Frost Of Rivia’s Allegations Against Gaming Journo Nick Calandra Proves How Corrupt Video Game Reporting Is
Nick Calandra is the former editor of Escapist, and now details are coming out on how he was fired from the video game journalism outlet.
Former Escapist editor and gaming journalist Nick Calandra has been personally responsible for shaking gamers’ faith in the video game journalism industry. He’s shown consistent behavior of lying and covering up for corporations, attacking independent journalists, and now even those on his side are turning against him and his new outlet. Two content creators, Sebastian Ruiz (Frost of Rivia) and Cisco Araneta, resigned from Calandra’s Second Wind Group due to Nick Calandra’s toxicity.
Calandra was fired from The Escapist Magazine in November 2023. In his own words: “I was let go for "not achieving goals" that were never properly set out for us, and lack of understanding of our audience and the team that built that audience.” At the time, some of his colleagues, including Frost of Rivia resigned in solidarity with Nick Calandra, believing that “we were going to be fired because the executives were tired of Nick over promising overspending and under delivering and were offering me his job. He had driven up cost by over 70% since the start of the year and lost somewhere around 30 to 60,000 per month on YouTube side alone and getting worse.” After their resignations they joined Nick Calandra’s new start-up, Second Wind Group.
In an ironic twist of fate, Gamurs, the owners of The Escapist, were actually planning on sacking Nick Calandra only and giving the rest of the staff creative freedom.
In his latest Youtube video Frost of Rivia says his intention is to point out that: “Nick Calandra specifically is the worst type of person that can end up in games media he's been highly unethical and the unfortunate effects of this is the validity of everything that's been published under his tenure will now come into question. I traced it as far back as August 2017 when Nick did not publicly disclose that one of the studios he was making a documentary for had offered a minimum $4,000 investment to get his fan-funded Kickstarter across the line.
Since then he's been trying to make bigger and bolder moves, they just don't pan out how you'd expect them to I suppose. He claims to stand up for workers, developers, creatives and consumers, branding himself and his crew as the change that the industry desperately needs.”
Frost says that despite Calandra’s claims, his actions have been anything but noble, even from his days at The Escapist. There, he saw Calandra blackball developers who had asked for game coverage one too many times for his liking and was actively against the idea of giving free shoutouts or small deals to smaller devs “who couldn't afford it.”
Frost also claims that Calandra misled the community about the cost of running a business in order to appeal to their sympathy and draw out more money from them. And when pressed on why he is paid as much as he is he would respond: “I've gotten accustomed to a certain lifestyle and I have a mortgage to pay.” Frost says that he butted heads with Calandra when he tried to re-evaluate costs and stop the overspending instead of “pushing more people to the Patreon and milking the community.”
It would appear that Nick Calandra has a habbit of stalking people on social, as Frost claims he was warned about Calandra after he left Second Wind Group. He shared a screenshot of a message reading: “Actually, quick tip – be mindful of Calandra potentially stalking your socials. He did that to me for close to a year, any time I said anything relating to games press work, until I finally blocked him. Hopefully that doesn’t happen to you as well, but... yeah, it was super weird.”
Regarding Calandra’s unethical behavior, Frost claims that he has proof of Calandra taking equipment and products meant for press and publications under the guise of coverage and keeping it for personal use. He also claims that Calandra “seems to have used his own personal Steam account as the main Steam account for each of his publications he's worked at for over the past 10 years, allowing hundreds of press codes for games to be funnelled directly into his personal Steam account, rather than that of any individual publication.”
But here is the ringer, and even though woke, anti-Gamergate Frost of Rivia won’t acknowledge it, the type of behavior he accuses Nick Calandra of, was the reason Gamergate started in the first place. Frost says: “Ever since then Nick's been trading good press coverage and even reviews for favors, gifts, trips and job opportunities. One such opportunity was when he sold Gameumentary to Enthusiast Gaming in exchange for documentaries and a salaried job opportunity for himself and no one else on the staff.”
Woke Frost of Rivia just proved Gamergate right. Let us know in the comments what you think.
by Jack Dunn
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