YouTube veteran Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw resigned from his job at The Escapist on Monday amid mass layoffs at the website. The parent company of The Escapist, the Gamurs Group, fired editor-in-chief Nick Calandra on Monday, and many of the website’s other employees resigned in protest. That included Croshaw, who has hosted the site’s beloved YouTube series Zero Punctuation for 16 years, and it’s not clear whether the show will continue without him at all.
Zero Punctuation is a video game review series featuring Croshaw’s voice and some recognizable minimalist animated figures. The Escapist itself is a site for video game news, reviews and op-eds that launched in 2005 and has been a staple of the industry ever since. However, in 2022, the site was acquired by the Gamurs Group – an esports publisher known for running websites like The Mary Sue, We Got This Covered and Prima Games. On Monday, Calandra seemed to lash out at his bosses when he announced that he had been fired and had declined his severance pay so that he could speak out without signing a non-disclosure agreement.
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“I was let go for ‘not achieving goals’ that were never properly set out for us and lack of understanding of our audience and the team that built that audience,” he wrote. Croshaw announced his own resignation just a few hours later, promising, “Whatever hapepns, you’ll be hearing my voice again soon, in a new place.”
A report by Forbes notes that most of the video department of The Escapist quit in solidarity with Calandra, but called Croshaw’s resignation the most significant of all. Many editors, writers and contributors reportedly resigned as well, although the site is not completely unmanned as new articles are still being published. Meanwhile, Calandra announced his next move on Tuesday, and it sounds like plenty of The Escapist‘s former staff will be working with him.
Calandra launched Second Wind on Tuesday with an hour-long livstream featuring Croshaw. Second Wind will be an independent employee-owned outlet, they explained. The new venture has a YouTube channel, Patreon page, Twitch channel and a few other links already out there. It sounds like the new outlet will focus heavily on video content, including videos and livestreams.
So far, Gamurs has not responded to other outlets’ requests for comment or made any kind of public statement on Calandra’s posts. So far, Second Wind has over 1,400 paying supporters on Patreon.
