Walmart's 'independent' gaming site just cut its entire editorial staff

Restart, the gaming news site that launched in late 2024 with Walmart's backing, has cut its entire editorial team, The Verge reports. Brandy Berthelson, the site's former editor-in-chief, announced the layoffs in a Friday post, and other staffers have since said they were let go as well.

On its own, that would be no more than another line in gaming media's bad-news ledger. Restart is different because of the structure it was built on. A retailer funded it, a content marketing agency ran it, and the site told readers it was independent. The layoffs have made that contradiction harder to ignore.

An independent site powered by a retailer

Restart is operated by Moonrock, a content marketing agency, while its editorial mission page says the site is "powered" by Walmart. The page is unusually candid about the machinery underneath. When Restart mentions a game, it offers purchase links to Walmart carrying a partner tracking code. Restart earns 0% of the sale if someone buys the product, but the code lets Walmart see exactly how customers arrived.

Whatever the site's editorial intentions, its commercial value to Walmart was never the commission. It was the data trail: proof that a Walmart-backed outlet could send readers somewhere and follow them to checkout. The articles were the packaging; the tracking code was the product.

The same page described Restart as an "independent site" and insisted Walmart "doesn't influence our editorial direction." That may have been true in practice. But the claim was doing heavy lifting inside an operation where the sponsor controlled the traffic, an agency ran the newsroom, and the only commercial detail the page disclosed was a tracking code for that sponsor. The gap between promise and structure is not confined to gaming: an AI art service pays artists $0.005 per image while its models still train on scraped work.

Independence guarantees in sponsored media typically describe what a sponsor may not do: approve stories, kill reviews, read drafts. They say less about how an outlet is built, who pays the payroll, or what happens when the sponsor's priorities shift. It is the same gap that shows up across tech, where a product can arrive with grand promises and little detail, like Samsung's health AI assistant. Restart's mission page addressed the first category. The layoffs, however they were decided, exposed how little protection the second category ever had.

Retailer-owned media has a short shelf life

Walmart did not invent this category. Game Informer, owned for years by GameStop, was the best-known case of a merchant running a publication. The Verge's report drew the parallel directly: a few months before Restart launched, GameStop shut Game Informer down. The magazine has since returned under new ownership, but the episode showed how quickly a retailer can decide its magazine is expendable.

Restart's own timeline is now a question mark. The site launched in late 2024; its entire editorial staff is gone. Whether Walmart and Moonrock keep the domain running, and in what form, neither company has said. The Game Informer saga also showed how durable these brands can be even after the newsroom disappears, so the fact that the URLs survive does not settle anything.

What happens to a site without editors

Berthelson says she is "not able" to discuss details of the layoffs. One laid-off staffer told The Verge they signed a severance agreement with Moonrock. Walmart and Moonrock did not immediately reply to requests for comment. As of this writing, Restart remains online, mission page included.

That last fact is the uncomfortable one. The editors are gone, but the site is still there, still "powered" by Walmart, still carrying the tracking links toward checkout. A media outlet with no staff is not a media outlet. It is a page with links on it, and no one has said what should happen to it next.

Restart leaves behind a question that outlives it either way. When a retailer funds a publication, and the publication calls itself independent, what is the reader actually getting? The mission page answered: an independent site. The layoffs answered differently. For every brand watching Walmart's experiment, the distance between those two answers is the real story.