In August 2026, a gaming website funded by Walmart fired every single person who wrote for it, and then announced it would keep publishing anyway. That sentence should stop people in their tracks, and somehow it barely registered outside of games media circles. It is the clearest picture anybody could ask for of where this industry sits right now, and it happened a full month before the IGN layoffs that finally got everyone's attention.
Restart, Walmart's Gaming Site, Laid Off Its Entire Editorial Team
On August 7, 2026, Aftermath reported that Restart had let go of its whole editorial staff. News editor Imran Khan, editor in chief Brandy Berthelson, associate editor Jesse Vitelli, deals writer Myles Obenza, and senior editor Henry Stenhouse all confirmed it publicly the same day. Berthelson added that her time in games media was over entirely, which is the part that tends to get skipped when these things get summarized.
Restart launched in December 2024 as a project of the content marketing agency Moonrock, funded by Walmart, under the original tagline "Independent gaming news powered by Walmart." That tagline got changed pretty quickly for reasons anyone could guess. The skepticism at the time was about whether a site bankrolled by a retailer could ever really be independent, and the answer arrived about twenty months later in the form of five people finding out over email.
Then came the follow up. Moonrock president John Gaudiosi posted that the archives would stay online and that Restart would continue, just with fewer and bigger projects, starting with GTA VI coverage. No editorial staff, still publishing. He did say former staff get first call when the next project is real, which is a decent gesture, but the underlying message landed exactly the way it reads. The brand was the asset. The writers were the cost.
Who Was Laid Off at IGN in September 2026
The timing is what makes this one hard to look past. On September 14, 2026, Aftermath reported that Ziff Davis had laid off IGN staff two months ahead of the launch of Grand Theft Auto VI, one of the biggest news generating game releases in years. Brian Altano, Seth Macy, and Bo Moore were among those cut, along with people across multiple departments.
Altano and Macy stung differently than a normal round of cuts. Those were on camera personalities with actual audiences, people who had readers and viewers specifically because of them rather than because of the logo above their heads. Moore found out the same day his coverage of Valve's Steam Frame launch was sitting on the site's front page.
IGN's union said they were blindsided, and said it took most of the day just to determine who had actually been let go, both inside and outside the union. That is a break from past rounds, where the union says they at least got a heads up beforehand. Four union members were confirmed affected, with a fifth case still pending a decision in November.
Anyone hoping to find a lesson in that list is going to come up empty. Nobody learns a single thing about somebody's performance record from seeing their name in a layoff announcement. That is not how staff reductions work at a company owned by a publicly traded media conglomerate, and pretending otherwise is just a cheap way to feel good about somebody else's bad week.
What Google AI Overviews Did to a 20 Year Old Site
LepsLair has had its share of ups and downs with Google. Back when paid blogging was big, Google decided to punish the writers of the blogs instead of going after the advertisers. In hindsight, I suppose that makes sense, why go after the advertisers when you could go after the publishers and force the advertisers to use Google Ads? That was years ago now and LepsLair had fully recovered from that blowback. In recent years I started adding more informative content to the site to help with my Google rankings and it was working, until AI Overviews messed it all up.
AI Overviews turned Google from a search engine into a fully automated publisher. A site publishes the article, Google crawls it, and then Google answers the question on its own results page using material that came from the article. Source links sometimes appear, but a reader who already has the answer has very little reason to click anything. Pew Research Center studied browsing activity from 900 U.S. adults in March 2025 and found that traditional results got clicked on 8% of visits when an AI summary was present, versus 15% when it was not. Links inside the summaries themselves were clicked on 1% of visits. Just as telling, users hit with an AI summary ended their browsing session entirely 26% of the time, compared with 16% on pages without one. People are not just skipping the click, they are giving up on the search altogether.
That study does not measure how much traffic any individual website lost, and it does not explain any specific layoff. What it does establish is that reader behavior changed, and it changed in exactly the direction publishers were worried about. A citation in a summary box is a nice gesture. It does not get anybody through the door, and it does not pay the person who spent a week putting the information together. It is the same discoverability problem LepsLair has run into writing about why Prototype isn't on Game Pass yet, where the search interest is real but an AI summary answers the question before the page ever gets seen.
The gap between those two situations is worth sitting with. A site with no payroll can absorb a traffic collapse and keep going out of stubbornness. A site with a masthead cannot. Same algorithm change, completely different consequences, and the consequences land on the people who made writing about games their actual job.
Bing Clicks Are Up While Google Clicks Are Down
I don't make money off LepsLair.com. I haven't in a long time. The articles I put up are because I enjoy writing. I always have. I took journalism and creative writing classes throughout high school and college. Even though I do this as an outlet and I enjoy it, seeing my impressions and clicks drop because Google has decided AI is their new main business is disheartening.
The strange part of the last several months has been watching Bing move in the opposite direction. Clicks from Bing are up while Google clicks keep sliding, on the same pages, with no change in what gets published. It is not enough volume to celebrate, and one search engine cannot carry a site that spent two decades built around another one. But it does suggest the problem is a specific company making specific choices rather than some inevitable death of the written word online. Now if we could just switch people from using Google to Bing.
The People Cheering These Layoffs Have No Idea What They Are Cheering
Every time a round of cuts gets announced, the comment sections fill up within the hour. Gaming websites were pointless anyway, nobody reads them, YouTube made the whole industry obsolete years ago. People love to celebrate others' misfortunes, and this particular version comes wrapped in a tidy little theory that requires knowing absolutely nothing about how any of this works.
The YouTube half of that deserves a fair hearing, because plenty of creators do genuinely original work. Hardware testing, long form interviews, investigative video essays, all of it counts. But a large share of gaming video is commentary layered on top of reporting that a written publication broke first. Strip out the outlets doing that groundwork and the reaction economy has nothing left to react to. The videos do not stop, they just get thinner, until everybody is recapping the same press release at the same time.
Gaming websites are not above criticism. Bad reviews deserve pushback, sloppy reporting deserves to get called out, and readers have every right to be loud about both. Treating a layoff notice as proof that an entire profession was worthless is a different thing entirely, and it is lazy.
Ziff Davis and Moonrock Still Chose the Response
Google being a problem does not let ownership off the hook. Falling traffic and shrinking ad rates are real pressures, but management still picks what to do about them, and the pick keeps being the same one. Cut the staff, hand the workload to whoever is left, repeat next quarter. It is the same pattern LepsLair has covered before with the Xbox shakeup, where ownership decisions during a rough stretch land hardest on the people actually doing the work. Payroll drops. What also disappears is institutional knowledge, industry relationships, and the trust a writer spent a decade building with an audience that followed their byline specifically.
Restart and IGN took slightly different roads to the same place. One kept the brand and deleted the staff outright. The other is trimming the people readers named by name while asking the survivors to cover the gap. Neither version explains how a publication gets stronger by continually losing the people capable of making it worth visiting.
The reader response to the IGN cuts should worry Ziff Davis more than it apparently does. Plenty of people said flatly that they were done with the site over who got let go. Maybe that holds and maybe it does not, but cutting the exact people an audience showed up for is not a recovery plan. It is a slower version of the same decline.
What Happens to Gaming Journalism Next
The honest outlook for smaller independent sites is not cheerful either. Search visibility has gotten harder to hold for anybody who is not a major brand, and the traffic model that supported enthusiast coverage for two decades is not coming back in the shape it used to have. The work still has value when fewer people land on the page to read it. Whether enough of that value ever makes it back to the people producing it is the open question, and right now the answer keeps being no.
Google deserves scrutiny over what its search changes do to publishers. Ziff Davis, Moonrock, Walmart, and every other owner deserves scrutiny over how they respond to it. The people who just lost their jobs deserve better than a reply guy deciding they never mattered.
