Wasted wanted to offer a different kind of gaming journalism, but couldn’t find enough support.
The Europe game magazine Wasted, which was founded in fall 2021, will be discontinued on March 31, 2023. The reason is apparently too low subscription numbers, which made further financing of the project impossible.
What is wasted?
Wasted was founded by the journalists Christian Schiffer (editor at Bayerischer Rundfunk) and Jagoda Froer. Stephan Günther, who also wrote for GameStar, acted as editor-in-chief. The 2021 founders introduced themselves in a short video:
link to YouTube content
Wasted set itself the goal of promoting games journalism in Europey to shake a little
and stand out from the mainstream. Instead of reports driven by topicality and reach, Wasted’s contributions should be characterized by experimental text types and formats, personal perspectives and often a pinch of humour. They were mainly written by freelance authors.
link to Podcast Content
Financed by the readership
But the aim was not only to set itself apart from other magazines in terms of content. Wasted relied exclusively on crowdfunding for its financing: readers could take out various Patreon subscriptions to support the team. On the other hand, there was no advertising at all on the website.
Apparently the support was no longer sufficient. Like Jagoda Froer and Christian Schiffer now in one message to their community wrote, the decision to stop the project is extremely difficult for them:
It is with a heavy heart that we now have to inform everyone else that we will be discontinuing the WASTED project on March 31, 2023. […]
The decision was not easy for us, but considering the development of the number of subscriptions and the state of our own resources, we see no other realistic option. […]
Maybe it’s some consolation for you to know that while trying to fill a niche in Europe games journalism, you’ve supported some pretty cool authors and even given them a voice!
Despite the end of the project, the Wasted website and forum will remain online, and individual authors will also publish texts there at their request. Also some projects, like a podcast or the format Who has the belt
should go on. So far, the Wasted community has reacted primarily with understanding to the end of the project.
