After a few years of both expanding and contracting, media outlet Paste seems to have ended its dedicated video games coverage, according to former employees and freelancers. Paste’s games coverage, once a vertical within Paste and then a standalone site called Endless Mode, became part of The AV Club last year.
AV Club associate editor Elijah Gonzalez posted to Bluesky today that “Yesterday was my last day at The A.V. Club. I got laid off and the site’s Games section is basically gone.” Freelance writer Diego Nicolás Argüello posted that “the games section at The AV Club games has been shuttered,” an understanding echoed by other contributors to the games section. Longtime Paste games editor Garrett Martin posted in part, “Thanks to everybody who wrote for us… and thanks to everybody who ever read it. See ya around.” Aftermath has reached out to Gonzalez and Martin for more information.
In a statement to Kotaku, The AV Club wrote
The A.V. Club made the difficult decision to eliminate three roles, which included two full-time staff who ran our video games coverage after joining us from Endless Mode… We will continue to have some games coverage, but we cannot sustain a full-time staff covering it with our smaller team.
Martin became the editor of Paste Games in 2011, making the section a home for countless writers and editors. (Aftermath co-founder Gita Jackson was previously an assistant editor at Paste.) In July 2025, Paste Games spun off into its own site, Endless Mode, in what Martin described at the time as a place to “explore the infinite possibilities of games, anime, theme parks, and more,” and which seemed to have the enthusiastic backing of Paste’s ownership. In November, Endless Mode was folded into the games section of The AV Club, which Paste purchased from G/O Media in 2024. (G/O Media is the former owner of Kotaku, the previous employer of Aftermath’s staff.)
Another site Paste purchased from G/O, politics site Splinter, was folded into former G/O property Jezebel in November 2025. Jezebel seems to have run into trouble of its own recently, with at least one former freelancer posting that they’ve recently lost work from the site, and with its EIC exiting the site after four and a half years.
Upheaval in media, especially games media, is nothing new–in fact, today marks exactly a year since Polygon was sold to Valnet. But the loss of Paste Games is hitting writers especially hard–there’s hardly a person putting words about games on the internet today who didn’t get an opportunity from Paste and especially Martin, myself included. For decades, the site has been known for its willingness to say “yes” in a field increasingly besieged by “no”s, letting writers follow their interests and passions rather than succumbing to the SEO-focused, high-volume strategy beloved by the ever-consolidating owners remaining in the space. So many people got their earliest clips there, launching the careers of countless writers, and many more continued to write for the site for years in its various forms.“Paste Magazine was a tour de force in games criticism, and [Garrett Martin] is a legend,” wrote games writing preservation site Critical Distance, a very true statement that nevertheless doesn’t feel like it scratches the surface of the full impact Paste and Martin had on what video games writing looks like today.
Argüello told Aftermath, “Back in 2015, when I didn’t even know what a pitch was, it was Paste and its illustrious contributors that served as a north star. Everyone spoke highly of the talent embedded on the site, and for good reason, which helped to draw attention. For me, though, it was the shared sentiment around Paste giving many, many writers their start that encouraged me to give freelancing a try in the first place. Today, many people - both old and new - are echoing that same sentiment. It’s a shame, then, that the next generation of writers won’t get to experience this.”
