You don’t need me to tell you it’s been a bad year for video games media. Every year, for years, has been a bad year for video games media. Things being bad for video games media is why the website you’re reading this on exists. Indeed they’ve been so bad for so long that for hundreds of workers across the world it’s prompted the soul-searching question: what do I do if I can’t do this anymore?
In 2024 I wrote a blog called ‘What If There Are No More Opportunities’, where I pointed out that as the media industry--and particularly video games media--contracts and collapses, there are simply no more jobs for the affected to move across to. A layoff in the 2020s doesn’t mean finding a new job at a new site, it often means finding a whole new career.
That’s a cruel and daunting reality to face, but it’s also the point where the story of these layoffs tends to end for many readers. We enjoy the work of a writer for months or years or even decades, then we learn about their departure, then that’s it. As we mourn their departure from the scene, they often become absent from it entirely, part of a mass disappearance of voices and thoughts and reporting.
But these writers’ stories don’t end there. Every person laid off in this climate has had to pick themselves up and try and do something else, and for this Inside Baseball Week story I wanted to talk to some to find out what’s been happening after news of their departure (and sometimes their former workplace itself) has disappeared from the headlines.
I spoke with six former games media professionals from North America and Europe, including Merritt K (formerly of Fanbyte), Danielle Riendeau (formerly of Game Developer) and Matt Kim (formerly of IGN). Some were business reporters, others worked in content or criticism. Some worked behind the scenes, others you may recognise from sites you used to read. They’re now all doing something else.
And while there’s some grim stuff to cover–nobody likes being laid off from a job they love, especially when it’s to serve no other purpose than to make a line keep going up–my hope here isn’t to dwell on people’s misfortune, or to paint a picture of an industry in terminal decline, but to show that for individuals, just like with game development, one door closing can lead to another opening, in ways that can sometimes be more inspiring and interesting than the doldrums surrounding their departure.
Luke Plunkett: Can you tell us about the nature of your departure from full-time games journalism?
Merritt K: In fall 2022 most of the staff of Fanbyte were laid off. I was kept on as I was covering Destiny 2, which was a major driver of traffic for us. In spring 2023, management attempted to change my job description to designing and implementing a Destiny 2 fan resource site (like Braytech) without a pay raise or commitment to obtaining a long-term visa for me. I believed the project was doomed (and it, of course, never came to fruition anyway) and had to leave.
Matt Kim: Yeah, so I was laid off from IGN in August 2026 after six years there. It was part of what appears to be annual layoffs at the company, and my number was called as part of that wave along with several other IGN employees whose work was integral to the running of the website.
Kazuma Hashimoto: After obtaining a part-time editor job at Siliconera after it was acquired by Gamurs, I had every intention to stay in games journalism --- even if that gig barely paid my bills. I was still able to find work elsewhere freelancing for Polygon, IGN, Rolling Stone, MMORPG, and Conde Naste's Them.
After Gamurs let go of all of their part-time staff over a year ago, Joseph at MMORPG thankfully gave me work to tide me over in the meantime, but I knew I'd likely become homeless if I didn't look for work elsewhere. It was the cold reality I had to face, so I left.
Holly Green: I was laid off from Game Developer in January 2025; the publication had been part of the parent company's purchase by TechTarget, and once the new year turned over, they made a number of cuts to every department. I was the sacrificial lamb of our publication.
Danielle Riendeau: I can’t say much about my specific circumstances, just that editorial independence is a crucial must-have and I can’t work in the field without it.
Kate Gray: It wasn't a sudden thing – just a slow dawning realisation that there wasn't much work, and that it was not a great place for women to be, in print or video (both of which I did). Also, magazines were dying, and that's where I started, so that was really a cutoff point for being able to do the kind of journalism I liked best. Plus, I always wanted to work in a slightly different form of writing – narrative stuff for games! I feel very thankful that it worked out for me.
...it was obvious that the ship was sinking...
Did you try to find other games media work elsewhere, whether full-time or freelance? If so, did you manage to find any?
Merritt K: I didn't have any illusions of getting another job in games media, because by then the writing was on the wall. So I hired a resume consultant who had been recommended to me and began applying for PR jobs and the few narrative positions which sometimes came up. I must have applied for hundreds of jobs in 2023 and 2024. I had a handful of interviews, but most never even followed up.
Matt Kim: I did try to find games media work following the layoff, pitching freelance stories to outlets and taking on a preview for GamesRadar. However, I quickly found the drive to pitch game stories and jump back into freelancing were to be largely absent following my layoff. I was pretty burnt out by the time I was laid off and didn't really want to engage with games all that much.
Kazuma Hashimoto: Joseph at MMORPG was kind enough to offer me a spot doing news and a column that I tried to maintain. It was my fault that I wasn't able to be consistent with it.
Holly Green: I did try to find employment elsewhere; I applied at IGN and Kotaku when they had openings, and interviewed a few times with Valnet after they approached me about two of their publications on two separate occasions. I found freelance work with my former publication Paste Games, which folded earlier this year, and more recently with Unwinnable. I also still occasionally contribute to Reverse Shot.
Danielle Riendeau: I only left a very short time ago, but I do plan to pitch some pieces in the future, to outlets where I think my particular point of view and style will have a place. I’m also planning to do a bit of writing for VGBees, which has a few ex-Fanbyte folks keeping the torch lit.
Somewhat related, I have been doing narrative design and writing on an in-progress indie game since about 2022, so I’m hoping to keep writing (albeit on a game rather than about games) for the near future as well.
Kate Gray: I picked up freelance work for a long time. It was relatively sustainable in the UK where I didn't need to pay for health insurance, plus I was mostly couchsurfing and I didn't need to pay rent, so the bits I picked up here and there were enough for a while. But it's hard work. It helps to have a regular gig (I had a couple of columns/news shifts) to make it work, and you need to be willing to have a pitchable take on EVERY SINGLE THING ready to go as soon as the discourse begins.
You need to be able to do reviews, too, so you've got to set aside huge chunks of unpaid game time, as well as having a living situation that allows for that. At one point, I was sharing a flat with two men and one TV, and you can't really commandeer the main source of entertainment for an entire weekend. It's harder to find freelance these days, and it certainly doesn't pay very well in general. Establishing a relationship with specific outlets helps, but it's not reliable – especially if said outlets treat you poorly.
...If I didn't pivot, I'd probably be homeless...
What convinced you to start looking elsewhere for work?
Merritt K: For me, the signs of collapse were apparent as early as 2022. When the upticks in traffic and money many sites experienced during the early COVID pandemic didn't continue indefinitely, owners started shuttering outlets. I had never even meant to get into games media in the first place, and it was obvious that the ship was sinking.
Matt Kim: I needed a job. So I started applying to any job that I thought I was qualified for, namely communications, copywriting/editing, and producer roles.
Kazuma Hashimoto: The stress of having to go back to full-time freelance was taking a toll on me, and it was starting to affect my work. My writing was going down the drain. I started to think about writing things I wouldn't be happy with just to survive. That was another reason I knew I just had to leave. I'd get burnt out more than I already was, and it was sending me into a deep depression thinking that this would be the rest of my life. If I didn't pivot, I'd probably be homeless.
Holly Green: I more or less gave up as the dominoes continued to fall at so many other publications. It got to a point where there was nowhere left to really apply. Even freelance seemed to be less of an option than in the past; since my work is more in criticism and I'd switched largely to analyzing and reporting on game development issues, there seemed to be even less room for me than before. It was similar in related fields; after a few good but ultimately unsuccessful interviews in PR and in development, I just kinda shut down. Everyone's feeling the cuts and there's nowhere left to go. After about six months I sort of threw in the towel.
Danielle Riendeau: The very short answer: I can’t stand the way that media companies, generally, treat workers.
The long answer is a “buckle up” situation. I’ve been writing about games professionally since 2006, and full-time since 2013. It’s hard to fully articulate how much I loved it, especially when I was surrounded by smart, respectful, amazing colleagues. I felt like I had a dream career, and I worked hard to keep it.
I was lucky that I was able to have side gigs - I’ve been a volunteer EMT since 2016, and I’ve been teaching game design for a few years longer than that. That’s always helped me with perspective and feeling shaky about the future (given the reality of mass layoffs and closures at most outlets). That reality, however, became more grim with every passing year.
There were several points throughout my career when I saw the writing on the wall, that the whole field was plunging into darkness. Those clues all involved how management at media companies has gotten away with treating writers (and workers of any kind). I spent about a year on a union bargaining committee at a previous job, sitting across the table from management, hearing their arguments and reasoning. It was really dire, but I now know that 2018-era dire really had nothing on 2026-era dire, unfortunately. It was bad, but it only got exponentially worse.
While I personally only got caught in one mass layoff in my writing career, the threat of a mass layoff (or other scumball tactics by higher-ups) took its toll. It made me fearful, certainly, but I also saw how it affected others at times, and I genuinely think those conditions have broken people. I’ve seen people so far in denial to the point of straight up delusion. Fear can make people act in scary ways, and things can get very, very ugly.
In January of 2025, after a mass layoff that really left my head spinning (while I “survived” it, I tried to fall on my sword for a colleague), I started going back to school. I already have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, but I started taking math and science classes again, to knock out prerequisite courses for a possible next master’s degree - this time in the healthcare field.
It was tough to work full time, take classes at night, and hold my other part time jobs. But at least it felt like I was preparing myself for the next inevitable layoff. Or other potential “extinction event.”
I’ve been on that particular ride ever since. I did not intend to leave game journalism at the time I did, but I had at least been working on an alternative path. I’m honestly very grateful that I was able to leave with my head held high, if nothing else.
Kate Gray: I think I was tired of the hustle to always have Big Thoughts on every single piece of games news, because it can make you really cynical. Part of it was also, as a woman, realising that it was really, really hard to make a name for yourself as a female journalist without everyone seeing you as female first, journalist second. The harassment was bad enough (and to be clear, it was awful), but I always found myself hedging what I actually WANTED to say, afraid of the reaction, afraid of the comments. I didn't enjoy living in fear of being harassed for giving a game 7/10, or destroyed on social media over saying something wrong, because it's easy to get a little careless with your writing when you're just trying to keep your head above water – when you're up late the night before an embargo, or you're doing last-minute edits, or you're trying desperately to think of a subject for that week's column. The struggle to survive is not a fertile breeding ground for good writing, no matter what 20th-century writers might tell you.
I can’t stand the way that media companies, generally, treat workers
Have you found meaningful/significant work elsewhere? If so, where, and what are you doing exactly?
Merritt K: Losing my job meant losing my visa, which meant having to leave the city I'd called home for nearly a decade. For a while, I was desperately searching for another US job that could get me back to New York. But after over a year of failed applications which got so bad at one point that I started filtering out emails with "unfortunately" in them, I realized I didn't want another full-time position. I started writing for a comedy site called 1-900 HOT DOG (ironically co-founded by games media veteran Seanbaby) and eventually became a weekly columnist. That, plus my Patreon experiments, other freelance work, and book projects was enough to scrape together a living. It wouldn't be nearly enough in New York, but in a much smaller Canadian city (with no car, kids, etc.) it works.
Matt Kim: So I've been lucky that I did find full-time employment. The job market outside of games journalism is also difficult, but one thing IGN prepared me for, and this is true of everyone who worked there, was the need to wear multiple hats and work on projects across writing, editing, video hosting, social media, project management. I was able to translate these skills into broader marketing roles across tech and commerce.
Kazuma Hashimoto: I have. I currently work for an agency located in East Asia full-time. I primarily work in business development, marketing and PR now. It's a very social job, lots of networking and traveling, which I find very fulfilling. I genuinely love it and I'm really happy with what I do. It also helps that hours are set and there's a very good work-life balance at my company.
Holly Green: Instead of getting a job, I decided to go back to school. I'm finishing my English degree and picking up another in Communications. I was lucky to have saved enough from my GD job to pay for my entire education. I used what was left over to launch my game development studio as well. I attend school during the week and do gamedev on the weekends. I guess I came to the conclusion that shit's too rough out there right now to try to get *any* job without looking good on paper. I can only hope there's still an industry to come back to once my degrees are completed. I used to get writing jobs on merit and word of mouth alone but that's just not cutting it anymore.
Danielle Riendeau: I’m very lucky to still be teaching, and still volunteering on my ambulance. Throughout my career, having meaningful side gigs basically saved my mind. They let me get away from whatever awful drama (or full-on harassment campaign) was blazing through the internet that week, or whatever threats executives were holding over our collective heads, and go teach something fun about immersive sim design or do a shift in the 911 system. On bad weeks, it was a lifeline and offered a very valuable perspective.
If I was treating anaphylactic shock, I was not thinking about who would get nailed in the next mass layoff. If I was bandaging a horrible injury, I wasn’t obsessing about a Friday morning all-hands with “difficult news” from a Patagonia-clad doofus who probably pulls seven figures to read asinine slide decks. If I was helping a person in a psychiatric crisis, I wasn’t thinking about the clueless executive who thought it would be “effective management” to start a department meeting with a page-ripped-out-of-a-psych-101-textbook image of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief displayed on a slide, make her best human approximation of a “sad face” and explain what grief is after decimating an already-tiny newsroom with layoffs.
My hope is to successfully get into a graduate program and become an advanced practitioner - either a physician assistant or nurse practitioner, and find a fulfilling second career in my 40s and on. I’m adamant that this new career also includes games, even if they’re on the side: making them, teaching game design, writing about them. Maybe that’s a strange shift, but I think I’m far too obstinate to stay away from this world, at least in some capacity.
It needs to be said as well, I certainly don’t think healthcare is a land of sunshine and rainbows. It’s brutal, and difficult, and especially in the US, a deeply broken system. I already know this going in (or going in deeper from my current position), but, numbers-wise, there are simply more jobs available. So if I find myself in a really toxic or abusive workplace, the hope is that I can reasonably expect to leave a bad situation for something better.
Kate Gray: I work on several contract jobs, writing for games. It suits me; I don't do so well at a full-time job because I value novelty, variety, and being able to control my hours. It's not feasible for a lot of people, though. I'm lucky to not have many outgoing costs at the moment – it pays for what I need. It's certainly more than what I was getting paid as a journalist, too!
...it felt like I was preparing myself for the next inevitable layoff...
Does your new job draw on any of your previous qualifications or experience as it related to games journalism?
Merritt K: I'm still writing, which is great because I don't really know what else I could do. I have this personality flaw where I really can't deal with authority and hate the idea of having to be somewhere and follow someone else's arbitrary schedule every day. I'm not sure my tenure at Fanbyte really provides any meaningful bona fides in the current climate, but I do value the experience that working in a collaborative editorial environment gave me and I'm definitely using some of the skills I honed there.
Matt Kim: Yes, the main thing I want to highlight is that the meat grinder of journalism, freelancing, and games journalism requires people in the field to become one-person content production hubs. And these skills that range from the above-mentioned writing, editing, hosting, social media, video production, and especially the ability to turn something from an idea into a finished production, whether that's a video or article, are pretty sought after in non-media fields. I have no doubt that a lot of people who have done games journalism, full-time or freelance, for any of the major media outlets can do the type of work I'm currently doing, which I would broadly say is content marketing.
Kazuma Hashimoto: Absolutely. Pitching has helped me so much in reaching out to press for coverage of some of our events and what not. Also, having established connections in gaming also opened doors for opportunities I've been able to obtain for the company. Writing criticism was also a boon. I was already doing a lot of cultural critique and consultation before, but it has helped a lot in general when it comes to evaluating risks.
Holly Green: I went into gamedev fairly confident that I could fake my way through it because of the sheer amount of information I'd picked up by working in games media for 17 years. I wasn't wrong. I took a course or two and came away with a good design with all the right elements in place, assembled a team, etc. I couldn't have done that without everything I learned in games media.
On the flip side, being in games media has helped somewhat with my courses at the school of communications I'm attending, but mostly in terms of being able to write quickly on a deadline. Most of what they're teaching is stuff I already know or things I actually lived through (like the birth and growth of digital media) but there's a lot of gaps in my knowledge as well. Feels good to fill those gaps in.
Danielle Riendeau: I like to think my management skills have some place in my existing healthcare career and in the future - as it stands now, I’m often managing brand new EMTs, often on their very first shift on the job.
As for my writing skills, I hope to keep them sharp in creative writing and in some further writing about games. If nothing else, I know a career of interviewing people and writing means my patient care documentation will be high quality!
Kate Gray: I work in live service on at least one of my contracts, which is a lot like magazine journalism: tight, short, regular deadlines, and a volume of work that goes out very quickly, which you don't have time to dwell on. I love it. Otherwise, writing shortform (i.e. single-line) dialogue is a lot like writing straplines. Short, pithy, to-the-point. I often say that the best skill a writer can develop is working to a very, VERY tight word count. Anyone can write a rambly, 2,000-word op-ed. It takes real skill to get your point across in 100 words!
Working yourself to death for the privilege of writing about video games is not worth it
Has your experience left you with any advice for others who have found themselves laid off or the victims of a closure?
Merritt K: If you are somehow miraculously still in games media and you don't have a backup plan, make one now. If you want to keep writing, find something else you can write about that people will pay you for. For a while, I was writing pop culture explainers, tech tutorials, and even coverage of the elder care industry. That all paid much better than 99% of freelance games media gigs currently do. Working yourself to death for the privilege of writing about video games is not worth it.
Matt Kim: Only to say again that the respect I have for anyone either in media or recently laid off from media is immense and that the skills they possess are transferable to non-journalism roles. Even in the face of the supposed AI jobpocalypse.
Kazuma Hashimoto: Your skills are cross disciplinary. Remember that when applying for work. Pitching, writing, critical thought are all valuable skills. And leaving games journalism doesn't mean defeat. What matters most is that you have a roof over your head and that your mental health isn't constantly at risk. You're not a failure for pursuing something that will provide you with the means to live. You will be happier for it, and doing journalism, criticism, and reporting on the side can sometimes feel more meaningful since you can choose what you want to write versus having to abide by the SEO Gods and trends to make what you're writing "valuable" to the news cycle.
Holly Green: If I have any advice, it's:
- To invest in yourself. You are your greatest asset. Don't waste any time when it comes to working towards the person you want to be.
- In times like these, the only opportunities we have (especially if you're of marginalized identity), are the opportunities we make for ourselves. If you have nowhere to go, it may be time to build a home for yourself. Establish something new on your own terms.
While this isn't great advice for everybody, as not everyone has the energy or resources to start something from scratch, it's never a bad idea to look out for no.1. If everything's going to shit, we may as well go down swinging.
Danielle Riendeau: The pieces are all still very much settling around me, but if there is anything I’ve learned in the last couple of months and want to impart on others, it’s to scream from the highest available rooftop - don’t let the caprice and idiocy of these conditions break you.
We live in deeply stupid, difficult times. It’s hard just to exist in 2026, in the geopolitical, economic, environmental conditions that we do, let alone get out of bed and do everything we all need to do to get through the day. I think it’s fair to say that mass layoffs and toxic work conditions and all the ways in which workers are devalued every day are deeply dehumanizing. They are dehumanizing for media professionals, for game developers, for anyone in any field where upper management has no meaningful idea about how things are made (or broadly, what actually goes into labor) and no care in the world for the people that make things work.
I’d say to anyone going through this, don’t let them make you feel like less of yourself. Find some way to survive, be a decent human being, and live a life that keeps your values intact.
None of that is easy, but never let anyone with a C in their title gaslight you into thinking you are crazy for wanting that life and naive for thinking it could happen. Reject their worldview and find some possible path forward. That’s what I’m trying to do, anyway!
Kate Gray: I wish I had good advice. A lot of the ways in which I got lucky were just that: luck. But you can put yourself in luck's way -- attending conferences, writing prolifically on a blog and sharing it, pitching everywhere and getting your name out. Most of my work has come from personal connections: meeting a studio head at a party, chatting with a CEO at GDC, making friends with someone during a contract and having them bring me with them to their next role. So I guess my advice is to be charming, and do good work. Honestly, being not-weird at a game event, and chatting to people *as if you want to be their friend, not to hand out a business card* makes a huge difference. I can tell when someone is talking to me for Networking Reasons, and I hate it! It makes you feel like a piece of Job Meat! Establish personal connections, and get your work done on time to a certain standard, and you're already ahead of most people.
But I know it's not easy. We're all desperate, and we can't always get chummy with the CEO, or pay for flights and accommodation to an event like GDC. But you have so many transferable skills as a journalist or a game developer that will work for you OUTSIDE of games, too. Don't be afraid to get a normal-ass job, do game jams or write stuff in your free time, and wait for the market to recover. I really, really hope it will, because it would be heartbreaking to lose all this generational creative talent to normal-ass jobs.
...don’t let the caprice and idiocy of these conditions break you...
Would you still want to be working in games media in 2026 if you could?
Merritt K: I don't think I would want to be at this point, no.
Matt Kim: I think leaving games journalism, I definitely got the feeling of "You don't know what you had until you lose it." Ten years in games media was a dream and I loved it, but I definitely loved an earlier time of it rather than the version of it I was doing my last year in it. So, I would love to do games media again, but maybe not the 2026 version of it.
Kazuma Hashimoto: Absolutely. I loved my time in games media, and I felt really happy that a lot of people resonated with what I wrote. I was told, a lot, even now when I attend events, that the work I did changed perspectives and that my culture writing inspired them to look deeper into the media they enjoyed. That was my only goal as a writer and critic in this space, and I fulfilled it. And if I could keep doing it, I would in a heartbeat.
Even after getting doxxed by Japanese nationalists and Asmongold, I'd still do it, even if I'd have some reservations on what I was writing and how I'd be protected by editorial staff. (That's the one thing I'll really commend Polygon on. The old staff there really took care of me as a freelancer and considered the risks I'd face for my writing.)
Holly Green: Yeah I think if I'd found something in games after I was laid off, I'd probably still be working in the industry now. I think my perspective is still needed in games media.
Danielle Riendeau: I would be working in games media right now if I could, yeah. If I was still working in the field, I would still be taking classes for a degree in healthcare, even if that was just the "backup." But after 20 years, I like to think I got pretty good at this, and I'm certainly still extremely invested. At this point, I'm mainly concerned (on the reporting side) on workers' rights and how developers are hanging on (or not!) in the current landscape. And always, I want to be writing criticism and the occasional essay about how a game is hitting.
Kate Gray: It depends on what "working in games media" would look like. With the landscape as it is now? I don't know. The hustle and churn are exhausting, the news is always depressing, and now that I live in Canada, I feel caught between UK games media (dry wit, a little cynical, often still tonally similar to/influenced by game mags of the 90s/2000s, still quite male-dominated) and NA games media (younger writers, less dense with jokes, more focused around investigative journalism, and issues like workers' rights and diversity/representation). Obviously those are sweeping generalisations, and not necessarily always completely true across the board, but that's based on my personal experiences writing for and reading both. There's part of me in both; there are things I like about each side, and things I don't like, too. I think other people are better at investigative journalism and reviews than me these days, anyway. I am often too nervous about getting things wrong or pissing people off, and it just makes me tired, because everyone's always pissed off.
But also, I really value working for multiple places, so I don't know if I would enjoy being tied down to one outlet. Working full-time for somewhere usually means either a concrete non-compete clause, or at the very least, a first right of refusal on anything you want to write. With the industry as it is, I just can't imagine giving my loyalty to somewhere unless I was one of the owners, and I'm not hugely interested in running a company myself. I don't think I'd do a good job. I'm glad other people are doing it, but I also kinda hate that we have to in order to keep the heart of games journalism beating. What happened to old-timey patrons of the arts? I would like to bring those back.
But in an ideal world, I'd work in games magazines again in a heartbeat. Maybe I'm blinded by nostalgia, or by the glow of my early-mid 20s, or by the fact that my editor did a lot of the hard work and protected me from knowing about it, but it was such a fun time, especially because it was all in-person. Reviewing games in the office, discussing with other likeminded folks over tea breaks, playing Towerfall at lunch, getting to browse the archives of 30 years of gaming history, and most importantly, NOT HAVING A COMMENT SECTION. Sometimes you'd have a full month before a review would go live, so by the time it was out, you weren't checking what people were saying on social media about it. There wasn't the same kind of hustle, either – you're not trying to post three news stories a day and two op-eds a week, or whatever. You don't need to worry about page views and clickthroughs and CMS wrangling and embedding images and expired social media links. You fill the mag, and you move on to the next one. I wish that was still a viable form of games media. Sigh.
Welcome to Inside Baseball Week, our annual excuse to explore topics so niche and weeds-y that no other video game website would touch them: deep dives into the industry’s least-plumbed depths, interviews with people whose jobs you’ve never even considered the existence of, detailed breakdowns of minute decisions like when to delay a game or lay people off, transparent and sometimes unflattering examinations of games journalism, and this time around, poop (ask Riley).
