The mass departure of most of Waypoint’s writers and its managing editor over the last few days appears to signal, if not the end, then at least a major setback for the second chapter of the Vice-owned video game vertical. That time can generously be described as eventful, but those events didn’t come out of nowhere. The saga of Waypoint to date is the perfect encapsulation of the state of games media in 2025.
The version of Waypoint that existed before Monday was brought back to life in 2024 after the original site’s high-profile closure in 2023 (subscribe to Remap!). It was weird from the start; Luke once described it as an entire publication hanging askew. Its tone was off-centre, it courted controversy a few times (most notably with a now-deleted story about right-wing VTubers), and has now been seemingly done in by the ill-advised deletion of a couple more complicated stories and, following that move, resignations.
There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with the site’s original closure, resulting in layoffs affecting an entire crew of talented writers, who had garnered a loyal following over years of hard work. Those writers built that following in spite of the stewardship of Vice Media, once at the forefront of a kind of edgy, youth-focused journalism that evolved over the years into a company that often did great work in the face of workplace scandals and lavish executive pay. Vice ultimately declared bankruptcy in May 2023, shortly after closing Waypoint, and announced it would stop publishing and lay off most of its employees in February 2024. Even this ultimate end saw executives making out like bandits, while many of the company’s rank-and-file employees have claimed they didn’t receive the severance owed to them.
...while all stories were approved by an editor, many of them were edited after publication, and potentially sensitive stories were not given the pre-publication legal review often common at other outlets...
Vice as a brand was resurrected in May 2024 via a partnership with Savage Ventures, and launched new versions of some of its sites including, in October 2024, Waypoint. Former Waypoint managing editor Dwayne Jenkins told Aftermath he suggested the name be changed, but ownership obviously disagreed. Formerly a site of staffed writers covered by a union contract with the Writers Guild of America, East, the new Waypoint saw Jenkins as its only staffed employee, bolstered by a handful of contributors who were paid $30 a post.
High-output sites primarily staffed by low-paid freelancers is a popular model across games writing these days, as the industry shifts from staffed, often unionized employees to networks where writers are paid dollars per story instead of a salary. Jenkins came from sites in the Gamurs network, as did the rest of Waypoint’s writers, some of whom also had experience at a similar network Valnet, as well as other outlets. Those networks’ sites specialize in aggregation, reviews, and content geared toward Google results; they seldom, if ever, do reporting or analysis of the type the new Waypoint attempted.
Which isn’t to say Waypoint’s writers weren’t capable of or hadn’t done those forms of writing before, or that they didn’t do that kind of work at Waypoint. But they faced an uphill battle at the site. Former Waypoint workers told Aftermath that while all stories were approved by an editor, many of them were edited after publication, and potentially sensitive stories were not given the pre-publication legal review often common at other outlets. Jenkins told Aftermath that post-publication edits were “the norm” in his experience at Gamurs, where he said he learned “many, many bad habits” and “never had a REAL Capital-J journalist mentor.”
“I had, ‘Oh God I gotta make sure this content is churned out!’ Gamurs practices, and you know, of course, that Gamurs wasn’t exactly in the business of teaching anyone anything.”
"Waypoint is not equipped to handle reporting like it has been doing," VGBees’ John Warren said on Bluesky. "I think the story of those pieces being taken down is important, but you have to acknowledge that…very little in the way of editing can lead to really massive mistakes in journalism."
Former Waypoint workers previously told Aftermath that ownership had voiced concern over the subject matter of stories in the past, fearing sexual or political topics might ding the site on Google. The workers said they weren’t aware of any specific legal threats regarding the stories most recently taken down.
A lack of experience, overseen by a venture capital firm led, predictably, to disaster: Vice is being rightly criticised for pulling the stories, and the mass resignations that followed have hollowed out the site and left writers with one less source of income in a brutal time for anyone trying to making a living as a games writer. The intentions of the site’s workers were surely in the right place, but the new Waypoint’s life was rife with pulled stories and others that just came off as tonally weird, all of it while facing scrutiny and distrust from readers who saw the site’s new staff working under the “Waypoint” banner as a betrayal to what the site once was.
How much of this is on Waypoint’s staff or owners, and how much of it is just emblematic of the systemic rot in video games media and the wider media landscape in general? The mass layoffs and site closures of the last five years have sucked whole generations of experienced, talented writers out of the games media industry. It has also meant the loss of experienced editors and leaders as well, the kind of people who understand the legal and journalistic rigor that has to go into serious reporting. But even beyond traditional journalism, experienced editors can help writers make sure any piece and its language clearly communicates what the writer means. This in turn helps create stronger writers, who can then mentor other writers.
“The current media collapse is awful for so many reasons,” veteran games writer Carli Velocci said on Bluesky. “But the lack of institutional knowledge and experience shaping reporting and mentoring the next generation might be one of the worst ones.”
Not only are there less and less jobs for these kinds of editors–as the sites that are still standing pivot to search-optimized, low stakes content–but as Jenkins’ description of his time at Gamurs shows, there are also less leaders to teach new writers and editors how to become those kinds of writers and editors. The consequences of this spirals, as journalistic best practices are lost in the games writing field, and even experienced writers, critics, and reporters find themselves without the support they need to do their work, outlets willing to take that work on, and the living wage that makes that work possible.
Under what other circumstances would Waypoint have lurched back to life other than capitalistic necromancy?
As former games journalist Ian Boudreau wrote, “Individual writers aren't the problem, they should be working with editors who are equipped to give them useful feedback and guidance on how to build a compelling and legally sound story. That layer of the business is effectively extinct.”
For Waypoint’s writers, being paid roughly $30 per post is a shocking, though not unheard-of rate, little more than minimum wage when you work out the time required to formulate and write articles. Pair that with an inexperienced managing editor and Waypoint’s high volume output (relative to its headcount) and it’s little wonder the site struggled. It’s a pipe dream to think Waypoint or Vice broadly would ever be brought back with proper leadership, an investment in full-time writers, and a commitment to strenuous reporting and thoughtful criticism made possible by paying and protecting staff. Ownership dug up a URL that clearly still had some cache, and they got exactly what they paid for. Which all sucks, but how else could this have gone down? Under what other circumstances would Waypoint have lurched back to life other than capitalistic necromancy?
You can’t talk about the story of new Waypoint without noting that, despite what an obviously unpopular idea bringing the site back was, writers agreed to write there and be paid so little for their work. As former Fanbyte writer Colette Arrand wrote, “if you accept [$30] as your base rate of pay and it’s not a favor, you are actively making the material conditions for you and everyone in the field.” When Valnet purchased Polygon, gutted its staff, and then tried to hire again, many writers publicly shared their refusal to work at the corpse of a once-great site, despite being offered jobs (or, it seems in many cases, contract positions) in tenuous times. Other staffers who kept their jobs eventually quit. Networks like Gamurs and Valnet run on writers desperate for games writing jobs, in a field that often chugs along on passion as an alternative to fair wages. A media owner with a games outlet on their hands might look around, see how the field works, and assume that’s just how things work, creating conditions that are, however wrongly and depressingly, industry standard. It’s hard to fault writers who need jobs for taking the jobs available to them in a landscape dominated by such jobs. Many workers have challenged journalism’s dismal status quo through collective action or unionization, but that sort of organizing is logistically and legally challenging–though not impossible–for freelancers. While there’s no denying that people accepting this kind of pay encourages companies to keep offering it, the true blame lies where these jobs and rates originate: at the top.
There are many instances in this whole saga where individuals could, and maybe even should, have made different decisions. But media owners and what they’ve turned the industry into hold the lion’s share of the responsibility for what is, ultimately, a systemic failure. They are the ones changing sites’ focuses, understaffing and underpaying them, and making the kinds of tone-deaf branding decisions that set sites like Waypoint up to fail. Waypoint 2.0 might be ending (if this is indeed the end) exactly the way it started, as an example of everything wrong with how business and the wider internet view video games media in 2025: not as a source of news and entertainment, but as an undersupported mill that grinds out cents on the dollar, click by underpaid click.
Note: Aftermath co-founder Gita Jackson previously worked at Vice's Motherboard, and appeared on Waypoint's site and podcast.
Update 7/23/25, 11:40pm: A link in the second paragraph has been updated to include an archived version of the deleted story.
Update 8:12am: A paragraph has been added regarding management's concern over the topic of Waypoint stories and its potential effect on Google results.
