Welcome To Aftermath - Worker-owned video game journalism (aftermath.site)
from hybridhavoc@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world on 07 Nov 2023 19:47
https://lemmy.world/post/7935728

Welcome to Aftermath, a worker-owned, reader-supported news site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them. Just launched today.

#games

threaded - newest

NOT_RICK@lemmy.world on 07 Nov 2023 20:38 next collapse

Between this and Second Wind it’s been a big day for new independent games journalism. You love to see it

Donjuanme@lemmy.world on 07 Nov 2023 20:43 next collapse

Is this the zp landing site?

Looks like Kotaku writers. I’ll add it to my check in sites.

Second wind is the new ben croshaw (Yahtzee of zero punctuation) YouTube channel.

I’m excited to have a new reading and watching videogame journalism experience materialize in the same day!

blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world on 07 Nov 2023 20:43 collapse

His name wasn’t in the founders so if he is, it’s not public yet.

blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world on 07 Nov 2023 20:44 next collapse

Welcome to Aftermath, a worker-owned, reader-supported news site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them.

We launch this week with four co-founders: Nathan Grayson, Gita Jackson, Riley MacLeod, and Luke Plunkett. You’ll also see buddies Chris Person and Alex Jaffe around the site. You might remember most of us from Kotaku, where we broke news, covered events, and brought you hard-hitting investigations. You might also have seen us at Motherboard by Vice, The Washington Post’s games vertical Launcher and The Verge. We got back together to start this site not just so we could all blog together again, but to try something new for ourselves and for games journalism.

These days it’s tough for journalism, especially about games. The past few years have seen mass layoffs and site closures, with remaining writers being asked to do more and more with less and less. The ad-supported model is crumbling, social media is a mess, and the businessmen and private equity firms buying up news outlets don’t care about workers, readers, and quality writing, they only care about profits. The four of us saw our sites closed, ourselves and our colleagues laid off, and our workplaces turned hostile in management’s pursuit of growth at all costs.

This couldn’t be happening at a worse time for the games beat. There’s a lot going on: widespread labor organizing, industry-changing mergers and acquisitions, sweeping layoffs, and somehow through it all a ton of amazing new games from big studios and indies alike. We need a curious, independent press to hold power to account, to cut through the marketing hype, and to elevate the voices of those affected by the gaming industry’s upheaval.

We’re going to do all that–and more–here at Aftermath. We know a little group of bloggers with a website can’t save games journalism. But we think there’s a better way than the exhausting rounds of layoffs and barely-functioning sites we’ve got now.

As workers and owners, we’re beholden to no one but ourselves, and to you, our readers. When you subscribe, you’ll get access to writing that pursues the truth and casts a critical eye on gaming and the internet, that doesn’t need to placate capital or kowtow to PR. You’ll be supporting the kind of journalism our past experience has shown us you like best: honest and irreverent, written for people rather than SEO. You’ll get a site that prioritizes the reader experience, with no invasive popups or ads that burn up your device. And you’ll be supporting new ownership models pioneered by our colleagues at sites like Discourse Blog, Defector, Hell Gate, The Autopian, Remap Radio, 404 Media, and others– new kinds of media companies that don’t just bring you good stuff to read, but are helping chart a new future for journalism.

Through our different subscription tiers, you’ll have access to articles, comments, podcasts, a newsletter, a Discord server, and more. We wanted to give you flexibility not just in how much you want to spend to support us, but in how much you want to interact with the community we hope to grow around the site. We hope you’ll want to talk to us, and to each other, but you can also just read the articles, where we’ll keep you up to date on the worlds of video games, board games, comics, movies and tv, nerd culture, tech, streaming, and the labor issues that surround them. We’re launching today with a ton of great stuff for you to read, and we’ll be adding more in the days, weeks, and months to come.

We have big plans for the future, too. We’re eager to publish freelance work, bringing you new voices and stories and supporting the next generation of journalists. We’re excited to hear your thoughts as well: the stories you want us to explore, site features you want us to add, the communities you want us to create. You can reach all of us here.

There’s no way to know how this experiment of ours will go. The past few years have felt like so many endings. But we’re building something new in the aftermath, and we’re excited to build it together with you.

THANKS

Starting Aftermath has been months of work, but we didn’t do it alone. We’ve been lucky to have the counsel of so many colleagues who paved the way, including Jack Mirkinson and Aleks Chan, Matt Hardigree, Max Rivlin-Nadler and Nadia Tykulsker, Jasper Wang, Jason Koebler, and Patrick Klepek and Rob Zacny.

Our amazing logos were created by Andrew Elmore, and the staff portraits were illustrated by Doubleleaf.

Our partners at Lede created the site you’re browsing on and provided vital tech support.

As bloggers who’ve had to turn into businesspeople, we received invaluable advice from Anna Flewelling, Parag Rajendra Khandhar of Gilmore Khandhar, Bruce Mayer of Wegner CPAs, Jessie Rose Lee, and Courtney Waid of First Turn Operations.

And fina

Seraph@kbin.social on 07 Nov 2023 20:53 next collapse

Can we get worker owned game companies now?

Veraxus@kbin.social on 07 Nov 2023 20:55 next collapse

This. This. This.

100% this.

PyroNeurosis@lemmy.world on 07 Nov 2023 22:04 next collapse

Aren’t those called indie establishments?

GoodEye8@lemm.ee on 07 Nov 2023 22:42 next collapse

Not really. Technically Bungie was “indie” after the Activision split and before being bought out by Sony and some of the issues circulating the news today were the same management issues they had when they were “indie”.

Worker-owned is a term rooted in socialism. It means the majority stake (ideologically 100%) of the company is collectively owned by the workers. Thus it means the workers decide what the company does and how they will do it. If an indie company has an owner, who makes the decisions, and employees, who don’t have a say in those decisions, then that’s not really a worker-owned company.

qarbone@lemmy.world on 07 Nov 2023 23:50 next collapse

So Valve, as game devs?

GoodEye8@lemm.ee on 08 Nov 2023 05:59 collapse

No. The main reason people are worried about what happens to Valve when Gabe passes is because Gabe is the owner, he owns more than 50% of the company. Valve has done well under him but once he’s out the picture and that more than 50% ownership is transferred to another person then who knows if the company will stay the same. After all that 50 makes the decisions about the company

If that 50 was split between the workers there would be less certainty about the potentially passing of ice person because the workers collectively uphold the company vision.

Buddahriffic@lemmy.world on 09 Nov 2023 18:39 next collapse

I have heard rumours that his son has a similar mindset. Though who knows, those rumours were on this site, plus even if they are true, he could just be pretending so that Gabe doesn’t look into other options or he could change his mind after being told some enticing numbers.

Cybersteel@lemmy.ml on 09 Nov 2023 19:11 collapse

No company survives the third generation.

AdmiralShat@programming.dev on 09 Nov 2023 19:30 collapse

I mean, unless something has changed in theater few years, Gabe owns only about a quarter of Valve

Cybersteel@lemmy.ml on 09 Nov 2023 19:10 collapse

So communists? Thought we had rooted them out in the nineties. But then again lemmy is run by commie tankies while Reddit is headed by far right nationalists. There’s no good platform nowadays huh.

GoodEye8@lemm.ee on 09 Nov 2023 20:58 collapse

Bro… For starters, not all socialists are communists. This video does a good job explaining the differences. Secondly, there’s a whole other world I’d have to explain just to get to how “lemmy is run by commie tankies” is wrong. For that I’m just going to leave that Lemmy is FOSS, which means the creators are not relevant to the continuation of the project, and Lemmy instances are individually ran and can be used to block “tankies” like lemmy.world did with lemmygrad and hexbear. And finally most people have a negative view of socialism because they don’t know (because it’s not being taught) Marx’s criticism of capitalism that is the foundation of socialist ideology. Marx wrote a whole book on it called Das Kapital, but you can get the general idea starting from here. It’s a summary of chapter 4 of Das Kapital and you should watch chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 (In total doesn’t take more than half an hour) to get the general idea. So even if you don’t agree with socialism as a whole you at least would understand what the core issue is that socialism wants to fix.

Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de on 07 Nov 2023 22:55 next collapse

sadly most indie companies are not co-ops

Yawnder@lemmy.zip on 08 Nov 2023 00:18 collapse

Can confirm. I’ve seen a small studio abuse one of the sole dev that wasn’t an owner and ducking him so hard…

dangblingus@lemmy.world on 09 Nov 2023 20:07 collapse

Indie just means you don’t have a major publisher like EA, Nintendo, Activision, Ubisoft, etc.

bighi@lemmy.world on 09 Nov 2023 12:05 collapse

Let’s go further. Let’s have worker-owned everything.

Worker-owned factories, stores, restaurants, etc. Worker-owned government!

Let’s cut out the people that do not work but take 90% of the revenue.

uis@lemmy.world on 09 Nov 2023 19:00 collapse

*Marx noises intensify*

Veraxus@kbin.social on 07 Nov 2023 20:58 next collapse

Wow, that was fast... but I am IN!

panchzila@lemmy.world on 08 Nov 2023 00:40 next collapse

Is a mastodon bot too much to ask? I don’t use reddit or twitter anymore.

hybridhavoc@lemmy.world on 08 Nov 2023 02:00 collapse

Would love to see them come to the fediverse, even if it was just something as simple as a bot. Their site is all RSSed up though. Can sub to the whole site here: aftermath.site/feed

Or just the Video Games category here: aftermath.site/category/video-games/feed

flumph@programming.dev on 08 Nov 2023 02:19 next collapse

Yeah, I don’t need a bot / feed for any specific service; give me an open standard like RSS any day.

panchzila@lemmy.world on 08 Nov 2023 03:57 collapse

I’ll look into it. Never have done anything like that.

lemmyvore@feddit.nl on 08 Nov 2023 06:59 collapse

Try Flym if you’re on Android.

It has a great “add feed” that can search for websites with feeds. So you can simply search for “aftermath” and it will find it — as opposed to knowing the feed already, or going on the site and then looking for the feed there.

You can also search for other sites or topics and build your own self-curated news sources without any algorithm.

If you end up not liking Flyn you can export your feeds as an OPML file and move to another app (just make sure that one has an export as well so you don’t end up locked in).

panchzila@lemmy.world on 08 Nov 2023 23:14 next collapse

Thank you!

Cybersteel@lemmy.ml on 09 Nov 2023 19:07 collapse

Like finding podcasts

panchzila@lemmy.world on 08 Nov 2023 03:58 next collapse

I have never gone into RSS I’ll look into it. Thanks!

CatTrickery@lemmy.world on 09 Nov 2023 13:54 collapse

If you want to follow on Mastodon follow aftermath.site.feed@mastofeeder.com which just bridges rss to the fediverse.

Note: it will only work for future posts due to the nature of the project

panchzila@lemmy.world on 09 Nov 2023 15:53 next collapse

Great stuff. Thank you!

murmelade@lemmy.ml on 09 Nov 2023 19:52 collapse

I think only future posts is OK considering it’s 1 days old.

neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 08 Nov 2023 04:35 collapse

Hallelujah for supporting RSS! Thank you!

Computerchairgeneral@kbin.social on 08 Nov 2023 00:45 next collapse

Always happy to see an independent gaming journalism outlet start up. Looking forward to seeing what they put out.

Kedly@lemm.ee on 08 Nov 2023 23:45 next collapse

Oh hell yeah Gita’s there? She was one of the last writers I’d read articles from before I ditched Kotaku completely

spudwart@spudwart.com on 10 Nov 2023 15:24 collapse

Whoa, it’s been a LONG time since I favorited a webpage for any reason.

I felt like I just got knocked back to the early 2000s. It was a nice feeling.