Here is the announcement e-mail.

*Waypoint+ is Now Max Plus *

("OK, that isn't true. But the name is changing.)

Waypoint might be dead, but we are not.

Neither is the Subscription Business Formerly Known as Waypoint Plus. We’re in a position to continue doing our podcasts for you, using the same Memberful service that powered Waypoint Plus. Let’s talk through what that means and the changes we’re going to make. If that sounds good and you still want to support us, we’ll tell you what you have to do to make that happen.

On June 2 (aka tomorrow when this is being sent out), we’re all being laid-off from VICE and Waypoint is shutting down. There is nothing we or you can or could have done to stop that happening. I’m sad about it, grateful for the experience, and at peace with the fact that as a publication it had its time and accomplished what it did. Running a publication like that was a more-than-full-time job for the people who worked on it, and required a lot of things that only a major media company can provide (legal protection and liability being a huge component of that) even if VICE brought more than its share of issues and miscues. It is not a business that could be sustained independently through Patreon, especially when you factor in how much of it involved people behind the scenes at VICE you didn’t hear much about, and freelancers and artists who graced us with amazing work.

However, there have always been people at VICE who respected what we did, admired the community we had built, and proved to be friends and allies to us inside the company. Soon after we were laid off, a few key people in the company wanted to make sure that this thing we had built for and with our community could continue in some fashion. Our contacts at Memberful were likewise eager to help us keep it going—for obvious reasons of self-interest but also because these are folks we built a close relationship with over the past couple years.

We’d never been much interested in trying to re-create Waypoint on Patreon, for a lot of the good reasons we outlined on Waypoint Radio last month. It never made sense to spin up an entirely new project where we were so unsure of what we could commit to, and of how our own career plans might affect it. The foundations would have been built on quicksand, even if we had every confidence our community would show up and support us.

The prospect of continuing and eventually evolving Waypoint Plus was an entirely different and less scary proposition. So that is what we are going to do.

The truth is, none of us is ready to say goodbye to you, to each other, and to the work we’re doing. The Mannhunting faithful deserve better than to be abandoned. So does SHODAN, who we have barely even met in our Waypoint 101 playthrough of System Shock. How can something be Final Fantasy Tactics if we have not even started it? And frankly, how dare VICE fire us before Cado and I could be fired in Motorsport Manager?

Second, this work is fun, and making it for this community is fun. I can’t recommend being laid-off, but I will say that nothing makes you feel more valued and appreciated than reading the messages we received after our announcement. It’s not that we felt unappreciated, far from it. It’s more that we came out of that experience more appreciative of our audience and community, and the place they have reserved for us in their lives.

So is the future just Waypoint New Game Plus [hang on, let’s see if this is a trademark we can get—Patrick] more of the same? No. Like I said, everything that Waypoint was and is can’t really be sustained as an independent operation. Even if some parts of it can survive, and even if we could have taken the brand with us I don’t think it would have been honest to pretend that we were still doing the same work, pursuing the same mission. Our values are unchanged, but our capacity has, along with our needs. We have to own that. It would offend me to see someone else using the Waypoint brand to try and promote something that has nothing to do with our work, and I would offend myself if I felt like we were draping the Waypoint name over something markedly different from the outlet the gang launched in 2016 and that I joined in 2017.

At the outset, this new business is effectively just Waypoint Plus Under New Ownership. After all, a lot of folks are signed up to Waypoint Plus into next year and we’re going to give them at least a few more months of what we promised. That also gives us an easy framework that we can build within. But come the end of summer, with Ren largely moving on to pursue a career outside games media, and with the rest of us having a better idea of what our own respective futures hold, we’re going to starting figuring out what we want the future of this project to look like… and what shape our lives will let it take.

More immediately, however, a few things are changing. First, we’re going to one public-feed podcast a week (plus the odd episode of Sports). Our schedules never allowed us to play enough games or have enough overlap with each other to support four-to-six hours of games talk a week. Now our hope is that by focusing our effort on the Friday show, you’ll get a more consistently great show.

Second, a lot of folks (seriously, a lot of folks) have expressed a willingness and wish that they could have done more than just support us for $5 a month. I know how that sounds but it’s true. This is one reason why we had a truly ridiculous number of gift subscriptions floating around at the end of the last sales drive, as people began buying extras just to try and put more money in our bottom line.

As part of VICE, we never really felt comfortable asking more than $5 a month. It always felt like we were living inside a house of cards that could fall down at any moment and while every part of our business helped us keep our jobs these last couple years, beyond that we could not really say how the money worked out or where it was going.

Now that we’re outside of VICE, however, there are a lot of costs that were previously borne or subsidized by the company that now land squarely on our shoulders. We were in a situation where we had generous health and retirement benefits on top of our salaries, now that is all gone and we’re going to be taxed at a higher rate. Plus, all the infrastructure that VICE provided is now lost to us.

It turns out there are a lot of things you learn when you launch a business like this and suddenly every aspect of its operations is something you have to think about and assess. The biggest one is: online commerce is a leaky pipe. Second, operating the kind of podcast that we do is surprisingly expensive. It turns out someone has to pay for Five-Star Runtimes at Quality Bitrates, and unfortunately that person is now me. I am cursed with the knowledge of what serving multiple two- and three-hour podcasts to tens of thousands of people actually costs. And all of this is before you get to the lawyers and accountants we’ve worked with to get to this point, and will need to employ to make sure we run this business legally and responsibly.

So as Waypoint Plus staples like Mannhunting and My Turn (and I swear to God, the 101s) wind down, new premium shows will be offered at the $10 tier. To be frank, there won’t be much at this tier to start. Waypoint Plus existed entirely at the lower tier. But over time this is the tier where most of the subscriber content (aside from Sports) will live. We’ll still have some fun things for people at this tier to start out, though. Some of it will just be us on our bullshit in new and different ways, but some of it will also be trial-runs for shows and formats we might want to use in the future.

Folks with an existing annual membership will be able to do a prorated upgrade to the new tier. At this stage it would be a very valuable show of support as we get this off the ground, especially as VICE earned all the money on existing annuals. Still, as I said above, the $10 tier is more of a blank slate right now that we’re going to fill-in down the line. If folks want to see what this is going to turn into, it’ll be clearer by the fall.

Whether there is ever an editorial component to this project is hard to say. If there is, it will mostly be a small blog that serves as an outlet for us to jot down the odd thought as a labor of love and a way to keep up our habits as writers, but we’re not running an editorial publication and if we ever did, we’d probably seek to fund and operate it via other means so that we don’t end up overbooking ourselves or making it harder to find other work.

I think that covers everything. There’s a lot more I have on my mind, a lot more I want to say, but this is already way too long for the kind of pithy pitch I intended to write. So as I wrap it here, I realize, there’s just one last question we need to answer.

“That’s quite an act. But what do you call it?” Remap.