RIP The Escapist?
James Cusworth / 6 months ago
If you don’t know or haven’t heard yet Escapist magazine, home of the people behind popular Zero Punctuation, Adventure is Nigh and one of my personal favourites The Stuff of Legends, has just practically killed itself. It most likely won’t come as a surprise to hear that the cause of death was corporate greed.
What Happened?
So as far as I know and to keep it short and simple the parent company behind the escapists, GAMURS, wasn’t happy with the amount of money they were making so they fired the Editor-in-Chief, Nickjcal. That’s the guy who basically made the escapist that we know and love today. With him being such an integral part of the escapist, within the following couple of hours, the whole video and editing team resigned with him… and that was just the start.
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.
— Nick Calandra (@nickjcal) November 6, 2023
I've watched many colleagues let go for the same reasons, and today was my day!
The list of resignations and firings have been pinned on their Discord, and continues to grow:
- https://twitter.com/Darren_Mooney/status/1721683973506568532
- https://twitter.com/TheOtherFrost/status/1721683636410261846
- https://twitter.com/DesignDelve/status/1721677391368425571
- https://twitter.com/nickjcal/status/1721640314203464045
- https://twitter.com/YahtzeeCroshaw/status/1721687212541280425
- https://twitter.com/JanjoZone/status/1721697403097542874
- https://twitter.com/RexiconJesse/status/1721719792007090444
- https://twitter.com/_mattjlaughlin/status/1721714880859042098
- https://twitter.com/willcblogs/status/1721704228182274123
- https://twitter.com/SigmaGears9/status/1721695395376415162
- https://twitter.com/ParkesHarman/status/1721692595166794023
- https://twitter.com/sassqueenamy/status/1721693823729066025
Following the announcement of their resignations and firings, they created their own discord server called “Escaped the Escapist”, ha, nice. They’ve announced that they would be going independent as they still own the rights to much of their content. Unfortunately, this does not include Zero Punctuation, but without Yhatz the creator and voice of the show, it doesn’t really matter, so I’m sure they will figure something out like what people in the discord are calling No Punctuation.
What Happens Next?
So at the time of writing, there hasn’t been any other update apart from the news that Nick and the group are going independent. In the discord server, Nick said there would be an announcement today November 7th so you can follow that here there will also be a live stream on Wednesday at 11 AM CT.
