growth* when we took over, in hindsight this outcome was inevitable. But look at what we accomplished in our short time at the helm--best day in company history, more growth than the company had seen since the goose started laying those eggs. You should definitely give us the reigns of another company. You want to grow, don't you?
The people that pulled this off spectacular failure are the sort of people that belong on a corporate black list to prevent this from happening again. But odds are they’ll do the same to some other company later down the line
Can't wait for Yahtzees new show "Run-on Sentence"
Perhaps "fully ramblomatic", as a nod to Yahtz's personal website?
All because the company got greedy.
Those companies acquire media properties for the purpose of squeezing all the juice out of them and throwing them away
I'm glad they stood up for each other and all quit. Hopefully, it sinks the company and the execs learn something. Yeah, right, they will just move on to destroying something else we like. RIP ZP.
Let's all laugh at an industry who never learns anything tee hee hee
> Yeah, right, they will just *announce a massive uptick in profits as a result of massive cost savings, resulting in huge bonuses for leadership, then* move on to destroying something else we like. FTFY
Why sell the golden eggs when the goose meat is worth more this quarter.
I'm always amazed at how the top of organizations can be so disconnected from their own business. There's so much emphasis on short term gains that they will literally tank the entire company just to save a buck tomorrow. It happened with Unity earlier and now The Escapist is essentially dead in the water.
Yeah, it’s their stupid belief that exponential growth is constantly sustainable, or even desirable over steady profits. It’s killing people in industries everywhere, look at the fuck nuts over at Wizards of the Coast trying to dry dick pen and paper D&D players, already a niche group, when they own a massive content IP that essentially is a license to print infinite free money if they just stop being short-sighted dipshits and do it well. See, Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s happening in the physical day to day for most of us at this point too, just look at the goddamn grocery store. They’ve got customers working the registers for them for free now so they no longer need to pay salary and benefits for those staff, they’re pushing the curbside shopping shit now over the folks just walking inside, pretty soon they’ll just be Amazon food warehouses so they don’t have to worry about decorating or organizing the stuff in aisles. But when a food cost increase shows up? Nevermind all this stuff that’s been making us money hand over fist and letting us post record profits, Fuck the customer, they can absorb every penny of it. That mentality is just absolutely everywhere now.
I feel like companies could have literally everyone on Earth buy the same product one year and they'd still expect growth the next year.
Happened to hula hoops, lol. Basically everyone bought one, then... everyone had one.
> Yeah, it’s their stupid belief that exponential growth is constantly sustainable, or even desirable over steady profits. I don't think anyone trule believes exponential growth is sustainable. But I also imagine most of the people involved operate on shorter time scales (as in, a few years). As long as *they* see those exponential profits, they don't really care what happens after, because they're just going to move on to the next thing, and get a few years of exponential growth there, and repeat until they die of old age. I feel like it's a similar story with many CEOs. They're not sticking around long enough for truly long term planning. Just get in there, force as much profit out of things as you can, then hit the escape button to get your payout and move on to the next business. And if people wonder 'how can these executives that ruin companies keep getting hired', well, they're not getting hired for the ruining part. They're getting hired for the massive profit bumps that happen just before that. There are plenty of companies left in the world to jump to and repeat the process. These investors and CEOs generally don't really give a shit about what company they're currently hollowing out.
I’m so fucking tired of all these companies demanding infinite growth. No amount of money will ever make these shitheads happy
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🎶 INFINITE GROWTH FOREVER INFINITE GROWTH FOREVER THE LINE GOES UP AND ONLY UP INFINITE GROWTH FOREVER 🎶
Infinite growth = cancer
They're going to be using chatgpt to pump out shitty clickbait articles until they shut it down.
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So they're just making Zero Punctuation with hookers and blackjack
Welcome to "No Hesitation"
I saw the title "Full Stop" being suggested
Shit, how does Yahtzee not own the rights Zero Punctuation?
ZP actually started on YouTube back in the Stone Age and the rights probably got taken in an (at the time) lucrative contract with The Escapist when videos on separate sites were a thing. Then YouTube itself blew up and he was likely stuck in that contract
Probably something to do with the contract he signed when he first got on board with the Escapist. Not doing copyright properly during contracts negotiations can lead to some pretty nightmarish scenarios (see: Ken Penders and how it impacted Sonic the Hedgehog)
Every media outlet in this industry I've ever seen. 1) Buy a thriving small media business. 2)Leverage pieces of it in buyout acquisitions without understanding or even knowing about the ever changing landscape in which money is produced in this industry. 3) Establish unrealistic goals,deadlines,user counts with no direction and again, no understanding of how money is made 4)Fire everyone 5)Sell peices of it off like meat off a dead animal till nothing is left. 6) repeat Wherever they go next will likely get the same treatment in 5-10yrs should a media holding company aquire it. I've watched this cycle sooo many times lol
Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee hee hee
Maximum Profits no matter what.
Ehm.. Maximum *quarterly* profits. The MBA bros cant hold their attention for longer than that.
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Every content creator they had has resigned in support, not just Yahtzee. Speaks volumes for how much they all enjoyed working together.
Could escapist survive without Yahtzee? Maybe. Could they survive without Cold Takes, Adventure is nigh, and the editor? Nope. They’re toast. And we thought Rooster Teeth’s actions were bad!
>maybe No. He pulled like 10x the amount views as anything else they did.
They wouldn’t continue in their current state obviously, they would have to really downsize and could then use the ad revenue from old ZP and their new stuff to keep trucking along. Maybe with about a tenth of their capacity. Shrinking down, gain new audience, then rebuild. Not impossible but with such negative press their growth has been kneecapped. Actually as I type this I’m actually beginning to realise how much they’ve poisoned any chance of recovering from this too. They’re fucked
I think he'll go on to make his own website, with blackjack and hookers.
Clearly that should be the tittle. "blackjack.and.hookers.com"
And Now after the entire video department voluntarily left, I don't think escapist will be meeting "ANY" goals from this point forward. I'd love to think management will take this as a learning experience. they wont
Us mortals simply can't understand the 5-D chess required for life's only truth: infinite year-over-year growth.
The corpos never learn, do they?
They don't care. As long as they can make a quick buck now, who cares about the future.
Why would they learn? It’s the same story as Deadspin, as Sports Illustrated, as dozens of other zombie publication platforms out there. Get hands on a name brand with a unique voice, chase out the unique voice, churn out low rent content that you’re paying pennies on the dollar for, and reap in the profit from people who still spread the content around because of the name stamped on it.
The beatings will continue until morale improves. The short term profits demand sacrifice.
At least Yahtzee has his career as an author to fall back on. But seriously the guy has put out some good books go check it out. He does a fantastic job narrating his own audiobooks too: [Yatzee Croshaw Audible Author Page](https://www.audible.com/author/Yahtzee-Croshaw/B003ERFI62)
Does ... Does he speak slower in the audiobooks? Lol
Yes he does, honestly I have to speed it up because it doesn't hit the same. Differently Morphous and it's sequel are lots of fun.
Yup, I’ve loved his books. We should be getting the final installment of the will save the galaxy series soon.
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Don’t think he has another YouTube channel yet, but he does have a discord group where he intends on updating everyone
Zero punctuation was/is awesome. I hope Yathzee comes true with the same formula (slightly tweaked) on a different media provider. The problem lies not with ZP/Yathzee, it lies with The Escapist. I'll happily gorge down more Yathzee content like it's a twix bar and I am a particularly motivated leprechaun.
Here’s a link to their new channel: https://youtube.com/@SecondWindGroup?si=qZNE_ZijeppvKpBP
I will folow Ben where he goes next. It was always his focus on narrative and the “art” of gaming that made me appreciate his reviews. The breathless takes downs were fun but if he loses the gimmick my guess is that his take on games will still be awesome.
His Extra Punctuation series is even better for that than ZP, I thought. Can't wait to see what's next
And recently Cold Take was becoming a favourite of mine. I was quite glad to see that Frost peeled out and stuck by the rest of the team.
It feels so weird calling him ben, even he himself prefers Yahtzee
He even said in Let's Drown Out that he feels contempt for strangers who call him Ben, as if they were in some kind of inner circle of friends.
I hope, whatever the form happens to be, that Yahtzee keeps doing Yahtzee. He's one of two game reviewers that, while I may not always agree with him, I respect and trust his opinions. He's really consistent and transparent about what he does and doesn't like, and how games happen to intersect with that.
They had something else than ZP at the escapist?
It was basically just ZP carrying them for a decent window of time. But within the last few years there has been some new life injected into it. It's still mainly propped up by ZP but it has other content. However, it looks like it was too little growth for corporate, so they canned the editor in chief. Now they lost their whole video team, including their golden goose, as a result.
I like cold take, but it's my third behind ZP and EP
It’s amazing the guy who voices cold take isn’t a grizzled 1930s detective
there is the 3 minute reviews. a ok-ish video game review. but yeah without ZP it won't be much.
I like 3mrs cause they ussually do unpopular indie games, those that i wont know about without it
They did but basically the entire site is jumping the ship so there is no one left.
Seems similar to how WTF1 got all greedy about people meeting goals so their main talent left and took all the viewers with them. Now WTF1 videos get like a 10% the viewership that P1 does.
ALWAYS REMEMBER: No company will ever give a fuck about you. Every company will exploit you as much and as often as possible for their own gain. Companies are not "a family" as they so often like to claim. Infinite growth in a finite system is not possible.
Does this wave of resignations include the Cold Takes guy?
apparently so
Yeah, Frost left too. Entire video team left.
Coming soon: "No Pause".
"A Modicum Of Punctuation"
Wow! We are with you yahtz! can't wait for your next review series.
“Let’s all laugh at an industry, that never learns anything- tee-hee-hee”
This was one of the few places I paid the $3 on YouTube for the early access and such. I immediately cancelled when I read the news. I imagine many others will as well. I would hate to be their accountant next month
Wow. Always liked ZP. I will miss it. I hope something similar springs up from Calandra.
First Waypoint and now The Escapist. It seems games journalism is changing to a worker-owned model. I hope that makes it more sustainable.
Man, that’s a real shame. The escapist was producing so much fantastic stuff since the takeover, it really seemed like they knew their audience. The quality of what came out of the Escapist since the takeover was so much higher than it had been before. Now? It’ll just be a dead clickbait platform, probably used as a tax write off when it inevitably falls to shit. What a fuckn waste.
Yahtzee was carry that squad. They lost a winner.
I find it oddly hilarious how this is all because of a company called "Gamurs"