The Escapist Internal Meltdown in Wake of Firing

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• The Escapist Internal Meltdown in Wake of Firing

In a surprising decision, Nick Calandra, Editor-in-Chief of The Escapist, was fired today. In a sign of comradery, several content creators including JM8, Yahtzee Croshaw and Frost posted their resignations on X (Twitter). Nick has plans of creating an independent media outlet.

I was fired from The Escapist today.

I have declined my severance pay and will not be signing an NDA.

I'm incredibly proud of everything my team and I achieved over the last four years, and the community that we built together.

Figuring out next steps now and moving forward.

— Nick Calandra (@nickjcal) November 6, 2023

Today, I formally resigned from The Escapist and Gamurs. I don't have the rights to Zero Punctuation, but whatever happens you'll be hearing my voice again soon, in a new place. Join this discord for updates in the coming days: https://t.co/Kdmb5biPDN

— Yahtzee Croshaw (@YahtzeeCroshaw) November 7, 2023

I have resigned from my position at The Escapist/Gamurs in response to the treatment of my collogues. I love this team and will stand by them. I personally own the license to Design Delve and it WILL be continuing! Where is the question.. i guess we'll find out. Love you guys <3

— JM8 & Ludo (Design Delve) (@JM8andLudo) November 6, 2023

I am voluntarily parting ways with The Escapist.

I'll be taking my chances with the guy who took a chance on me. https://t.co/Eu09MpPsZH

— Frost of Rivia (@TheOtherFrost) November 7, 2023

And with that, I am also stepping away from The Escapist as of today.

But the creativity doesn't stop here. Watch this space. So much love to the incredible team I've been lucky enough to work with these past few years. ❤️ https://t.co/0QdPXCyFSv

— Amy Campbell (@sassqueenamy) November 7, 2023

Okay, I guess this is public now. I have resigned from "The Escapist."

The past four years have been some of the best of my professional life. I am very proud of the work that I have done there, and prouder of the people that I worked with.

It was an incredible team to be on. pic.twitter.com/qYoMLmsrWS

— Darren Mooney (@Darren_Mooney) November 7, 2023

An Artificial Future

The Escapist magazine is owned by the media conglomerate Gamurs. While it has not been publicly disclosed in relation to this recent round of firings, Gamurs did conduct a mass layoff earlier this year with employees. This was part of a push to leverage AI for content generation when they started listing job listings for AI Editors as covered by KnowTechie. Using AI for content generation is a result of trying to increase revenue through SEO, page views, and ads at a lower cost.

This plays a part in the reason the Internet is becoming more noise than useful information as companies try to force out as much content they can to rank better in search results. However, like the Live Service games model is showing, people only have so much time to engage with content. There’s only so much content that can be created before the quality is severely degraded. With AI being an emergent technology some ethical questions need to be raised about when is it appropriate to replace a person with AI. In my opinion, using AI to expediate the content creation process is doubling-down on a bad business model where clicks/views is more important than quality.