The Escapist appears to be going through a period of great upheaval in the last 6 months. Just to recap their last few months:

Watching the people and conversation within #gamergate, it is actually the CLOSEST I’VE EVER SEEN to MLK’s dream in the world. — Oliver Campbell (@oliverbcampbell) December 13, 2014

Um, right. At any rate, I think it’s very clear that the Escapist has decided to embrace a certain editorial slant for their future content, which is fine. Game journalists SHOULD be able to have slants and biases – otherwise, every single piece of writing will read like the puff pieces that just regurgitate publisher talking points, which is what games journalism was back in the print days. It is, I note, probably going to be roughly as fair and balanced as, say, Fox News. Or, dare I say it, less objective than Polygon – just the other direction.

Pandering to this audience has created some level of excitement amongst the GG diehards. Will it work? Possibly. Polygon is actually doing pretty well from all evidence I’ve been able to find, in stark contrast to the Escapist’s sinking fortunes (compare the 1yr data to see what I’m talking about), so clearly talking about games from a well-defined point of view can build a readership. That being said, GG is not actually a very big movement – KiA’s readership of 28K is a rounding error compared to the 12M people that Kotaku reaches monthly, and the Escapist’s sinking fortunes overlap tidily with their embrace of GamerGate, meaning that the slow shift they’ve been making already appears to be alienating more people than they’re bringing in.

All that being said, I can tell you that I’m no longer the target market for that magazine.