Gaming and entertainment media publisher Gamurs Group has cut 30 staff worldwide, saying the layoffs were necessitated by Google changes including its “helpful content” update late last year.
The company, which publishes gaming and esports brands including Twinfinite, Dot Esports and Destructoid and is based between Australia, the US and Europe, informed affected staff simultaneously via a blanket email.
The cuts appear to have affected several editors and long-serving employees.
The mass email told laid-off staff the cuts followed “a thorough structural review” during which the company “considered all potential alternatives” but was “unable to identify any suitable alternative positions for you within the company at this time”.
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Press Gazette understands those affected were immediately logged out of their company Slack and email accounts, retaining only temporary access to payroll infrastructure. Staff with company-purchased laptops have been allowed to keep them and contractual “restrictive covenant obligations” have been waived.
The email continued: “The publishing industry has been undergoing unprecedented shifts over the past few years, specifically, with the release of Google‘s helpful content update and the decline in Google search and Discover traffic across all websites.
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“Gamurs Group has not been immune to these impacts, and we have had to reassess our current structure to implement effective changes and redirect the company’s future.”
Gamurs sites were ‘punished’ by Google
Press Gazette understands remaining staff were subsequently told the company would pivot towards publishing higher-quality, more in-depth content more closely tailored to the interests of its existing audience.
One affected staffer told Press Gazette that since Google’s 2023 helpful content update Gamurs titles had begun “to struggle quite a bit with our traffic”, an issue observed by many media publishers.
“Our rankings started to bomb, as we saw AI and Reddit and Steam come up in the rankings, and our traffic – even our evergreen traffic – just started to drop off, and stuff that should have hit wasn’t wasn’t hitting. Big releases we thought would do well, didn’t.”
Another agreed, saying: “Most Gamurs publications were already struggling with hitting writer KPIs a lot in recent months, morale was at a brutal low and Google was continuing to punish Dot Esports specifically for moving away from what made the brand valuable in the first place: genuine reporting, esports-dedicated news, and scoops.”
As a result, they said, the redundancies were not a total surprise.
“It felt a bit like there was a guillotine constantly over your head,” said the first person – and as a result the news was “a bit of relief. It’s very odd. I think for a long time it’s felt like it could happen at any point. So there was shock, but also, I think the shock was more in the way that they did it than that they did it.
“The fact that they did it was not a surprise,” they added, but more “the fact that they did it via mass email to that many people at once”.
Gamurs Group has made other rounds of cuts recently, including one in March 2023.
A third person said: “It’s been a cycle of not knowing if you’ll be made redundant tomorrow, next month, or next year for a while now. I was pretty sure redundancies of some kind where imminent, but you never know for sure if you’ll be part of it.”
They added: “It’s definitely mixed feelings. Since I expected it at some point, it didn’t hit me that hard (at least not yet). There’s the stress of finding something new now, but I also have a sense of relief and freedom at leaving Gamurs.”
All three laid-off employees expressed frustration with the way Gamurs handled the layoffs, saying that in previous rounds those being terminated were at least informed during a one-to-one phone call with a manager. Some of those managers have themselves been made redundant this week.
The second person said they thought that, “while their management of the sites has been poor and their handling of the redundancies ridiculous, many of the sites aren’t performing well enough to maintain the teams.
“Cuts of some kind were probably necessary, but I don’t think cutting almost exclusively editorial is the way to go.”
The third was less sympathetic, however, saying: “I think Gamurs set the company and its publications on a collision course with these redundancies some years ago, especially with the first two rounds last year.
“They had already gutted much of what made the websites strong, vibrant, valuable, and healthy and placed too much reliance on chasing output to get articles on Google through Discover, SEO, and searches. Once that dried up and the site was punished for basically turning into a churn farm (not to belittle what the incredible writers recently let go or still there had been doing to prove otherwise) it was only a matter of time.”
Several of Google’s algorithm updates in recent years have adversely impacted publishers, some of whom had previously leaned into search-optimised content like product reviews or thin, aggregated information because the algorithm had incentivised them to do so.
Mail Online’s global head of SEO Carly Steven told Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference this month that a Google anti-spam update in June had “effectively turned off a very significant revenue stream for a lot of publishers” by wiping out income from voucher codes and betting offers.
She added: “If an editor says to me: ‘I want this story to rank at the start of the top stories rail’ – I cannot make that happen in the way that we used to do.”
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