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Games

Zero Punctuation Ends After 16 Years (bbc.co.uk) 43

Posted by BeauHD from the end-of-an-era dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The star of long-running videogame review series Zero Punctuation has quit after 16 years. Ben Croshaw, known as Yahtzee, was famous for his very fast, very rude, quickfire opinions on the latest games. His five-minute videos featuring crude cartoon characters were a weekly feature on gaming site The Escapist. But Yahtzee announced he was quitting the site with several colleagues after their editor-in-chief Nick Calandra was fired.

He said he wouldn't be taking the Zero Punctuation name with him, but fans would hear his voice again 'soon, in a new place'. Zero Punctuation, launched in 2007, is The Escapist's most popular feature, with videos from the series comfortably outranking others on its YouTube channel. [...] Yahtzee's departure followed Calandra's, who said he was fired by The Escapist's parent company Gamurs for "not achieving goals that were never properly set out for us." The pair were followed out of the door by a number of colleagues, most of them from the site's video team.
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Zero Punctuation Ends After 16 Years More

Zero Punctuation Ends After 16 Years

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  • Yahtzee will continue the series (Score:5, Informative)

    by astyanax ( 8365 ) on Friday November 10, 2023 @08:49PM (#63996845) Homepage

    As Fully Ramblomatic (the original name for ZP from before The Escapist) with the Second Wind Group (https://www.youtube.com/@SecondWindGroup) which is comprised of the ex-Escapist staff - very excited to see how much they have gotten up and running in the last couple days since the mass exodus!

  • nothing worse then working for pompous high ups who have no idea how to actually run a company. good on them for going off on there own.

    • With the entire video team (*) following Nick after his departure, I think those higher-ups will soon realize they shot themselves in the foot with this decision. A brand does't have lasting value once whatever people liked about the brand is no longer there.

      (*) TFA says "a number", but after hearing the names in the Second Wind announcement stream, I think it's pretty much everyone on the video team. In any case, no new videos have been posted on The Escapist's channel for a few days.

  • The usual Venture Capital bulls@#$ (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sarusa ( 104047 ) on Saturday November 11, 2023 @02:21AM (#63997189)

    Escapist got bought by GAMURS last year - yes you read that right, some venture capital twats actually named their company GAMURS and started buying up properties left and right (though not nearly on the scale of Embracer).

    And as usual they have no actual idea about games or gaming journalism, and all they care about is squeezing blood money out of a turnip. So in this case they fired Nick and then the entire video production staff, including Yahtzee, quit. I hope they have better luck on their own again. I didn't always agree with Zero Punctuation, but I watched it every week and it always got at least one laugh out of me.

    • Re:The usual Venture Capital bulls@#$ (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday November 11, 2023 @03:04AM (#63997211)

      I never understood the idea of buying a company for the staff. Twice so in this economy. If you buy my company, the only thing that would happen is that everyone moves next door and you own an empty building with a name that's quickly known to be totally tarnished and worthless because all that made this name worth something is now with $new_company_name.

      And the industry is tiny enough that everyone will know that the instant it happens.

      • You can buy it and keep the staff happy, of course.

        • You probably can't do that profitably, though, because if you could, the organization you bought it from already would have.

          • Not necessarily. Some companies are in fact run by directionless idiots, or just people with different goals in mind.

            Think of it this way. Just because when I was young my room was messy, doesn't mean I couldn't clean it. I would clean it ... when my mother told me to. Running a company can be thought of in the same vein.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        I never understood the idea of buying a company for the staff. Twice so in this economy. If you buy my company, the only thing that would happen is that everyone moves next door and you own an empty building with a name that's quickly known to be totally tarnished and worthless because all that made this name worth something is now with $new_company_name.

        And the industry is tiny enough that everyone will know that the instant it happens.

        I suspect in this case Escapist was not bought for the staff, rather the users. Of course the C Level execs don't care about the users, they just want to be able to say they get X thousand unique users per day to sell advertising. The staff get pushed to facilitate more advertising and to monetise users. This, as you points out tarnishes and devalues the name, once that reaches a point where it's not worth trying to squeeze users for cash any more the company gets broken up and sold off. The parent company

        • That only works for as long as the users stay. And the users don't give a fuck about "The Escapist" or any label, they care for the content they came to see. If there is no content, they won't come.

          Frankly, I have never seen any kind of content of The Escapist except Zero Punctuation. I don't give a fuck about anything else from The Escapist. If they can't provide new episodes of Zero Punctuation (and of course in the same quality), they won't have my eyeballs to sell anymore.

    • Interestingly, the Gamurs group culture rules include "Don't be an asshole." They also have a 4.8 out of 5 on glass door, with 30 reviews, enough to likely be valid. It seems like Gamurs might be better than you'd expect.

      While we know Nick's side of the story and we know the Escapist video crew sided with them, it isn't clear that the entire group is bad--it might be that a single executive is simply "overzealous" or even a bad personality interaction. Nick specifically requested folks to not harass Escapis

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sarusa ( 104047 )

        A lot of these companies now insist that every employee post a positive glassdoor review or get fired. It's basically part of the playbook like gaming Amazon with fake reviews.

        It might also be legitimately great to work for the main GAMURS company (other than having to tell people where you work with such a terrible name), but it's obviously really shitty to work for the companies they scarf up.

        • Good point, it could be they are forcing folks to vote or be fired. As for the rule, I agree it doesn't prove anything, but it was enough to give me pause and consider it could be better than expected--on average. Obviously not for the Escapist video folks.

          It could also have just turned from good to bad. Like all relationships, relationships under financial stress tend to show the worst in people. Venture backed startups depend on capital. Given that the cost of money is up about 10 fold (from .5% to 5%), t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sarusa ( 104047 )

        And (sorry for the double post), 'don't be an asshole' is obviously boilerplate insincere corporate assholery like Google's 'don't be evil' when they're routinely evil. It's just PR.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by a5y ( 938871 )

        Interestingly, the Gamurs group culture rules include "Don't be an asshole." They also have a 4.8 out of 5 on glass door, with 30 reviews, enough to likely be valid. It seems like Gamurs might be better than you'd expect.

        Seemingly benevolent rules aren't meaningful evidence that a company isn't awful. A common practice in HR of awful companies is selective enforcement of rules.

        • And public affirmations of sainthood are usually a mask worn by hypocrites.

          You don't have to advertise it if you're a good person. People know.

    • The stated reason for firing Nick was that the channel wasn't making enough money. The Gamurs owners are probably congratulating themselves on getting rid of an underperforming property and doing so in a way that they don't have to pay a lot of severance. There are probably even tax benefits for when a company implodes on its own rather than being intentionally shut down by its owners. (Not an accountant, just cynical.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Escapist got bought by GAMURS last year - yes you read that right, some venture capital twats actually named their company GAMURS and started buying up properties left and right (though not nearly on the scale of Embracer).

      And as usual they have no actual idea about games or gaming journalism, and all they care about is squeezing blood money out of a turnip. So in this case they fired Nick and then the entire video production staff, including Yahtzee, quit. I hope they have better luck on their own again. I didn't always agree with Zero Punctuation, but I watched it every week and it always got at least one laugh out of me.

      Its not like Escapist was a decent web site before. I used to watch ZP but then they started screwing around with adblockers and trying to get people to disable them. It was easier just to stop watching.

      Hopefully something good can come from Yahtzee and the others on their own.

  • There's likely some AC bitching about all journalism bad but from what I read years ago on The Escapist there were some well written pieces on non-obvious aspects of why things don't go as planned in the games industry (ZP might be Yahtzee's famous series but I think Extra Punctuation beats it as far as food for thought, hands down).

    One problem is that the ad driven business model demanded clicks to ads, and with that kind of business model it's a case of "when, not if" it degenerates into the territory of

  • It sounds like a fun bit of drama

  • Zero punctuation has come to a full stop. That period is now over.

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