Gamurs Group, owner of sites like Dot Esports, Destructoid, and Twinfinite, had another round of layoffs this morning, with several former staffers reporting they were laid off via impersonal emails while they slept.
A former Gamurs staffer told Aftermath that they woke up today to find their Slack access and work email had been cut off. The email they received informing them they'd been laid off addressed them by first name but included no mention of their position or other inclusion of their name.
Other former staffers echoed this experience on Twitter. Former Dot Esports and Tech Radar Gaming Editor Vic Hood wrote on Twitter that she “woke up to an email that I’ve been let go.” Former Twinfinite and Game Skinny Managing Editor Tom Hopkins wrote “I have also been made redundant by Gamurs and Twinfinite over a generic email when I woke up this morning.” Former DotEsports employee Isaac McIntyre wrote their layoffs was “Done by a 5:00pm email (no calls) and instant account-wide logouts, which was frankly disappointing considering my time with the company.”
This is seemingly par for the course for Gamurs layoffs, with former employee Mike Straw tweeting that "This is exactly how they let me go last year...a boilerplate email that simply read 'Dear Freelancer' despite me being a staffed editor."
The former Gamurs staffer told Aftermath, “I'm honestly just a little heartbroken. Some really good people were let go today, with no warning, and it's going to just leave more scars on what's left of the sites under Gamurs. I don't know how a company can expect good writers to flourish when the ground beneath them is so shaky.”
Gamurs as a company seems to have no interest in writers flourishing, with former and current Gamurs employees telling Aftermath back in March about low pay, chaotic layoffs, and a company flailing after traffic in the face of changing search and social media algorithms. One former writer told us then,
It's hell…Everyone is stressed out. Coworkers are randomly getting cut for 'performance issues' week-to-week across all sites. The articles are all mindless. The only thing that matters is Google and what Google readers want. Creating a balance between work and life? Impossible. Corporate is breathing down everyone's necks to make sure every single writer is doing four articles a day. Gamurs is now a race to the bottom where every site is at risk of becoming an SEO content farm. The days of actually reporting are over. The acquired sites are losing all semblance of meaning and brand.
Before today, Gamurs previously had layoffs in July. Meanwhile, despite regularly conducting layoffs, over at the Gamurs Group career page you can find a host of open roles, with freelance positions paying per piece at abysmal rates that include $11-60 USD, $15-75, and $16-90.
Everyone involved here--from former Gamurs staffers, to the remaining folks at Gamurs, to people looking for work in games journalism, to people reading the work these sites put out--deserves better than this. We all deserve work made by humans, for humans to read, and the people who make that work deserve to be paid fairly and treated humanely, including when layoffs happen.
But that's not the day we're having today! Seeing this happen, time and again, is infuriating and heartbreaking, and my sympathy and rage go out to all affected.
Update, 12:34pm: An email from Gamurs CEO Riad Chikhani and Chief Content Officer Kevin Morris, shared with Aftermath, said 30 people have been laid off across Gamurs. The message cites the company "restructuring our operations" and points to changing algorithms, including Google's Helpful Content update and Google Discover, as making "clear that a larger reset and re-adjustment of priorities is necessary to ensure long-term sustainable growth for our business."
The execs also write that "we will be changing our pay structure for freelance writers to better reflect the value of longer, more in-depth work" and promise future details into what exactly that means.
They write that "As search has changed, it’s more clear than ever that doing what we love is actually the best path forward: creating great, high quality content about topics our audience cares deeply about." Given that this is the strategy writers at these sites were employing prior to Gamurs' acquisition of many of them, and given Gamurs' relentless pursuit of the exact opposite strategy since, I'm curious to see how this works out.
