You stopped reading Kotaku in 2016. You did not stop reading. You just spent the next eight years following bylines around the internet, paying $7 to Patrick Klepek over here, $9 to Aftermath over there, half-reading a Substack from someone you remember from Waypoint, opening Defector to read the games posts even though it isn’t a games site.
This is a map of where the writers went. It exists because nobody else has bothered to draw it, and you deserve to know who is still doing the work.
It is also, full disclosure, a sales pitch. We are an indie gaming media bundle called TAG Pro, and one of our founding-offer arguments is that you are already paying for everything we offer, patched across five different outlets, and that bundling it is cheaper. The map is the proof. Read it as evidence, not as a press release.
The collapse, briefly
Between 2019 and 2025, every major gaming publication you used to read got gutted. Vice killed Waypoint. G/O Media killed Deadspin and ran Kotaku into the ground until it became, in the words of one of its own former staffers writing later at Aftermath, “AI slop.” The Escapist’s owners fired the whole team in a week. IGN bought Game Informer’s corpse. Polygon survived by becoming a different magazine. GameSpot exists. Eurogamer’s parent company keeps cutting it.
The writers did not disappear. They reorganized. Some started worker-owned co-ops. Some launched solo Substacks. Some teamed up with two or three friends and put out a newsletter twice a week. The diaspora is now where the work actually happens. The legacy outlets are mostly aggregators of press releases.
The catch is that the diaspora is fragmented. Each writer or co-op is a separate paywall, a separate Stripe checkout, a separate RSS feed if you still use one of those. Following them all is a part-time job and a $300-a-year hobby.
Here is the map.
1. Kotaku → Aftermath
Aftermath launched in November 2023 when four ex-Kotaku staffers (Riley MacLeod, Nathan Grayson, Luke Plunkett, Gita Jackson) walked away from G/O Media and started a worker-owned site. It is the most direct lineage from the Kotaku of the late 2010s, the one that ran the long features and the actually-funny posts. Subscription tiers run roughly $7 a month to $10 a month. Their best work is the long stuff that legacy gaming press will not run anymore: labor reporting, criticism that names names, columns from writers with actual opinions.
Who to read there: Luke Plunkett’s media columns, Nathan Grayson’s labor reporting, Gita Jackson on basically anything.
2. Vice’s Waypoint → Remap
Remap Radio launched in early 2024 when the Waypoint team (Patrick Klepek, Rob Zacny, Cado Contreras, Renata Price, Ricardo Contreras) reformed after Vice imploded. Patrick had already been running Crossplay as his solo newsletter; Remap is the team version, podcasts plus written work. The work skews older, more thoughtful, more interested in the lives of the people playing the games than in the games themselves. Subscription is around $10 a month for the full feed.
Who to read there: Patrick on gaming and family life, Rob on strategy games, Cado on basically anything they want to write about.
3. Patrick Klepek’s solo work → Crossplay
Crossplay is Patrick Klepek’s solo Substack, separate from Remap. The pitch is gaming through the lens of being a parent and an adult with limited time. If your dad-friend keeps forwarding you gaming pieces, they are almost certainly Crossplay pieces. Subscription is around $5 a month or $50 a year. The free tier is generous. The paid tier gets the Friday newsletter and the bonus columns.
The angle: this is the cleanest single-writer version of the “writing about gaming for adults” beat. If you read one writer, read Patrick.
4. Deadspin → Defector
Defector is not a games site. It is the writer-owned co-op that the rest of this diaspora references as the model. Twenty ex-Deadspin staffers walked out in late 2020, formed an LLC, sold subscriptions directly. They cover sports, but they also cover games, and the games coverage (mostly by Luis Paez-Pumar and a rotating cast) is among the smartest you can read. Subscription is $79 a year or $8 a month.
Why it matters here: Defector is the existence proof that worker-owned reader-funded sites can sustain a team of twenty for five years. Every indie gaming site on this list cites Defector when explaining their business model. When ResetEra users say “we need a Defector for games,” they mean this, specifically.
5. Kotaku editorial → Game File
Game File is Stephen Totilo’s solo newsletter. Totilo edited Kotaku for a decade. The work is investigative, industry-focused, the closest thing to “trade reporting that an outsider can read” in games journalism right now. Subscription is around $5 a month. The free posts cover most of the news. The paid posts cover the things you would actually pay to know.
Best for: industry watchers, anyone who cares about the business side of the games they play.
6. The Escapist team → Second Wind
Second Wind is the full Escapist team relaunched after a mass exit in November 2023, when their CEO fired their editor-in-chief Nick Calandra and the rest of the team walked in solidarity. Yahtzee Croshaw (Zero Punctuation), Nick, JM8, Frost, the whole crew. Subscriber-supported, ad-light, video-first but with a written component. Funded primarily through Patreon and YouTube memberships at around $4 a month.
Why this one matters: Yahtzee’s Fully Ramblomatic is the single most-watched gaming video review series of the last fifteen years. Second Wind kept it. The Escapist still publishes under that name with a new team. The audience went with Yahtzee.
7. Vice / Motherboard → 404 Media
404 Media is not a games site either. It is four ex-Vice / Motherboard reporters (Joseph Cox, Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole) doing investigative tech reporting, subscriber-funded at $10 a month or $100 a year. Their games coverage is intermittent but excellent when it appears. Koebler’s work on AI scraping affecting game developers, Maiberg on cheating economies, Cole on whatever the latest awful platform decision is.
Best for: when something you read about a game is actually about a broader tech story.
8. Backloggd / HowLongToBeat-adjacent → Backloggd Backer
Backloggd is not a publication, but it is in the diaspora map because it is one of the things adult gamers pay for. It is a Letterboxd for games, with a small editorial team that publishes lists and reviews. Backer tier is $36 a year. The product is the tracker. The editorial is the bonus.
The TAG honest take: we built our own tracker (SavePoint) because Backloggd does not do household libraries or decision support. We respect Backloggd a lot. If you only want a tracker, theirs is great.
Where TAG sits on this map
We are not in the diaspora. We are something different. Two Average Gamers has been around since 2018, started as a regular gaming blog with two friends, ran on Mediavine ad revenue for six years, and pivoted last year out of the ad-funded model into a paid bundle called TAG Pro.
The pitch is not “we are smarter than the writers above.” It is that we are the bundle. Editorial in the voice and rhythm of the writers above, plus a tracker product (SavePoint), plus a Discord, plus a daily-habit arcade (Connections clone, head-to-head ranker), bundled at $99 a year. The founding offer is $149 once, locked forever, while the first 100 seats remain.
The bet behind that pitch is the math you have been doing in your head for a year. If you support Aftermath at $100 plus Crossplay at $60 plus Backloggd at $36 plus one or two others, you are paying around $300 a year for a patchwork that does not include a tracker built for adults or a Discord that isn’t 19-year-olds. You can do all of that, plus the tracker, plus the community, for $149 once.
We are not asking you to leave the diaspora. Half the founding members we already have still subscribe to Aftermath and Crossplay, and so do we. We are asking you to add us as the bundle that connects to that lineage.
If you can only pick three
This is the question the diaspora map should answer. If you read this far and you have $25 a month to spend on gaming media, where do you put it? Our honest ranking, with TAG removed from the list to avoid the obvious bias:
- Crossplay ($5/month) for the single best writer on adult gaming
- Aftermath ($7-10/month) for the team voice and the labor reporting
- Defector ($8/month) if you also care about sports, Game File ($5/month) if you do not
That is roughly $20 a month, or $240 a year. Add our bundle on top at $149 once and you have the closest thing to a full media diet for an adult gamer that exists in 2026.
What this map is actually telling you
The legacy outlets are not coming back. The writers worth reading are at small co-ops, on solo newsletters, on subscriber-funded video shows. The work is better than it has been in a decade, and it costs more than it used to, and it is fragmented across a dozen Stripe checkouts.
There are two ways to react to that. You can keep patching it together, half-reading each one, occasionally getting hit by a Substack you forgot you were subscribed to. Or you can decide which three or four you actually read, lock those in, and stop scrolling.
If our bundle helps with that decision, good. If it doesn’t, the map above is still the map. Use it.
About TAG Pro: launching publicly December 2026 at $99/year. Founding offer live now: $149 lifetime or $79/year locked forever. Read the founding pitch →
