Waypoint was/is fucking awesome, both in quality but also in providing a critical paid mainstream-ish voice to game criticism and reporting. Damn good people with a damn good masthead, and a lot of their stuff (even with the stuff that wasn't for me or I didn't agree with) is super thoughtful.
Digital media at large is a nightmarish business right now (and arguably for the past decade), and Vice has a lot of problems both internally re: positioning and externally re: ad/partner money is a goddamn desert. This probably goes double for most entertainment verticals like gaming, and that's even before you get into the awful & boring conversations about "brand equity", "market position", "competitive wedging" & anything at all to do with equity firms/publicly traded companies. Even online publications that are hitting (or crushing!) their traffic/advertiser/signup/engagement targets are being trashed or merged about every nine months because of a tough market and even tougher (imo, entirely unrealistic) investor expectations, and that's not even going into "what does sustainable numbers look like". Thank fucking god they unionized, on that note.
I'm not thrilled with Waypoint losing the title, but chances are that it's a compromise being made so that the people of Waypoint can continue doing the job they set out to do. Even if that means I have to wade through some content aggregation horsecrap that some might call "clickbait" (which isn't real, yall) because it can drive the mass market traffic needed to justify the niche stuff that Waypoint does, I will happily make that trade times ten, because Waypoint's work and purpose is that damn good.
So yeah, GL to all the people at Waypoint/Vice Games former and current. Things ain't easy, and I'm happy y'all seem to be persevering in the face of it. Gaming is better because of publications like Waypoint, so if I gotta go to a different domain name and/or breeze past some Game Boy nostalgia to read it, that's fine.
