Oh, oh, Snake, I think I know how The Escapist can get out of this with their nose relatively clean, business intact, and still not pay their workers! Just sue them for defamation before the employees sue for unpaid wages. They don't even have to play to win, just make it ugly and spirit crushing. Air a bunch of sordid personal crap, get their mothers involved, have the lawyers call all through the night; you know, act like a real business. It shouldn't take long before the Extra Credits guys and whomever else might have an issue with working for free are too tired of everything to even think of suing for wages. Oh, and they'll obviously have lawyers' fees to pay with the money they were never paid. Working that out should completely eliminate their ability to sue for wages.

The public should get tired of the story in a few weeks at most (most will never know it was happening), so it's not like they'd lose readers in the long term. I'd say this is the best course of action. "We are prepared to defend ourselves against future defamation in a court of law," seems to say Mr. Macris agrees with me.

Solid, one question. What if they're work-for-hire?

Translation: Pull out the "Bobby Kotick v Infinity Ward" maneuver.

PROTIP:
Because I can pretty much guarantee that it will have been the very first time you've ever treated the viewpoint of someone in disagreement with you with any degree of respect at all.

It would be a great change of pace.

First off, Marc, there are several people whose opinions I respect and several times when I've said either I'll concede the point because the way a person explained it made sense or because even though I disagreed I didn't feel informed enough on the subject to argue the point. It's jut that nobody ever notices when these things happen.

Second, I will apologize for how I behaved in this thread. Sorry.

Updates and comments plus a look at a reply to Escapist side

I dunno. I'm just going to find a new game site and leave this one behind. All I'm saying.

He's said on his own site, he's been busy writing for Rock Paper Shotgun if I'm not mistaken.

This post is really just an excuse to link more people to Miracle of Sound.
 

Yahtzee, EC, and Miracle of Sound are/were the only things that were really worth any time over there.

And there's always Miracle of Sound's Bandcamp. Though it'll always be a bit behind the site.

There are... problems in making this happen. Any site costs money to run, and to get a really dedicated staff ideally you'd like to pay them. When Gamepad Dojo was in full swing I really felt bad that I wasn't able to pay anyone. I made sure they weren't under the impression I would, but that doesn't mean I didn't want to.

If you're going to do news, which is the easiest most effective way to get tons of content on a regular basis, you need to cover as much news as you can. This means going out of your way to do original articles, which other sites will quote and repost, and doing the same to other sites, and trying to maintain staggering quantity while you do.

It's genuinely hard to force yourself to just sit down and keep writing news article after news article and still have something you don't feel bad for posting. I'm still not at this skill level, and it's a regular frustration for me.

What makes all this harder is doing it in a way to draw in hits, because what it all comes down to is traffic equals money. It's hard to do this in a way that still retains integrity because in the end inflammatory, overly-opinionated articles with misleading headlines will almost always get the most hits.

Reviews on their own aren't enough to let a website succeed. That's a basic fact.

Even while taking all this into mind, you've also got to maintain your integrity while also keeping publishers and PR reps happy. Ideally you also build a strong community, and it's incredibly hard to build a "strong" community that isn't automatically awful.

You need money, hits, and a dedicated team, and it's hard to get all these things without sacrificing quality or your moral fiber. It's sad, but that's the way things are.