I learned Thursday night through social media that Waypoint, Vice’s games section, was shuttering and I was shocked, because they made a good product, and they did it in a way that seemed sustainable. There had been jokes and hints in the past that this might happen, but as other sites fell around them, I held hope alongside many other fans that they would somehow make it through unscathed. Learning that was too naively optimistic was a genuinely painful revelatory experience. The people that are actually going to be most affected, the Waypoint team who lost their jobs, handled the whole shitty situation with dignity, showing grace and humor as they explained to their audience what was going on through an awesome first goodbye podcast on April 28th.
We’re lucky that they will spend the next month wrapping things up; we’ve entered the period “Way-less-point,” as host Rob Zacny put it. There’s no way to concisely and precisely explain how much the show and website have meant to me, and I’m one of thousands of people that listen two or more times a week every week, and those that bought into the subscription service in hopes of maintaining the site’s sustainability. Every day, as the idiot-engineered collapse of Twitter causes people to rethink how media works, I’m hearing about the current moment as the end of an era in media. With a deluge of layoffs since the beginning of the year (then blamed on a “recession” that is suspiciously absent from recent news coverage), it has never been clearer how little the people with fingers on purse strings care for well-researched, thoughtful coverage of, well, anything really, but certainly of games.
I’ve been meaning to write a new “Best Videogames Podcasts” list for a while now. The loss of Waypoint both makes it seem more necessary and less worth it. I’ll get to that because I still want to share some of the people doing important and interesting work in that realm, but right now I just want to talk about Waypoint, and how its value to me personally is clearly so much greater than Vice’s shareholders and directing board can fathom. They’re killing something dear, here.
I don’t mean to throw blame at Waypoint if you’re no fan of mine, but there’s a direct line from me hearing Rob Zacny talk about Suzerain on the podcast to me reviewing the game and then pitching an interview to Paste Magazine, which in turn led to my editorial internship and further writing there.
I started listening to my two favorite games podcasts (and there’s a great many good ones) in October of 2019 while I was working at a nonprofit outside of Philadelphia. I had a desk job that allowed my mind to wander and I thought podcasts would be a good way to buckle me in. I remember standing at the break/printing table near the copier, sorting papers, as Austin Walker, Rob Zacny, and Patrick Klepek talked about the NFL in the post-show. “A leftist gaming podcast that talks about the NFL at the end? Was this designed for me specifically?”
In 2020, after I got laid off from that same job, Waypoint was one of a few podcasts that filled the void where social interaction might have gone in a year that wasn’t dominated by COVID lockdown. I don’t imagine it was healthy for the main voices I heard daily to be strangers hundreds and thousands of miles away, but it’s the reality I was living in, and it was a comfort through a very lonely summer dominated by existential crisis and long days at home trying not to die during a pandemic. But let’s pull back from the parasocial:
Waypoint is one of the most important brands in games journalism. Through its connection to Vice, a major new media brand, Waypoint had both grounding and wiggle room – it could be more serious and aggressive than some of the other major brands that are sometimes called “enthusiast sites” but never had to sound or feel corporate; its voice was unique, its tastes eclectic, its staff diverse. The Waypoint crew didn’t, for instance, publish a review of the Harry Potter game that gave it a 9/10 after outlining how it’s actually broken shovelware – they have too much integrity for that, and moreover the editorial freedom to not have to write a review of the game at all. A few other sites took similar positions, but I only had the pleasure of hearing Waypoint talk at length about the state of the conversation around the game.
There are all sorts of structural reasons that determine a website’s editorial purview, but the point is that Waypoint had a terrific lens on the game industry that is unlikely to be replicated and impossible to replace. I read other places (Bullet Points, Kotaku, Polygon, Destructoid, NoEscape, Game Developer, GamesIndustry.Biz, The Gamer, FanByte, Video Games Chronicle, PCGamer, RockPaperShotgun, ButWhyTho? etc.) and listen to other podcasts but Waypoint is so often my entryway into conversations about what is happening in the world of game development and criticism. Waypoint is the reason I know about Giant Bomb, as backwards as that will sound to some people, and therefore also Nextlander.
I’d have found Andor without Waypoint, but I’m not sure whether I would have found A More Civilized Age. I am fairly certain AMCA wouldn’t exist without Waypoint, because its seeds came together in part through conversations that happened on Waypoint Radio. Hell, some of those conversations got me started back reading the Timothy Zahn Thrawn books.
I don’t want to overstate the site’s personal importance or remove my own agency in my consumption and creation choices; perhaps I’m being too vague and general. The point is that there are very few websites doing the sort of well-informed, incisive criticism of videogames – looking at labor, looking at politics, looking at consequences and contexts of work that Waypoint does in the way Waypoint does; and fewer still of them drawing on the interests and experiences that the Waypoint crew did to inform what they said and wrote, incorporating their outside knowledge to feed into games coverage and contribute to conversations about art and media beyond it. There was so little in the manner of a corporate veneer while the human personality was still met and matched with earnestness and critical thought. “Casual professionalism” feels like a marketing buzzword, or a spin on Sorkin’s “Practical idealism” in The West Wing so I know for a fact it’s not doing the proper work to relate what these folks were doing, but I feel like you should know that with over 562 podcast episodes and counting, they have left a wealth of valuable conversations for audiences to listen in on.
A brief sampling of some of what’s worth reading there right now off the top of my head: Renata Price’s review of Otxo is the only one I’ve seen, and everything she writes is beautiful and contemplative; Patrick Klepek’s review of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (one of several I’ve read) is in part a metacommentary on the process of reviewing and is another very-recent standout piece. Just the other day I was reading from Cameron Kunzelman’s old column on post-apocalyptic games, and also his deep-dive on the politics of Disco Elysium and L.A. Noire. Ade Adeniji just premiered with a piece about why suburbs aren’t often the setting for videogames. There’s still – as of yet – a piece by Austin Walker about the ESA’s terrible mishandling of what was probably the last Electronic Entertainment Expo. I’ve read Rob Zacny’s review of Marvel’s Midnight Suns and heard his opinion grow in esteem over months on the podcast; and his adventures in office redesign have led to writing about flexible televisions. (Besides the current team of editors Rob Zacny, Patrick Klepek, writer Renata Price, and producer Ricardo Contreras, there are no shortage of great former writers and editors I’ve been introduced to through this site or its podcast – former founder Danielle Riendeau, former writer at Vice tech site Motherboard, Gita Jackson, and Motherboard staff writer Matthew Gault come immediately to mind – and the podcast had even been hosting interviews with game developers. Seriously, check out the catalog while it’s still available.)
It was just a great site and a terrific podcast respected throughout its industry, connected to so many other cool people doing important projects. The world of videogames is worse off for its passing, and it’s a reflection of the warped priorities of the people currently in charge of the purse strings of digital media. I sincerely hope everyone presently involved gets more opportunities to shine a critical light on the world of videogames, and on movies and sports as they did in midweek. I can’t imagine this will be the only tribute written – it might not even be the only one I write – but it felt important to give a heartfelt thank you to everyone that built that site and podcast from before I knew it existed and created such a welcoming online community for their fans.
So, cheers to the Waypoint crew. Thank you for everything you’ve done for people who care about videogames and media over the last six years, and for whatever you do at Waypoint in the next month.
The Waypoint team have always signed off episodes with “Fuck Capitalism. Go Home.” It’s never been an easier sentiment to echo.