Kotaku Is So Back, Microsoft Not So Much

On this week’s episode, Nathan and Riley are joined by Ethan Gach of Kotaku dot com and Garrett Martin of the newly rechristened Endless Mode, two beneficiaries of the only good week for games media in the past century. The former finally managed to wriggle out from under G/O Media’s suffocating boot via a sale to the same seemingly benign company that bought Gizmodo, and the latter represents that rarest of unicorns: a new video game website with a functional budget in the year 2025. We talk to both Ethan and Garrett about the state of games journalism and their cautious optimism about the future now that MBA-brained business idiots seem to have moved on from blindly buying up websites for their ponzi schemes. Then we discuss decidedly less good news: Microsoft just laid off 9,000 more workers, many of them in games, resulting in cancellations of multiple promising projects as well as general industry brain drain. Finally, prompted by a mailbag question, we talk about the many cool world records we’ve broken, only some of which involve eating a waffle to discover a clue.   

Credits

- Hosts: Nathan Grayson, Riley MacLeod, & special guests Ethan Gach and Garrett Martin

- Podcast Production & Ads: Multitude

- Subscribe to Aftermath!

About The Show

Aftermath Hours is the flagship podcast of Aftermath, a worker-owned, subscription-based website covering video games, the internet, and everything that comes after from journalists who previously worked at Kotaku, Vice, and The Washington Post. Each week, games journalism veterans Luke Plunkett, Nathan Grayson, Chris Person, Riley MacLeod, and Gita Jackson – though not always all at once, because that’s too many people for a podcast – break down video game news, Remember Some Games, and learn about Chris’ frankly incredible number of special interests. Sometimes we even bring on guests from both inside and outside the video game industry! I don’t know what else to tell you; it’s a great time. Simply by reading this description, you’re already wasting time that you could be spending listening to the show. Head to aftermath.site for more info.

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