Well, it wouldn't be a new year if there weren't a fresh hell--today, writers at the gaming section of Bustle Digital Group's Inverse said the section has been closed, and layoffs affected Vox-owned The Verge's gaming coverage as well.
According to a former Inverse writer, the closure affects three writers and the site's gaming editor. That editor, Shannon Liao, confirmed the news on Bluesky, alongside others. (Liao previously worked with Aftermath co-founder Nathan and me at The Washington Post's gaming vertical Launcher, which was shut down in 2023.) The former writer told Aftermath they were told in a Zoom call that the company is "'divesting' from gaming content," language echoed by other laid-off writers on social media today. (Update, 1/16/26, 1:27pm--One Inverse worker has said they still have a job at the site, though their role will "be changing significantly.")
They say this leaves Inverse with a "skeleton crew Entertainment Team." Bustle bought Inverse in 2019, which included layoffs; since then, BDG has seen a rash of layoffs so extensive that opening tabs about them is threatening to crash my browser, including in 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024, several of which affected Inverse specifically. BDG briefly revived Gawker, sister site of Aftermath's founders' previous home Kotaku, in 2021, and then shuttered it in 2023. BDG owner Bryan Goldberg, meanwhile, owns a silly hat.
"Management had been really telling us the last few months that numbers have been rebounding," the former writer told Aftermath. "But Inverse has always kind of been the black sheep of BDG, because we were so different from all of their other brands. Personally, I've always gotten the sense they just didn't really know what to do with us, despite our numbers justifying our existence."
In other bad news, Vox-owned The Verge's gaming writer Ash Parrish announced on social media that she'd been laid off today. (Parrish previously worked with Aftermath's co-founders at Kotaku.) Last May, Vox sold its gaming site Polygon to Valnet. Vox also had rounds of layoffs in 2024 and 2025.
That media owners don't know what to do with their gaming coverage is nothing new, but seeing them continue to flail around, impacting the lives of writers in the process, is both heartbreaking and embarrassing. That we're so early in the new year feels like a sign we're in for another rough year for journalism, though I'd love to be proven wrong.
