Second Wind, a channel made by the staff who were fired and left The Escapists gave a lot of information on what’s next. The pair started by introducing themselves and giving temporary titles. They went over the backstory, which we covered in another article. The pair decided to go with the YouTube Channel idea and Patreon after the outpour of support. They decided to go through their bigger idea, which was Second Wind.
Per the live stream, The first piece of content will be coming out next Wednesday, November 15. They will be short-form reviews called “Fully Ramblematic” among other sites that are owned by the writers who left The Escapists. There will also be another channel for live-stream content and podcasts. The livestream will start tomorrow November 9, 2023.
The Second Wind Channel was created five days ago, which is four days before Calandra was fired but the pair didn’t mention why that was. I can confirm that Calandra had no idea he was going to be fired before it happened. His e-mail was locked out prior to being fired which I can also confirm has happened to another Managing Editor when they were fired.
They did mention that the D&D page was collecting money for what sounds like a campaign. Yahtzee will cover the cost of what has already been raised, which makes me wonder what Gamurs will do with the money that they now have access to.
As for what the two think of the firing of Calandra. The pair claims that Calandra had built a great site and that they were in the middle of massive growth.
I cannot comment on if there’s any truth to that because I have worked as an Editor at Gamurs so it would not be appropriate. I will say that there are two sides to every story and that just because a site or initiative has lots of ideas does not mean that traffic reflects that. While I do wish the team well, my experience at Gamurs was not one where they made decisions like this without reason. That is especially true when the network is dealing with the people in charge of sites.
Again, good luck to the team, but I would like to emphasize that you need two sides to decide who is right or wrong. A lot of the backstory is unknown and Gamurs likely won’t comment on this.
