Gaming Sites Replaced Real Journalists with Invented Ones, and the Reviews Made It to Metacritic
What happened
When SEO agency Clickout Media acquired UK gaming publications The Escapist, Videogamer, and Esports Insider across late 2024 and early 2025, it followed a familiar playbook: it fired up to twenty members of editorial staff, then repopulated the sites with AI-generated content published under entirely invented author identities. Readers who went to those sites for expert human game coverage got neither the expert nor the human.
The scale of the fabrication became clear when a Press Gazette investigation identified "Brian Merrygold," described on Videogamer as "an experienced iGaming and sports betting analyst" and "a lifelong gamer at heart." His photograph, biography, and every article credited to him were AI-generated. A second invented writer, "Callum Mercer," was similarly fictional from the byline down. One of Brian Merrygold's AI-written reviews, for the game Resident Evil Requiem, reached Metacritic before the platform identified its origins and removed it. Metacritic confirmed afterward that it would sever ties with any publication found to publish AI-generated reviews.
Clickout Media's purpose in acquiring the sites had little to do with games journalism. The company has a documented pattern of buying established gaming and tech domains, dismissing editorial staff, and filling the resulting pages with content linking to online casino and cryptocurrency platforms. The acquired sites' reputations do the work: Google rankings built on years of real journalism become a distribution channel for gambling affiliate links. Sites such as Videogamer continued carrying trust statements telling readers their content came from human gaming experts while that claim was plainly false.
For the journalists who built those reputations, the consequences were immediate and constrained by design. Videogamer senior gaming editor Cat Bussell and The Escapist writer Lloyd Coombes were among those who confirmed their redundancies publicly on social media. Severance, where it existed at all, was tied to non-disclosure agreements. Former employees who signed them were restricted from speaking openly about the conditions of their departure, which meant the public account of what happened inside those newsrooms came almost entirely from the Press Gazette investigation rather than from the people most directly affected.
The Metacritic removal happened only because a journalist investigated and made the deception public. Nothing in the publication pipeline flagged that "Brian Merrygold" had no employment history, no professional record, and no prior existence anywhere outside the pages where AI generated him. A provable record of what a system produced, tied to a verifiable author identity at the point of publication, would have made that gap visible before the review circulated rather than after a newsroom spent time exposing it.
Reported impact
- Affected parties
- Not publicly disclosed
- Harm type
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- Scale
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- Financial impact
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- Regulatory action
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Classification
Relevant governance controls
Governance control mapping is not available for this record.
- No controls mapped
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Control mapping is analytical. It does not state that any control would have prevented the incident.
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index. The event is also catalogued in the following database, which is listed for cross-reference.