Interesting. I'm guessing it's an April Fool's joke simply because TB seems to be rather fond of his autonomy. That said I could potentially see TB doing something here on The Escapist as well as doing his usual thing on Youtube. After all several Escapist contributors have had multiple gigs apparently. Bob for example also did "Game Overthinker" alongside his other bits here on The Escapist. If this is (as is very likely) an AF joke it's a good one because it's enough to get people to think "could this possibly be true" rather than rejecting it out of hand as being too silly.
That said TB from what I've seen tends to be a lot less offensive and/or politically loaded than Jim or Bob, so he would actually be a great fit with where The Escapist seems to want to go.
To be honest if this was my site (which it's not) for an AF joke I would have said that The Escapist has paid ahead of time for Anita Sarkeesian to do 52 videos one a week for the next years as part of a regular focus on feminism on gaming, and to gain a broader viewership the famous Zoe Quinn has been paid in advance to create "Escapist The Video Game" a geek website management Sim intended to educate about the anxiety involved in running a business to release for free sometime within the next year and a half, a year for development and an extra six months for her to take care of her own promotional work.
Then I would sit back and watch the explosions through the forums for a full 24 hours before admitting that it was a joke, and then duck from the second explosion caused by the hopefuls and those upset that I would dare joke about something like this and drop those names.
Indeed, I might need to even dig my own special April Fool's bunker.
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All kidding aside I'm not too fond of April Fool's this year as it seems more annoying than funny. I was actually goofing off with "Guild Wars 2" or wanted to, but the company decided it would be fun to make it so all the characters run around with their arms out making airplane noises, and it just got too annoying. I'm actually scared to boot up most of the other MMOs I drift between now since I wonder if I can actually play any of them without being harassed by some dev who thinks the idea of being funny is to annoy everyone.