As a reader of this website, you're probably familiar with the fate of a similar website, Vice's Waypoint, which was shuttered in April 2023 and its incredibly talented staff laid off. You may not be quite as familiar with the fact that, earlier this year, even amid all Vice's very public corporate turmoil, Waypoint quietly came back.
Go take a look! There's a site there with fresh stories and at least three writers' bylines attached to them. It has, if you turned the lights out and looked only at the brief flash of a silhouette before the room was plunged into inky blackness, the outline of Waypoint, in that there is a website there called Waypoint publishing stories about video games.
That's about where the similarities with the old Waypoint end, though, because this zombie version has very quickly become an incredibly weird website. Managing Editor Dwayne Jenkins is posting there a lot, quite possibly under duress, and nearly everything they are publishing sits slightly askew, like the frame of each blog is hanging from only one nail in the wall.
This post, published on November 22, is a great example. Bemoaning the state of indie coverage in games media, it is headlined by a game the author hasn't actually played, and later features attempts to call Alan Wake 2 and Dishonored "indie". Its heart is in the right place, at least at the point it first set forth onto the page, but the turns it takes once it gets going are just utterly bizarre.
Waypoint in November 2024 is a collection of so many of these random thoughts, half-formed ideas and incomplete paragraphs. It's post after post of fever dreams, of unsupervised riffing on the medium, an artist's impression of what a video game blog from 2009 looked like, drawn by someone who wasn't there at the time and doesn't understand how they worked.
I'm not saying any of this to dunk on Jenkins or the site itself. This isn't a bad website, in the way a content farm or clickbait hellscape might be. It's a weird website, and I'm just trying to understand the point of it. I honestly can't get a read on why it exists, what it's doing with this rare second chance. Is it there to juice SEO? The blogs they're running won't do numbers in that market. Is it ads? There are LOTS of ads on the page, yeah, but there's no way this website has the readership to make them worth anything more than cents on the dollar. Is it to foster a community? The site has no comments, so I'm going to guess it's a no there as well.
Why would anybody want to read any of this? It's offering nothing that the original Waypoint did, a site with a genuine sense of community, a coherent tone, and work that was so valued by fans that when Vice shut it down it was almost instantly able to pop right back up again. Nu Waypoint isn't even good at the stuff the very worst websites are offering, like SEO slop and clickbait headlines.
It's like someone at Vice woke up one day, forgot they had already owned a video games website and closed it down, and thought in a rare moment of lucidity "man, you know what we need, a video games website". So they reopened Waypoint, hired some writers, ordered them to blog at a volume that seems harmful and thought that was that. This new website wouldn't need a vision, or a strategy, or any focus on quality; all it would need to do to succeed would be to shovel some content on the page and hope for the best.
In reality, the reality you and I and everyone else live in, it's all so obviously broken and clueless and detrimental to everyone involved, from readers to writers. I'm left as clueless watching this unfold as I was at G/O Media, as Jim Spanfeller gleefully broke everything he touched, like a flabbier version of the giant baby in Spirited Away.
Why are the people in charge always so fucking stupid? How can they be the only people on the planet to see that this isn't working, that it's a bad idea, that this is not what readers want or what writers should be put to work writing? Why is it that the dumbest people in the room are always the ones in charge?
I don't have an answer. All I can say is that, as always, fuck capitalism, go home, and you can support what Waypoint used to stand for at Remap.
Note: Aftermath co-founder Gita Jackson previously worked at Vice's Motherboard, and appeared on Waypoint's site and podcast.
