You will, of course, remember Waypoint, Vice’s gaming vertical which was shuttered in 2023. Folks from Waypoint went on to form Remap Radio; Vice went on to lay off hundreds of employees, stop publishing, and then confusingly start publishing again with help from the aptly-named Savage Ventures. Now, as part of that, there are words on the Waypoint site again.
I’m not going to say Waypoint is back, even though one of the seven articles the site has published since Friday makes that claim. In that article, new managing editor Dwayne Jenkins writes, “What I want Waypoint to be is simple: a home for creatives and writers to talk about everything in this troubled, crazy industry we love and entertain you guys along the way…But I also adore gaming and cherish what Waypoint represented to believe I can lead the charge in making this real. Something chaotic without being crass. Critical without being cruel. Ambitious without being arrogant.”
I love alliteration as much as the next guy, but what does this mean? I would not have called Waypoint–home to excellent reporting and criticism–crass, cruel, or arrogant. Those are words I would reserve for the top brass at Vice, who paid themselves exorbitant bonuses while failing to give laid-off employees severance. Current articles on Waypoint include news about an Assassin’s Creed giveaway, a Baldur’s Gate companion ranking, and a survival horror game coming to the PlayStation–the kind of SEO-sniffing stuff that’s eating games journalism alive, and which is a far cry from what made Waypoint great.
Despite this, Jenkins writes that “The games journalism space is fraught with layoffs, mismanagement, and woefully underpaid and overworked creatives whose dreams have been crushed into SEO-infused paste.” True! I don’t know what brought Jenkins to this situation–lord knows things are tough all over–but you obviously don’t need me to tell you that whatever comeback Vice is attempting to make without, you know, its writers isn’t what brought you to Waypoint in the first place.
Former Waypoint writers aren’t happy–on Twitter, founder Austin Walker wrote, “I think we built a thing that would be pretty hard to puppet. Good fucking luck.” Former employee Natalie Watson wrote, “Seeing the website I dearly loved and have mourned time and time again ‘brought back’ by nothing short of necromancy is deeply upsetting.” Both Walker and Watson point out that whole no one got severance thing in their tweets.
In the words of my most popular blog, how stupid do they think we are? We saw the same ill-fated play with vichy Deadspin, an attempt by execs to erase the past and try to put the bullet they shot themselves in the foot with back in the gun. But readers aren’t as easily fleeced as media owners; no one is celebrating the return of a beloved site just because articles are publishing at the same URL. And we’re lucky enough to have Waypoint at home–many of the writers you love are doing their thing without corporate fuckery over at Remap, because it turns out you can make a lot of good work when you’re not owned by money monsters who don’t understand the actual value of the sites they have. I hope Remap gets a lot of new subscriptions out of this, which would be the only good news here.
Aftermath co-founder Gita Jackson worked at Vice.
