One of the sad trends that have been going on in our world recently is a lot of “greed decisions” going on for no good reason. Those who “have the ability” have been buying up groups to try and profit off of already established fan bases and such and then get mad when things don’t “make it rain” as they hoped. When that occurs, people who did nothing wrong tend to suffer, and that seems to be the outcome of what’s going on at The Escapist. A key firing has led to the end of many things, including Zero Punctuation.
For those who don’t know what happened, The Escapist is owned by the Gamurs Group, and they decided to fire the editor-in-chief for the site, Nick Calandra. According to Calandra, the group fired him for “not meeting goals.” That’s something you COULD argue was justified until he revealed that the group never outlined what “goals” he was supposed to meet. He also cited that Gamurs Group didn’t understand The Escapist and how their fanbase was. In other words, it was a firing out of ignorance, and that caused many problems.
One such problem was that many at The Escapist were loyal to Calandra, who had been there for many years, and they wouldn’t stay if their friends could be mistreated like that. So many, including “Yahtzee” Croshaw, the voice of Zero Punctuation, bowed out and ended everything that same day:
This is significant for various reasons. Not least, the Zero Punctuation series has been going on for 16 years, and it’s well-known that Yahtzee’s hilarious reviews of video games were the biggest thing that The Escapist had. So, if he’s gone, the site will be a shell of its former self. Many fans have already come out and said that if the series is done, so are they with The Escapist because Yahtzee was “holding it up” over the course of the last decade or so.
If you’ve never heard his videos, the point of Zero Punctuation is that Yahtzee uses his very British voice to spell out the good, the bad, and the VERY ugly about video games. Yes, he did occasionally like video games and wasn’t afraid to praise them, but more times than not, he took a very “brutally honest” approach to reviewing games, and people appreciated that honesty, even if they didn’t agree with it sometimes.
Yahtzee has promised to continue his thing somewhere else, so we’ll have to wait and see where that will be.
