Exit Interview: Ryan Friend

Welcome to the second edition of Exit Interview! It is what it sounds like: interviews with people in the video game and esports industries who are experiencing some kind of major career change — in this case, the loss of a dream job. These conversations are intentionally rangy; the digressions are the point.

In the previous edition of Exit Interview, I spoke with Ryan Fairchild, a former lawyer for esports athletes and content creators. Below is my interview with a different Ryan F!

Ryan Friend is the former editor of Dust2.us, a site that covers the long-struggling North American Counter-Strike scene. In late October, Friend was laid off in the course of sweeping cuts implemented by the site’s owners, Better Collective. In this conversation, we talked about money, metrics, mean readers and major retraction-worthy errors.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.¹

ReaderGrev: Tell me a bit about what Dust2 is, and what your role was.

Friend: Dust2 was different, and it was supposed to be different. The big thing that Dust2 had to be was not HLTV. [ed. note: HLTV is a leading Counter-Strike news site also owned by Better Collective.] It had to be a site that was not going to do the HLTV things. And the first year that I was there, I didn't do the best job. I failed a lot more than I would like to admit. I don't think I understood what my role was. I don't think I did a good job of contributing in the way that I needed to. I wasn't efficient, and I think there was a lot of growing up that I had to do for that role.

What does that mean — not being efficient enough, not playing the right role — in terms of the day to day operations?

Friend: I was leading more than getting my hands dirty. And I think there were some things where I thought too highly of myself. I think that sometimes I thought of myself as too good to do certain things. And in retrospect, that was bullshit. You know, it's almost embarrassing to admit that I don't think I can look back at that first year and be proud of the work that I did. I worked really hard at coordinating people and being a manager, but there wasn't a lot of like, I can jump on this. I should be doing this. I think I really learned how to be better in year two, and that's where we saw a lot of growth. I felt more confident in myself. I built up a bit more of a skin to not feel like I had to listen to a ton of critics. I had to listen to myself and my bosses and the people who were telling me if I'm good at my job. The people that matter are the people who pay my bills.

You know, I think media literacy is tough. In an industry like esports, where the the user base is very young, I don't think that they sometimes understand full context, I don't think that they understand intent. And it's frustrating: people don’t take the best case of what you're trying to say or what you're trying to do. I think people, unfortunately, within esports, take everything in the worst possible way. And I’m guilty of that too. I've definitely done it before. I probably will continue to do it. But I think that there were a lot of things where I was looking at it like, I'm trying to do the best I can, and people sometimes didn't take that into consideration, or they didn't consider that in their reactions to pieces. But, you know, whose fault is that? Probably some is on me.

Do you think your work on Dust2 improved the average Counter-Strike fan’s media literacy?

Friend: I think that the dedicated fans of Dust2 evolved as we evolved. I think that there is a core audience that we had that understood what we were doing. Over the years, people saw us for our best intentions.

But there's a huge contingent that’s like, you're just doing this for clicks. And it's like, yeah, you know, sometimes, there are articles that are going to draw attention in certain ways. I don't think that we tried to be disingenuous. Sometimes it might have come across that way, and I think that's tough. As journalists, we just want to be able to provide information. But my job as well was like, how do I sell it? I think that's a very tough position to be in, to have to choose headlines sometimes that are a little bit more enticing to get people to read. It’s a really tough position. Sometimes when you put a lot of effort into a piece and you're not careful about the headline, no one will pay attention to it. It's a double-edged sword, and there are a lot of times that I was wrong. I made a lot of bad calls and I own that. You know, some might have been good for the site, but also some were probably not the best for the audience.

But at the end of the day, we improved and continued to set record numbers every single month, every single year. And that is what I look back on and say: We built something. We tried and failed in a lot of different ways, but we also tried and were successful in so many more ways. I think that's the biggest takeaway. We won more than we lost.

What were the expectations, metrics-wise, for Dust2?

Friend: I don't want to say numbers out of care for my former employer. I think that's something that does need to be private. But I will say that we came in [and] the numbers were not good. That was not due to anyone’s poor job. It was due to the fact that they didn't have the money invested to have someone working full time on the site to come up with new stuff every day, to have a team. When I joined the site went from a small ragtag crew into, boom, here's a full force thing. So obviously the numbers changed from then.

The monthly metrics the month before I joined — by the summer when I was there, we had improved [on those numbers] on a month to month basis by six times. And then that became the new standard we ran for the rest of the year, and we continued to improve on that. I think we ended up doubling that once more. We got to a pretty healthy number for what should be expected of an esports website that only focuses on Counter-Strike that only focuses on North America. Like, I look at the numbers at the end of the day and I'm like, Fuck, we did great! I'm the niche of a niche of a niche. Like what else am I supposed to do here?

The issue honestly comes down to the fact that esports gambling is a big part of how [esports] journalism sites now operate. HLTV, obviously — you can just go on the website and you see there are gambling ads there. Europe has a lot of gambling sites that are willing to pay money. The United States has a lot of strict regulations around gambling advertisements and the big players — FanDuel, DraftKings, MGM, PrizePicks, Underdog — all of these sites have a lot of restrictions. There's not a lot of room for them to figure out how pay [esports] sites continuously to advertise their products when they don't really have esports offerings. But the goal was that with U.S. betting regulations continuing to loosen, there were going to be more advertising opportunities. I think [Better Collective] expected that around this time, around year three, the payoff was going to come. And it never did.

We’ve talked about this privately, and if I remember the tenor of the conversation right, it seemed as though hitting those numbers involved a lot of stress and work. Can you tell me a bit about that?

Friend: When I joined, I was told that I had one year. So I gave up my career to do this thing where they were like, that monthly metric, by the end of the year it should be like 12 times that, on a month to month basis. The pressure was insane.

My partner, she encouraged me to do this. It was a big decision: financially, career-wise, lifestyle. And so I did it, but it came at a big cost. I was kind of relaxed that first year, but I was always on my phone. Always. I'm always checking Twitter. I'm always checking Discord. What are people saying? What are people saying about our articles? What are people saying online? Do I need to write another article? What's the new news? I didn't shut off.

And then the second year, it got worse. My relationship struggled, honestly. I was constantly on. I never took a weekend off, like, fully off, where my phone was off and I didn't check Twitter, I didn’t check Discord. I was always on. I could never shut it off. I think that's the thing: Even in the back of my mind, I was always thinking about it, and I've been always thinking about it for three years in a row. The job consumed me. I definitely got burnt out. But it was a passion, and it was something I never thought was possible. And so I never wanted to let it go.

When I got laid off, it felt like a giant anvil was just lifted off of my chest. I’ve lost my phone more in the last six weeks than I ever did in the last three years simply because I can put it down and walk away. I could never do that before. These last six weeks, I'm not on Twitter. I'm not on Bluesky. I'm not on Discord. I'm not checking to see what's going on anymore. I'm very detached. And I think part of it is like a rejection, it's like a bad breakup. [laughs] You know, I loved this thing and then all of a sudden it basically told me: Fuck off. And that was hard.

Do you feel any ill will? Do you have any sour feelings about how things went?

Friend: The way that I was laid off was not ideal. I had been approved to go abroad with my wife, and everyone knew that that was the situation. Everyone also knew that I was buying a house. And the layoffs happened very fast, in a matter of days. There was an announcement: Hey, there's an issue; everyone, please be on this call. And I was like, that call is happening at 1 a.m. in Vietnam. Sorry, I am not going to be on that call. So the news broke before I even woke up. You know, I learned from other people first that I had been laid off. And that sucks.

As for myself, I wouldn't change the experience. I got a dream job. I would tell people I was a video game journalist, and they’re like, Oh my God, that's so cool. And I was like: No, I don't think you understand how cool this is. I cover one video game in one region and I can make a full-time living off of this. I am living a dream. I got to do amazing things. I went to foreign countries to cover games. I interviewed amazing, cool people. And I will never, ever, ever in any realm whatsoever, get to do what I did ever again. I will always take that to heart. Besides all the pressure, besides the addiction that I had to the job, I look back and I'm like, that was really cool. And I'm making peace with the fact that this was a section of my life, and it had a beginning and it had an end. And that’s okay. Not everything has to last forever.

I know you worked in finance before Dust2. I’m curious about the disparity between your salary before and your salary in esports journalism.

Friend: I would say that in all honesty, when I initially joined, there wasn't too much of a difference. It was a difference, but it was in terms of total comp and career progression. I think that's really what I gave up: I had a much higher progression for where I was going to go. And I like to say that I worked in finance; I worked in commercial real estate, and then I worked in residential real estate, like the business side of it. There’s a different pay scale there, compared to investment banking or stuff like that. I was getting less than what you might think for a New York salary. But the progression, when you stay in that for a couple of years, once you start making VP, once you start getting up there, you know, woof. And so I was giving up that part of it, where it would continue to escalate, by switching careers. But at the end of the day, I wasn’t happy. I was miserable. I don't necessarily know if I would have lasted long anyways.

What didn’t you like about real estate?

Friend: I was so bored. My God! I remember the first year of the job, I was like: Do you guys like this? I thought we just did this because we needed a paycheck. And [my coworkers] were like: No, we find homes and office buildings fascinating. And that's kind of when I realized: I'm in the wrong place, and I just didn't know how to get out of it.

I was so fucked up in thinking that you only made money in finance. That that was where all the money was. And the reality was I was making shit. I was not making a lot of money.

You know, I met my girlfriend, and I remember being so cocky, I think on our first date, acting hot shit, like “I do investments.” And as New York people do, salaries came up, and she laughed in my face. She was like: I work in marketing, and I make more than you. And I think that drove a stake through my heart, like, I’ve been lied to. I'm miserable and I've done this for too long, and I could have been doing something else and I could have been happier and I could have been making the same.

Tell me a bit about Rush B Media, how that started, and what the vibe and intent was behind that. [ed. note: Rush B Media was a hobbyist Counter-Strike publication started by Friend before he was hired to lead Dust2.]

Friend: I was just a fan, and I didn't know how to talk to anyone in my real life about it. I remember buying a blue yeti microphone and being like: I wonder if anyone's going to listen to this. I had no plan. And then I started getting into leak reporting.

I was wrong about a lot of things, about how I went about it. I should have been more careful. There are stories that still keep me up at night, and I remember them, and I try to do my best to never repeat them ever again. And I hope that nobody ever has to go through those awful stories where they write a report and it's just completely wrong and the sources are wrong and everything is wrong. I think about [one] story a lot, where we wrote an article that said that Team Liquid was considering kicking [Keith "NAF" Markovic]. And I remember having two independent sources for it; that was the standard that we used. And it was wrong. And I was embarrassed. And I hurt people, and that’s not great. It’s awful. I've talked with “NAF” and I've talked with Liquid and everything is good at this point. But it was a thing of inexperience. And, you know, a lot of people still to this day bring that story up as a reason that I'm not a good journalist, which I think… Sure!

I felt a pit in my stomach whenever we put out a roster report. It doesn't matter who, doesn't matter how small. I would get physically sick. Even if I had it from the player. It could be a player's agent or the team itself or the player himself talking to me, telling me this. And I'm like: You could be lying to me. And so I have to triple check everything.

[ed. note: There wasn’t a question that led to this, but Ryan and I also talked about his reporting on Mathieu “Maniac” Quiquerez, a Counter-Strike caster accused of sexual assault.]

My “Maniac” story — if I could do it again, I probably could have done it better. [Mathieu “Maniac” Quiquerez] was a caster, analyst, talent member in the Counter-Strike community, and a woman came forward and presented a story that said that she had been sexually harassed by this man. And then another woman came forward and then her boyfriend came forward. And at the same time, I was trying to follow up with different sources, talking to these people. I put out a call for independent people to reach out to me. They did. People shared evidence with me. I had to cross-reference that evidence. I had to try talking with “Maniac.” You know, I talked to 20 different people. I talked to lawyers for our own company. I had to vet the information. I had to drop so much information that couldn’t make the final article.

And I think there's still stuff in [that article] that feels amateur hour-ish when I look back on it. But it was a serious issue, and I handled it the best way that I think I could. I remain proud of that article as something that I really worked hard on. I think overall, I give myself a B grade on the article.

What do you think keeps it away from an A grade?

Friend: I think there’s a section in there where I talked about Instagram messages [ed. note: the story includes a passage about “sexually suggestive messages” sent over Instagram.] and in the grander scheme of things, what the fuck was that? When I finally took a step back and took a breather, I was like, this detracts from the other issues that I presented in there. I'm not ashamed of [the story]. I just think I didn't do it justice by, unfortunately, including that.

Do you know what’s next for you?

Friend: I think games journalism is in a weird place. I don't think that there is, unfortunately, a lot of career trajectory for where we are. And so I'm thinking of that, you know, as I'm getting older. And I don't think people will understand that, if and when I eventually fully leave and go corporate. I'm waiting for someone to be like: This proves it. You were never a real journalist at all. You were just a grifter. 

A lot of these outlets that care about games, the commercialization of it is an impossible task, no matter how good you are at it. And when you run ads, people accuse you of selling out. And it's like, well, I don't know what to do here, man. Like, I'm doing my best. I'm trying to pay for people's livelihoods here.

There were a lot of 3 a.m. mornings that I was up to cover games that were happening in Europe. And there were a lot of late nights to cover games in North America. And you don't get paid better because you do it. You do it because that's the job. You pull a lot of 12 hour, 14 hour days sometimes when you're covering these things. And then people will post the entirety of your article on Reddit because they don't feel like clicking into it.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev!

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If you have a tip, or just want to get in touch, I can be reached on Bluesky or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

1. For transparency’s sake, this means I’ve cleaned up the “ums,” “likes” and “ahs,” whittled down my questions to let you get to the answers faster, and cut certain parts of the answers (or entire exchanges) here and there that are redundant or irrelevant or which make sense over audio but not over text. Some of the questions have also been reordered slightly to make more sense in sequence.