$0 Per Article: TheGamer Writers Revolt Over New Contracts

Zero dollars. That's what a writer at TheGamer could earn for a fully researched, fully edited article under new contracts issued by parent company Valnet on May 21. The "Pay Per Session" system, which Kotaku reports went into effect the very next day, pays writers $5 per 1,000 clicks and editors $3 per 1,000 clicks, but only for the first 15 days after publication. If an article doesn't crack 1,000 views in that window, the person who wrote it gets nothing.

I covered Valnet's ex-Brazzers ownership and history just last week, but this is a new low even by their standards. Previous contracts at TheGamer included performance bonuses on top of a base rate. The new system strips the base entirely. There is no floor. You write an article, it underperforms because Google's algorithm had a bad day or your editor slotted it at the wrong time, and you earn literally nothing for your labour. Calling this a pay structure is generous; it's a transfer of all business risk onto the people with the least power to manage it.

Lex Luddy, editor in chief of Startmenu and a former junior editor at TheGamer, broke the news on Bluesky, confirming that "permalance" staff were issued the revised agreements without TheGamer's own management being consulted beforehand. Luddy told Kotaku that "almost everyone" at the site, from listicle writers to senior editors, is technically classified as a freelancer and could be subject to the new terms.

Half the Staff in Revolt

The reaction inside TheGamer's Slack was immediate. According to Luddy, half of the site's writers are in "open revolt" against upper management, while others are trying to reach Valnet representatives directly for an explanation. Many staff reportedly view the contracts as "soft layoffs," a way to push people out without formally firing them and triggering whatever obligations that might carry. I can't see how you'd read it any other way. If you structure a contract so that a significant portion of your workforce will earn $0 on a regular basis, you're not incentivising quality. You're engineering departures.

Valnet's internal framing, described in Slack as a "new and exciting, performance-based bonus system" designed to "reward top-performing articles," is the kind of corporate language that makes you want to put your fist through a monitor. Performance-based pay can work when it sits on top of a guaranteed rate. When it replaces the rate entirely, it's not a bonus. It's piecework with no minimum wage.

The timing makes this worse. Luddy pointed to Google SEO changes as a factor that has been hammering TheGamer's traffic, a problem the writers themselves have no control over. Valnet is essentially telling its staff: the platform we built our business model on is failing us, so we're passing the cost of that failure directly to you. Games media is in a brutal place right now, and plenty of outlets are making hard decisions. But "we might not pay you" isn't a hard decision. It's an abdication of the basic employer-writer relationship, especially when almost your entire workforce is already misclassified as freelance.

Valnet, founded by Hassan and Sam Youssef, operates a portfolio that includes Polygon, GameRant, OpenCritic, and Collider among others. The company has previously been accused of blacklisting writers who complained about low pay. As of publication, Valnet has not publicly responded to the backlash over the new contracts.