Thunderous Cacophony said:
LysanderNemoinis said:
Li Mu said:
snekadid said:
What roster of incredibly talented content creators? You mean Yahtzee and the Critical Miss duo? Does two sources constitute a roster?
I wonder what she'll actually make. I hope she just replaces Bob.
But The Escapist already has a replacement for Bob - it's 8-Bit Philosophy. It's the exact same thing as Bob just without the thin veneer of movie reviews.
On a side note, Snekadid, there's also Firefilm, Shamus, the News crew, and the 3 or 4 other people they announced would be having columns starting soon.
Heck, the top comment on the Sourcefed article about Trisha coming here is about how they're bleeding talent and people don't know why they keep going back there. It like the writers are all getting up and moving one room to the left, and in the time between them standing up and the next person sitting down everyone is declaring that the offices are all deserted and the building is crumbling down around them. I'm just gonna brew a fresh pot of coffee and wait for Trisha to start working.
Well, looking at The Escapist's numbers they took a major hit in terms of activity through a lot of last year which is when a lot of the site's SJWs started to rev up a lot more than ever before. Given what we've had outed with Gamergate it's not surprising that a lot of people looking at this are upset that The Escapist cut these guys and seemingly wants to become a lot more a-political so the situation is exaggerated. The site isn't "bleeding talent" because nobody left, they were thrown out and are being replaced. The Escapist is still a pretty big site, and a lot of those commenting probably don't like the idea of a more balanced site and/or realize that The Escapist won't be hosting them. Of course we will see what happens in the future. The Escapist has been going threw an even darker spot while it transitions.
That said I do not know anything about this new girl since I don't follow many blogs or Youtube personalities, but we'll see what she's got.
At the end of the day the bottom line is The Escapist was dying, and still is. Those previous content creators that got the axe were not getting the job done. This is an attempt to save the site. If the site still dies, it just means that the damage was too deep, many sites aren't big enough to try and save themselves this way, and at the end of the day The Escapist is going down swinging if the worst happened. Had The Escapist held onto guys like Bob and Jim it wouldn't have changed anything looking at what was happening.
That said, I think a big part of the problem with The Escapist is in part that it has too many critics, reviewers, and commentators. While Yahtzee was a big draw when they first got him, it also had LRR doing somewhat more lavish productions like ENN, "Drawn By Pain", "Nightmare Arcade", "There Will Be Brawl" and geekdom skits and stuff like that. I don't know how much that stuff cost to produce, but it occurred to me that as you saw less and less of that kind of stuff alongside the "talk" the site began to slowly lose steam, even if it wasn't that noticible at first. At the end of the day when you look at what we just had we pretty much had a couple of Social Justice Warriors ranting about geekdom and throwing in political commentary and personal views as they did, sometimes quite offensively to their own viewership. Jim and Bob had different styles, but did indeed cover a lot of the same ground, and you'll notice both of them wound up at the top of a list of "examples of what is wrong with geek media" during Gamergate. Originally you could get on this site, read some articles on geeky topics, see videos from a girl playing acoustic guitar, see some weird video game inspired skits, and a parody of a news broadcast making fun of the game industry without it say being "well this week I'm going to spend 8 minutes ranting about Ubisoft yet again" which might be valid, but entertaining? Well, not as much after the first dozen times.
I kind of hope the new girl isn't pretty much going to just be doing a review and/or industry commentary bit like Bob and Yahtzee, or if she is, that the next few recruits aren't all doing the same thing as well. Variety of content is important