Across the world, news media is laying off people left and right. CNN, Washington Post, and countless others have had layoffs recently. The layoffs aren't just happening at major news outlets, gaming websites are also being hit with layoffs. IGN laid people off in September 2026, including Brian Altano and Seth Macy. Restart/Moonrock had layoffs in August 2026. Shortly after these layoffs happened, the comment sections filled up with people celebrating. That part never changes. People love to celebrate others' misfortunes. Talented writers and video producers lose their jobs, and within an hour somebody shows up to announce that gaming websites were pointless anyway, that nobody reads them, and that YouTube made the whole industry obsolete years ago. It is a tidy little theory that requires knowing absolutely nothing about how any of this actually works.
Who Was Laid Off at IGN in September 2026
On September 14, 2026, Aftermath reported that Brian Altano, Seth Macy, and Bo Moore were among the IGN staff cut under owner Ziff Davis. The layoffs reached multiple departments, and IGN's union said four union members plus additional employees were affected. Altano and Macy in particular were the kind of on-camera personalities people actually showed up for, which makes the timing of this one sting a little more than usual.
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.
How Google AI Overviews Affect Gaming Websites
The honest version of this conversation has to start with search, because search is the faucet. Statcounter put Google's worldwide search market share at roughly 91% in August 2026. That number covers search specifically rather than all web traffic, but the practical effect for a publisher is the same. One company decides whether new readers ever find a website at all, and when that company adjusts how results are presented, ad revenue, freelance budgets, and staffing levels move with it.
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 questions 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.
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 the behavior changed, and it changed in the direction publishers feared. 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 in the first place.
Why Publishers Stopped Taking Google at Its Word
Trust is the other half of this, and Google spent that down years ago. Company representatives spent a long stretch denying that click data factored into rankings, and then antitrust testimony confirmed that the Navboost system used exactly that. Leaked internal documentation filled in more of the picture afterward, and Rand Fishkin's breakdown of those documents laid out how far the public statements drifted from the internal reality.
None of that proves anything about AI Overviews specifically. It does explain why publishers roll their eyes when Google says traffic impact is minimal. When a company holds that much leverage over whether a business exists next year, asking everyone to simply believe the official line is a big ask, and the track record does not support it.
Ziff Davis Still Has to Answer for the Cuts
Google being a problem does not let ownership off the hook. Falling traffic and shrinking ad rates are real pressures, but management still chooses the response, and the response keeps being the same one. Cut the staff, hand the workload to whoever is left, repeat next quarter. Payroll drops, sure. 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.
Readers were openly stunned that Brian Altano and Seth Macy were cut, and plenty of them said they were done visiting the site over it. Maybe that holds and maybe it does not, but a publication cutting the exact people its audience came to see is not a recovery plan. It is a slower version of the same decline, and the next round of numbers is going to look worse, not better.
While this shakeup was surprising to say the least, I still don't think it comes anywhere near as shocking as when Phil Spencer stepped down at Xbox.
Does YouTube Actually Replace Gaming Websites
The YouTube argument deserves a fair hearing, because plenty of creators do genuinely original work. Hardware testing, long-form interviews, investigative video essays, all of it counts and all of it takes real effort. But a huge share of gaming video is commentary layered on top of reporting that a written publication broke first. The scoop, the studio source, the leaked document, the forty hours somebody sank into a game before explaining how its systems actually function, that groundwork comes from somewhere.
Strip out the outlets doing that work and the reaction economy has nothing left to react to. The videos do not stop, they just get thinner, and eventually everybody is recapping a press release together. That is not a hypothetical, it is already visible in how much coverage traces back to the same handful of surviving sources.
What Happens to Gaming Journalism Next
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.
For smaller independent sites, the outlook is not exactly cheerful either. Search visibility has become harder to hold onto for everyone who is not a major brand, and the traffic model that supported enthusiast coverage for two decades is not coming back in the same shape. The work still has value when fewer people land on the page to read it. The open question is whether enough of that value ever makes it back to the people producing it, and right now the answer keeps being no.
Why Google AI Overviews Hurt Small Gaming Sites Like LepsLair
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 of stuff out of my control is disheartening. In a lot of ways it's odd that another website is in control of whether or not you are seen. You don't pay Google to be indexed. It's not like the old days where you paid to have your business in a phone book and the more you paid, the bigger your ad was. Google just decides what it shows and whether or not it shows your website. With AI, they chose to show something different, making websites obsolete since it already has that data.
Google deserves scrutiny over what its search changes do to publishers. Ziff Davis and every other owner deserves scrutiny over how they respond. Brian Altano, Seth Macy, Bo Moore, and everyone else who just lost their job at IGN deserve better than a reply guy deciding they never mattered.
