For its entire run, Waypoint was my favorite source for figuring out what was going on in the complex, fascinating and often upsetting world of video games. I was even lucky enough to write an article, produce/provide some music for their podcasts and moderate their forums for a time. I'm so glad for everyone I got to know on staff and in the community thru the forums and my podcast memes. If I hear someone else who plays games is a Waypoint listener/reader, it's always been a great ice-breaker. Like "oh ok, so you get it". I not only learned more about games, but about politics as a whole from the site and community as well. I was so ill-equipped in 2016, but I was hungry to learn.
Everyone who ever worked for them deserved to be given more shine and more space to stretch their legs and do great things.
Fuck VICE
It's difficult to articulate just how important Waypoint was in terms of unapologetically bringing in thoughtful pieces that weren't just about how games played, or whatever new bloodbath at whatever studio took place, they were a place that wrote about weird little shit that nobody else would write about. There were pieces diving into the history of obscure DOOM wads, Marxist critiques of games, and (one of my favorite series of articles they ever did) meditations on apocalypse and endings. They went out there and fucking killed it, and gave a platform to writers that probably wouldn't be able to get their shit published anywhere else - certainly not to a large-scale website, at any rate.
And now they're fucking dead because (stop me if you heard this before) venture capitalist ghouls and shitty upper management came in and decided the numbers weren't going up enough, so to make the numbers go up in the short term a group of insanely talented and passionate people had to lose their jobs and get cast into the howling void of an increasingly dire economic situation. Just fucking inexcusable. Make no fucking mistake: this didn't have to happen, never had to happen, but because someone needed the numbers to go up a bunch of people are left scrambling for work. Fuck VICE.
Fuck capitalism, now and forever.
