The Washington Post had a string of employment terminations over the past week, with 20 newsroom reporters being laid off and 30 vacancies announced to be unfilled. According to GamesIndustry.biz,  majority of these cuts are due to the Washington Post’s decision to shut down Launcher, its dedicated section for gaming news and culture.

NYT reporting that The Washington Post is shutting down its video game vertical, just as the video game industry has spawned HBO’s number one hit and is about to have one of its biggest years ever. Cruel and shortsighted. My heart goes out to everyone at @LauncherWP

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) January 24, 2023

Launcher was established on October 15, 2019 and provided “feature coverage and analysis of the people, companies, teams and trends” that made up the ever-growing gaming industry. According a memo by the Post’s executive editor Sally Buzbee, the positions were eliminated in response that were “not essential to serving our competitive needs.” However, the Washington Post Guild, the representative voice of the Post’s employees, made a Tweet expressing that these layoffs were not rooted in financial necessity. The now former editor of Launcher Alyse Stanley also commented that these layoffs came as a complete surprise to the staff.

We have received no clear explanation for why these layoffs had to happen.

As far as we can tell, they are not financially necessary or rooted in any coherent business plan from our publisher, who has said that he expects the company to be larger a year from now.

— Washington Post Guild (@PostGuild) January 24, 2023

Still in a state of shock. The “sorry to hear what happened to Launcher!” slack messages starting coming in before my shift was even scheduled to start today, then received that email saying “we have reached out to those employees” affected by layoffs. they had, in fact, not 🙃

— Alyse Stanley (@pithyalyse) January 24, 2023

The Washington Post’s decision to end its dedicated gaming section is only the latest in a wave of games media layoffs. Popular gaming websites GameSpot and Giant Bomb also saw a recent wave of layoffs, and there will likely be more employment cutbacks within the year from a variety of media outlets due to worsening general financial conditions.