Clickout Media is a group that buys up gaming sites and then forces them to host endless unmarked advertorial content for gambling sites and casinos. Now the owner of The Escapist, Adventure Gamers, and Esports Insider is, according to reporting by Insider Gaming, going to “pivot to AI,” and of course that means firing swathes of staff and demolishing the remains of all the sites it’s ruined.
“Sad to say that my role at The Escapist is up for redundancy,” wrote that site’s contributing editor Lloyd Coombes on BlueSky. On LinkedIn he added, “that means a lot of things that I’m still not quite getting my head around.” Coombes is just one of many people who are losing their jobs as a result of ClickOut’s ridiculous folly. Insider Gaming reports, “It was said that Clickout Media will be maintaining a skeleton crew of ‘AI Editors.’”
“That’s me and my team gone from VideoGamer,” says Cat Bussell. “Very sad day. I’ll probably do a bigger post on this later on down the line. Still reeling.”
It seems that all these sites might be completely wiped out with so many job losses, all to be replaced by the illusion of AI.
ClickOut is a peculiarly shy company, describing itself as a “PR and marketing agency” despite its acquisition of gaming sites, and focus on crypto and web 3. It’s so shy, in fact, that it keeps its company’s name off the sites it buys, and goes out of its way to hide its ownership, as we discovered last year when the company bought the beloved Adventure Gamers and reduced it to shilling for online casinos. The site is almost abandoned now, after 27 years of passionate adventure gaming coverage, with the last couple of stories from mid-2025 sitting ghost-like at the top above “reviews” of online slot machines.
The same is true on The Escapist, a site that’s been through many iterations from its highbrow beginnings as an online magazine, through its grim pro-GamerGate era, to its most recent form as a solid, well-written gaming news site from people who genuinely care. The staff has demonstrated a special knack for covering lesser-known games among the big hitters, albeit one that is constantly undermined by the enforced inclusion of “guides” for online gambling that all read suspiciously like a robot might have helped. The same is true all over again on Esports Insider, which continues to put out solid journalism about the esports world, in between wildly incongruous articles about stock prices of betting firms. And then there’s the esteemed VideoGamer, which has battled on despite being plagued with casino ad shite.
It’s not just gaming sites to which ClickOut commits this vandalism. ReadWriteWeb was once a web tech site, launched in 2003 and well-respected, but now it’s just a site pushing sports betting, casinos and poker. It also spent last year buying many, many poker sites, as well as Gambling Insider.
We’re not able to confirm how many people have lost their jobs today, because as Insider Gaming reports, those affected have been required to sign NDAs in order to ensure they receive their severance. We’ve reached out to ClickOut, but based on previous experience, their shyness seems to prevent them from replying to emails, too.
We wish all the best to everyone affected, in a continuingly grim era for games journalists.
