Back in 2012 or 2013 or so, Anita Sarkeesian hit the scene with wanting to make Feminism 101 videos looking at the portrayal of women in video games. Certain groups of people on the internet really didn't like this, and decided to make their displeasure known as loudly as possible (something they're still doing to this day, as it happens). In response, certain other groups of people on the internet got equally loud to oppose them, thus setting the stage for what would later send a rift through the community of this website (not to overblow the importance of The Escapist or anything, I'm just setting the groundwork of the narrative here).
Having set the internet a-broiling with her really basic and pretty milquetoast views overall, the gamersphere was now perpetually on edge for any topic related to politics and how they exist in the gaming space. Essentially two groups of people formed around this discussion, of the "keep all politics out of video games!" and "keep politics I don't like out of video games!" varieties; though certain groups also loved to misrepresent "the other side's" perspective in order to push their own views forward. A third, generally less vocal group who reasonably opined "media is inherently political" were more or less overlooked and often thrown into one of the other two groups. But this is all just a lead-up to the main event, which stormed the gamersphere in 2014: GamerGate.
When a disgruntled ex-boyfriend posted a very long, very elaborate, very detailed description of the goings-on of his prior relationship with an indie game developer, which involved her supposed affairs with multiple other men including a freelance games journalist, sectors of the gaming sphere online effectively blew up. Discussion of the subject was very rapidly squashed on most websites, except for a specific few. This website was one of those few, thanks in no small part to the actions of overlord Archon (side-note: the departure of Susan Arendt certainly didn't help the shifting position of things around here). What ensued was probably the biggest trainwreck dumpsterfire you could ever imagine involving something as relatively low-stakes as video games, and I'd honestly rather not get into the nitty-gritty of it anymore. It was fucking stupid overall, and really only served to further radicalize the groups already established back in the beginning of the Sarkeesian event.
But, it took a very long time to slow down here on this website, and the more it raged, the more it pushed users to either hunker down or blaze out by fighting other users or just abandon the website entirely. Visit numbers on the website started falling, and it already had a black mark on the money-earning front from back when Extra Credits left, so pretty soon we started seeing content creators being dropped or otherwise leaving the site, most prominently Jim Sterling and MovieBob, who coincidentally also happened to explicitly hold political ideas that very openly criticized those of Archon's and the people he allowed to flood into this website.
Thus, around midway or late 2015 or so, the website began its very slow descent into obsolescence, as it bled money, content creators, users, and even staff members. The staff was downsized and moved to a new office in order to cut costs, the entire news team was let go, Yahtzee is just about the only notable content creator left since Grey Carter was recently dropped, even the Tech Team who actually made sure the website was working and not overrun by spambots was let go. The mods had consistently been kept out of the loop of things since Susan Arendt left, and upon the creation of the no-rules Wild West forums a significant number of the old guard mods pretty much just gave up and abandoned their positions.
Frankly, it's pretty amazing that the site is even still running at this point.
EDIT: Now, obviously there are other factors that have played into the falling popularity of this website, not least of all the simple fact that people just don't like going to a dedicated website to follow video content when they can just see it on Youtube, but that doesn't make for quite so dramatic a retelling.
. I'm quite a gamer myself and currently I'm still playing games, especially RPG. Some of my favorite are: Dragon Age Origins & Inquisitions (both are excellent, Origins has exciting story, Inquisitions with dragons slaying part), Witcher 3 (excellent story telling and exploration), Dark Souls (brutal, but fun... if I can progress), Persona 4 & 5 (just recently, and I'm in love with them).
