For those unfamiliar, Giant Bomb was one of the first video games press outlets to focus on premium video content. They offered monthly/yearly paid subscriptions for unlimited streaming/downloads: a mix of livestreams, review/criticism content, and Just Goofing Around pre-recorded content. They typically released a few hours worth of content a week at their peak, if I remember right, and the cost was something like $30-50 a year. This was before long form video was a big thing on YouTube; arguably sites like Giant Bomb were pioneers that showed a path forward (at least temporarily) for lots of creatives.
Their podcast has been running weekly for the entire time the site has operated alongside (intermittently) other podcasts, so they're approaching 890 episodes. Each episode was typically a few hours long as well.
When they were doing good they were a well-oiled content machine operating on a small budget with a small team. A lot of the stuff they put out was really special or unique in games press at the time - for example, one of their staff went to North Korea during a vacation so during one of their weekly live streams they devoted a time slot to him showing his photos and talking about his experiences there.
The history of the site is wild, too. From the origin in the wake of Jeff Gerstmann being fired from GameSpot, the subsequent exodus from that site, to the death of Ryan Davis, to being bought by CBS Interactive and brought right back under the fold next to GameSpot, to being acquired by multiple other companies, to Jeff Gerstmann getting fired AGAIN, and now this. And all the fun times and weirdness and insanity along the way.
And a funny bit of trivia: likely the most widespread impact the site has had outside of gaming is that it was the origin of the "blinking white guy" meme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb6BsegPewk
It happens. Our CTO "resigned" about 6 years after we started our VC funded startup. He sold his shares to the rest of the investors. It wasn't his choice to leave.
Yeah I suppose. It just is shocking to me, because for me Giant Bomb was Jeff (and Ryan, may he rest in peace). Hard to fathom the site without him, but so it goes I guess.
>For those unfamiliar, Giant Bomb was one of the first video games press outlets to focus on premium video content. They offered monthly/yearly paid subscriptions for unlimited streaming/downloads: a mix of livestreams, review/criticism content, and Just Goofing Around pre-recorded content. They typically released a few hours worth of content a week at their peak, if I remember right, and the cost was something like $30-50 a year. This was before long form video was a big thing on YouTube; arguably sites like Giant Bomb were pioneers that showed a path forward (at least temporarily) for lots of creatives.
It would never occur to me to watch someone else talk about or play a game online, let alone pay for the privilege.
To add some context here, at the time you had Jeff Gerstmann which is a dinosaur in the game journalism sphere and had insights and insider information from many different sources.
He has also an encyclopedic knowledge of weird esoteric games.
Add to this a series of people he had great chemistry with and people that were not familiar with some franchises and introduced by other members lead to funny moments.
Their coverage of E3 was legendary.
It depends how deep people are within subcultures but giant bomb did offer a lot of entertainment (even for free I never paid for the premium stuff) and honest game reviews. I can't speak for the current state because I was watching before the core team left and stopped watching after.
A lot of it is just fun and silly, but for me it was also an interesting way to develop my taste in something - to hear other people who are real heavy connoisseurs of something discuss it, and learning from them. Of course, you can get this from your friends and the people who are really around you in your life (or, just don't develop your taste at all because you just like what you like), and there's nothing wrong with that, I get why some people find it odd to watch people play video games.
You have to understand as well that Giant Bomb was the first of its kind in a lot of ways, this was an era where video game journalism began to loosen up from the corporate, PR-friendly, very stiff and consumer-focused era it had been in during the dominance of print media, and Giant Bomb was this novel thing where people who had been deeply involved in that era began to find their own voices. If you followed video games at the time online, Giant Bomb was this total breath of fresh air.
I grew up in the 90s sitting on couches watching friends and family play games while we socialized.
For me, watching other people play games on the internet is basically an extension of that but with the addition that I can also watch some of the best gamers in the world if I want to.
Not totally. For smaller streamers, it's easy to interact with the streamer. And many people make friends in the chat and that's even why they keep coming back for - the community in the chat.
"It would never occur to me to watch someone else talk about or play a game online, let alone pay for the privilege"
I think that's specifically what made GiantBomb so different in the first place - people were tuning in for the personalities, more so than the game news. There were already a lot of places you could just go for game news and updates (like IGN and Gamespot), but GB had decades of industry stories that were worth tuning in for. All sorts of 'behind the scenes' stories and faces would show up, Jeff finding out about the Dreamcast being cancelled in a conference call while on the toilet with food poisoning, Drew going to a Starcraft tournament in South Korea when they were still fairly new, the crew getting blind drunk at a birthday where they duct taped whisky bottles to their hands, stories of the sheer nightmare of lugging equipment and setting up for E3 every year with Drew and Vinnys video diaries. It was a peek behind the curtain into how the industry works with a group of very likeable people that made it different - more than just a place to go and watch people play games.
In a third of the time you spend watching one "content creator" "goofing around" you can go through 3-4 text reviews and figure out if the game is for you already.
I don’t know why you would watch videos where people are goofing around. That seems like a you problem. Instead of picking random reviewers, stick to a few that like the games you like.
And honestly, one of the best reviewers I know does video reviews and puts the recommendation in the title. I still like to listen to the reviews because I can do it while doing other things, unlike reading.
FYI Since you two don't seem to have engaged with Giant Bomb previously. This is exactly what Giant Bomb did NOT do. Most of their new games video coverage was their Quick Look series that was typically 10-20 minutes from maybe a few different points in the game.
Yeah, Quick Look’s are what brought me to Giant Bomb initially. They aren’t reviews and they take pains to not spoil too much of the game. They give a good feel of what the actual gameplay looks like, which is almost never available from the game trailers, and which I find is hard to get a good mental picture of from written reviews (especially short ones).
Just watching their quick looks introduced me to so many different game genres that I’d never tried before. It’s a shame they stopped doing those a couple years ago.
Since gamers are a subculture, they want a mirror of any part of real life you can think of, except about games.
There's a sub-subculture in this of video game journalists. There's a further subculture inside this of people who want to be writing for a video game review website (or a sports blog etc) but only ever actually write about their half-baked opinions about American politics.
> It would never occur to me to watch someone else talk about or play a game online, let alone pay for the privilege.
Wait till you find out about American Football, or Soccer, or any of the racing events.
But seriously, we talk about programming. And people pay to talk about programming. Why wouldn’t people interested in gaming or other things do the same?
>But seriously, we talk about programming. And people pay to talk about programming. Why wouldn’t people interested in gaming or other things do the same?
I dont watch people talking about programming and I dont pay for the privilege of watching people talk about programming.
Is it right to say that giant bomb is in social.media terms was equivalent of myspace, vimeo is something like a far smaller linkedin, twitch is the equivalent of twitter, and that YouTube is Facebook?
Not really. Giant Bomb is a content creator, not a social media network. They have some social features on their site, but it's all centered around GB and the content they produce.
As an aside, Vimeo isn't a meaningfully social site anymore. They pivoted to commercial video hosting long ago - there's still some commenting features on videos but it's not a significant part of what they do.
I dont know how popular Giant Bomb is as a site, but in general video game journalism online is pretty much in the doldrums. Most of the big players from the last 20 years seem to have either disappered or are cutting staff back to the bare minimum. They seem to have become click baity and but dont even get much interaction from viewers.Looking at the Titan of the industry, IGN, they barely get more that 20k views for videos they put out on Youtube, even though they have 19million subscribers. Their audience seems to have moved on from them to individual Youtubers or twitch.
As a business proposition, video gaming sites seem like a money pit with no guarentee of a return. They may have a chance at survival by serving a niche audience that wants a specific type of content, limiting their scope and ambitions. But at the moment I just dont see a comeback for them.
Giant Bomb is a bit of a tragic tale because they essentially pioneered the idea of personality driven game streaming at a time when most video game sites were still doing the templated 5 section review. The problem is that they were a bit too ahead of their time, so they had to rely on outside funding which caused them to be sold - first to CBS, then Red Ventures, and now Fandom. If they were launching today, it would be a patreon funded YouTube channel without the overhead of an in person office, rolling your own video streamer, etc
I don't think they had issues making money, they had issues hitting unrealistic growth targets being set by their overlords. This was discussed on the most recent Nextlander podcast. Nextlander being 3 of the Giant Bomb OGs.
Jeff Gerstmann, one of the founders, also goes into details about this, Giantbomb was always making money, but had issues scaling up because corporate wouldn't invest in them. He says that it was very hard for them to monetize the podcast, which was one of the biggest podcasts before the boom, because they wouldn't allow him to sign a deal with a ad network, nor would they provide a sales team so they could get those ad deals.
CBS also owning Gamespot was a big issue, because it wasn't making money but it had the potential of bringing much more if they could fix it. It got even worse with the last 2 rounds of buyouts, because the buyers never wanted Giantbomb, it was a package deal.
While the monetary overhead of an office is a fact, that couch also built their show. The in-person dynamics of both the podcast and their other shows were a class above the remote-only version that was forced by the east/west split, and later COVID. I miss that couch.
They pioneered it, but they lost because "gig-economy" streaming is better at finding diamonds in the rough. Giant Bomb couldn't find more Vinny's or Dave's no matter how hard it tried (and it did try).
Youtube can pay okay when you hit those 6 figure subs, but it's still not quite enough to pay for a traditional office setup. Not even a small one. Sadly, geting 10 vinnies on one channel doesn't get you 10x Vinny income, it's better to do a setup like Channel Awesome (minus the whole harassment and rebellion of the clients) and manage 10 Vinnies if you had the choice.
That was definitely the case in my opinion. I used to listen to the Bombcast religiously, and it just wasn't the same after Ryan died. I kept listening for a while, but eventually tuned out because he really did bring something irreplaceable to the table.
I can only give a personal perspective but I don’t necessarily trust reviews from large, established mainstream outlets, as opposed to independent creators and reviewers.
My taste in games tend to lag by at least a few years, so I’d often far rather watch a let’s play or an independent review - especially one created some time after the fact - to get a true impression of the game than an overly curated take whose perspective is often overly skewed and coloured by then-current trends and tastes in gaming.
For anything >10 years I still find myself looking for content from CGR and, particularly, CGR Undertow, for example.
Plus it’s not unknown for mainstream reviewers to overhype new games.
The plethora of content, and view counts, suggest I may not be alone in this point of view.
That's certainly not a criticism that could be levelled at Giantbomb, considering it was started when its founder, Jeff Gerstman, was fired from his job at GameSpot for giving a game a low review score while the developer of the game was doing a big marketing campaign on the site.
I think it's because there's no trust in the big names anymore. Most of their "reviews" seem to be largely written by the game studio. How many times can you see IGN gush about how awesome a game is before launch and then when you get your hands on it, is a buggy boring mess before you stop checking IGN?
A lot of it is on the publishers for their early review copy practices. Big media outlets will get early review codes for the games so they can be among the first to get a review out and net the traffic. But the publishers want good publicity in return for the early access codes, and reviewers that don't play ball can find themselves on an industry wide blacklist from receiving them in the future.
So the best, least biased reviews you can find are going to be 2-3 days post release, and not from someone who is large enough to get free review codes. I never trust pre-release reviews.
I'm not a huge gamer myself but game journalism the last decade has been scandal after scandal after politics after scandal after politics, so it's no wonder everybody has moved on. If I want to know what a game is like, literally the last opinion I'm interested in is that of a "game journalist".
Sites like Game Informer, Easy Allies, and MinnMax have shown viability through subscription/Patreon models that focus on dedicated communities rather than mass appeal.
> Looking at the Titan of the industry, IGN, they barely get more that 20k views for videos they put out on Youtube
I've noticed the same thing, and it confuses me. There are massive numbers of gamers in the world, and more every day. These gamers presumably want reviews of what is / isn't worth their time.
Sure, as you mentioned, there are individual YouTubers or Twitch streamers... but one streamer doesn't have nearly enough time to review all the games that come out. Not even just the AAA titles!
So, how are gamers making their decisions about what to play next, if they're not reading reviews on a site like IGN?
IGN huge, they review/cover a broad amount of stuff but since they’re so big they become known for having average coverage, and the average is not great. So I personally have never looked to them for opinion coverage.
I think most people have some specific things they like, and end up following community opinion, like Reddit or Discord for a game genre, and following a different personalities on YouTube or Twitch.
Personally I’m mostly playing mostly (indie) Metroidvania games which are not well covered by IGN, I hear buzz about new releases on Reddit or from Cannot be Tamed on YouTube. Beyond that I sometimes see cool stuff on Twitter, I picked up Clair Obscure after seeing a few tweets mention its great writing and music. I also end up seeing the front page of the Steam store, which has reasonably good recommendation profile for me given 90% of my game purchases are through there and I’m playing on Steam Deck which focuses the recommendations on titles well supported by Linux and the hardware.
> These gamers presumably want reviews of what is / isn't worth their time.
They seem to care very little about the opinions and taste of the people producing content for sites like IGN.
> one streamer doesn't have nearly enough time to review all the games that come out. Not even just the AAA titles!
They usually specialize in a genre, and a lot of gamers are interested in a fairly narrow range of genres.
But also, you don't have to know about every game available. "The perfect is the enemy of the good", also with respect to information. The goal is really just to find enough games worth the time/money to keep oneself entertained. Life's too short to worry about whether you might have enjoyed something else more than the game you actually played. (If you can even justify spending time on video games at all....)
> how are gamers making their decisions about what to play next
Metacritic, Steam reviews, the aforementioned streamers, word of mouth in their own communities... probably other ways....
Hard disagree. That implies that that 'coverage' of new games on Reddit would just be generally positive without substantial critique, and I haven't found that to be the case.
Yeah my first reaction when I see an interesting new game on Steam or elsewhere is to search r/games (NOT r/gaming lol) for the game's name and look around at what people have to say about it. They're often very detailed and honest.
It's probably a good thing that reddit seems to have been too incompetent to enshittify their site completely yet. There's lots of it that has been, but there's still plenty of very good discussion there if you know where to look.
I find reddit to be so hypercritical of everything to the point of it not being useful anymore. A very good 9/10 game will get so much criticism you'd think it's the worst game to be released in a decade.
I'll admit that I stopped looking at reddit for most game content lately (last year or 2) so my opinion might be outdated. But I do remember the new Assassin's Creed getting quite a lot of hate for gross reasons. It becomes oddly political much like many subs for TV shows and movies. Misogyny and racism are rampant.
That said I suppose if good moderators filter the rabble out there's bound to be some good communities. I just find that if you love a game it's usually best to steer well clear of the subreddit for it.
This is key and one of the reasons that ignoring r/gaming and subbing to r/games instead has been standard wisdom since like 2010 when reddit actually had a guide to which frontpage subs to unsub from (r/pics, r/funny, etc.) and which ones to replace them with.
I think most gamers use YouTubers and Twitch streamers as tastemakers rather than reviewers. If your favorite personalities are having fun and it looks like you'd have fun too, then you don't need a review.
> These gamers presumably want reviews of what is / isn't worth their time.
Judging by online reactions, what gamers want is their own opinion reflected back at them. Anything else brings frothing rage and vitriol.
For some extremely-online types who have made “gamer” their identity, the purpose of gaming media is primarily to have that identity confirmed, not to gather information.
> These gamers presumably want reviews of what is / isn't worth their time.
They want reviews that the can trust to predict their experience, and trust in the games media for that is (for a variety of reasons) very low.
> Sure, as you mentioned, there are individual YouTubers or Twitch streamers... but one streamer doesn't have nearly enough time to review all the games that come out.
So? No one has time to read/watch reviews of every game that comes out, either, or to play all the games that come out; if they can find a stable of trusted streamers that combined give reliable and timely impressions of games so that they can find a sufficient number worth playing and mostly avoid wasting money on duds, they don't need reviews of every game that comes out, and they especially don’t need that at the expense of reliability.
The problem is that TikTok/Instagram Reels have taken everything. The engineered crack that is the most addictive thing ever takes every second of our attention so it leaves no time to do anything - no "proper" journalism, no books, no films, even YouTube is too long format for someone addicted to TikTok. It's actual catastrophe of attention spans.
The best thing Fandom could do for the community is close forever. Talk about a cancerous website. People like to talk shit about Pinterest, but Fandom is tremendously worse, since its SEO efforts drown actually useful websites.
> Fandom is tremendously worse, since its SEO efforts drown actually useful websites.
This cannot be emphasized enough.
A clean, no-cookied, location-off search for "Doom wiki" (no quotes) returns the terrible, low-information, awful-layout, often-outdated/incorrect Fandom Doom Wiki as the first result.
The actual Doom Wiki, better-designed and far more content-filled - which is called "The Doom Wiki", and with a domain that is literally just "doomwiki.org" - comes in second.
My goodness I clicked a link to Fandom on accident the other day - most external links on tvtropes go to Wikipedia.
A sidebar opens automatically, there's a pop-up at the bottom, tons of distracting design and things showing up asking me to take a poll. What a mess. And I have adblock ofc... can't imagine what it really looks like.
I am saddened whenever an IP I've just discovered has their knowledge hub on fandom.
Whiskey Media was top tier back in the day. A group of folks producing really fun content, and having a great time doing it. The community was top notch too. I have no idea where the diaspora ended up, since the forums and wiki are comparatively dead these days.
In this context, the term “bomb” refers specifically to Giant Bomb, the gaming media brand that has now become independently owned and operated by its creators.
Anyone remember 1up.com before giant bomb? 1up was how I got into podcasts. The computer gaming magazine podcast was hilarious. I loved those guys. I should try to download the archive.
For one, when I visit the site on my phone, the bottom 25% of my viewport is taken up by their recommendation algorithm, the top 30% is usually but not always taken up by an autoplaying video completely unrelated to the topic or wiki I’m visiting, and so I’m left with a tiny piece in the middle of my screen actually containing the contents of the wiki page I’m trying to read.
They also hold wikis hostage by not allowing them to move to another platform and redirect/get rid of their Fandom wiki. This means that if any wiki tries to move to be independent, the Fandom wiki will keep existing, and usually will still be the first result on Google for a long while, maybe forever, because of Fandom’s SEO. Of course the entire community of editors will have moved on, so this heavily outdated Fandom wiki full of ads and other elements trying to catch your attention and keep you on the site, will rank above the independent ad-free and active wiki with up-to-date information on Google search.
Just go there without an ad-blocker and see for yourself. It is pretty bad even with an ad-blocker.
The worst part is that it wasn't always like that. When it started of as wikicities and then wikia, it was pretty good, very Wikipedia-like, which is to be expected considering its history. But it enshittified quickly as it became Fandom, all while making it hard to move the existing communities out of the platform.
I'm still waiting for a gaming site that could rival what TheGIA was back in the day. But unfortunately, the web that gave rise to TheGIA is long gone...
The last two images you linked to are fake, and clearly designed by someone who doesn’t know Spanish and has never been to either Chile or Spain. No signs look like that in either country.
Nobody would dare capitalise “de” in Santiago de Chile for instance.
Confirming, the image linked by grandparent is tagged as 3d illustration on shutterstock[1]. A similar illustration with lowercase “de” spelling exists too[2]. Actual road signs in Chile have lowercase “de”[3].
Your last two links are fake. And you can check on your own Wikipedia link that for Spain's direction signs, only proper nouns are capitalized: full uppercase on conventional roads for historical reasons, otherwise the usual capitalization rules such as on highways or town roads. Whereas full lowercase is reserved for service directions (e.g. service road, airport, hospital, beach). The exceptional capitalized service directions are really old town signs.
Fandom is a pit of the internet that you never want to find yourself in. Giantbomb probably should have never happened, it never hit the heights of Gamespot.
What behaviour? Who did what? You made the vaguest of assertions, assume everyone downvoting you knows what you're talking about, then proceed to get upset over it, which is pathetic. Don't get on my back for not being clear when you can't even communicate what it is you're angry about.
For those unfamiliar, Giant Bomb was one of the first video games press outlets to focus on premium video content. They offered monthly/yearly paid subscriptions for unlimited streaming/downloads: a mix of livestreams, review/criticism content, and Just Goofing Around pre-recorded content. They typically released a few hours worth of content a week at their peak, if I remember right, and the cost was something like $30-50 a year. This was before long form video was a big thing on YouTube; arguably sites like Giant Bomb were pioneers that showed a path forward (at least temporarily) for lots of creatives.
Their podcast has been running weekly for the entire time the site has operated alongside (intermittently) other podcasts, so they're approaching 890 episodes. Each episode was typically a few hours long as well.
When they were doing good they were a well-oiled content machine operating on a small budget with a small team. A lot of the stuff they put out was really special or unique in games press at the time - for example, one of their staff went to North Korea during a vacation so during one of their weekly live streams they devoted a time slot to him showing his photos and talking about his experiences there.
The history of the site is wild, too. From the origin in the wake of Jeff Gerstmann being fired from GameSpot, the subsequent exodus from that site, to the death of Ryan Davis, to being bought by CBS Interactive and brought right back under the fold next to GameSpot, to being acquired by multiple other companies, to Jeff Gerstmann getting fired AGAIN, and now this. And all the fun times and weirdness and insanity along the way.
And a funny bit of trivia: likely the most widespread impact the site has had outside of gaming is that it was the origin of the "blinking white guy" meme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb6BsegPewk
> to Jeff Gerstmann getting fired AGAIN
Hold up what? I didn't know that. It seems insane to fire the man from the organization he co-founded.
It happens. Our CTO "resigned" about 6 years after we started our VC funded startup. He sold his shares to the rest of the investors. It wasn't his choice to leave.
You're gonna be blown away if you read a bit of Apple's history ;)
Once the VCs get involved you will soon find the company you founded is no longer the company you work at.
Yeah I suppose. It just is shocking to me, because for me Giant Bomb was Jeff (and Ryan, may he rest in peace). Hard to fathom the site without him, but so it goes I guess.
Things change, and sometimes require you to change in ways you’re not okay with to stay/have it keep working.
So either change yourself, leave (if you can), or get pushed out (if you’re not majority control). Or everything grinds to a halt.
It isn’t just companies.
Jeff chats about some recent history on his podcast from a few days ago.
https://youtu.be/bQiGkSCQN7o?t=165
>For those unfamiliar, Giant Bomb was one of the first video games press outlets to focus on premium video content. They offered monthly/yearly paid subscriptions for unlimited streaming/downloads: a mix of livestreams, review/criticism content, and Just Goofing Around pre-recorded content. They typically released a few hours worth of content a week at their peak, if I remember right, and the cost was something like $30-50 a year. This was before long form video was a big thing on YouTube; arguably sites like Giant Bomb were pioneers that showed a path forward (at least temporarily) for lots of creatives.
It would never occur to me to watch someone else talk about or play a game online, let alone pay for the privilege.
It seems I am alone on that front.
To add some context here, at the time you had Jeff Gerstmann which is a dinosaur in the game journalism sphere and had insights and insider information from many different sources.
He has also an encyclopedic knowledge of weird esoteric games.
Add to this a series of people he had great chemistry with and people that were not familiar with some franchises and introduced by other members lead to funny moments.
Their coverage of E3 was legendary.
It depends how deep people are within subcultures but giant bomb did offer a lot of entertainment (even for free I never paid for the premium stuff) and honest game reviews. I can't speak for the current state because I was watching before the core team left and stopped watching after.
A lot of it is just fun and silly, but for me it was also an interesting way to develop my taste in something - to hear other people who are real heavy connoisseurs of something discuss it, and learning from them. Of course, you can get this from your friends and the people who are really around you in your life (or, just don't develop your taste at all because you just like what you like), and there's nothing wrong with that, I get why some people find it odd to watch people play video games.
You have to understand as well that Giant Bomb was the first of its kind in a lot of ways, this was an era where video game journalism began to loosen up from the corporate, PR-friendly, very stiff and consumer-focused era it had been in during the dominance of print media, and Giant Bomb was this novel thing where people who had been deeply involved in that era began to find their own voices. If you followed video games at the time online, Giant Bomb was this total breath of fresh air.
I grew up in the 90s sitting on couches watching friends and family play games while we socialized.
For me, watching other people play games on the internet is basically an extension of that but with the addition that I can also watch some of the best gamers in the world if I want to.
The social aspect is lost though.
Not totally. For smaller streamers, it's easy to interact with the streamer. And many people make friends in the chat and that's even why they keep coming back for - the community in the chat.
Online chats don't really compare to IRL interactions though.
There's currently an epidemic of genz who barely interact with their virtual friends.
"It would never occur to me to watch someone else talk about or play a game online, let alone pay for the privilege"
I think that's specifically what made GiantBomb so different in the first place - people were tuning in for the personalities, more so than the game news. There were already a lot of places you could just go for game news and updates (like IGN and Gamespot), but GB had decades of industry stories that were worth tuning in for. All sorts of 'behind the scenes' stories and faces would show up, Jeff finding out about the Dreamcast being cancelled in a conference call while on the toilet with food poisoning, Drew going to a Starcraft tournament in South Korea when they were still fairly new, the crew getting blind drunk at a birthday where they duct taped whisky bottles to their hands, stories of the sheer nightmare of lugging equipment and setting up for E3 every year with Drew and Vinnys video diaries. It was a peek behind the curtain into how the industry works with a group of very likeable people that made it different - more than just a place to go and watch people play games.
> It seems I am alone on that front.
No :)
In a third of the time you spend watching one "content creator" "goofing around" you can go through 3-4 text reviews and figure out if the game is for you already.
I don’t know why you would watch videos where people are goofing around. That seems like a you problem. Instead of picking random reviewers, stick to a few that like the games you like.
And honestly, one of the best reviewers I know does video reviews and puts the recommendation in the title. I still like to listen to the reviews because I can do it while doing other things, unlike reading.
> Instead of picking random reviewers, stick to a few
I do. In text mode.
> that like the games you like.
But this way I'll never get to play anything new to me. Best to check varied reviewers even if i don't always agree with them.
> I can do it while doing other things, unlike reading.
Reading is much faster than even listening to a talking head though.
> I do. In text mode.
So, I don't get it. You have a problem with reviewers, but you stick to a few? Seems like a self-imposed problem.
> But this way I'll never get to play anything new to me.
The reviewers review new games.
> Reading is much faster than even listening to a talking head though.
Sure, but a thumbs up or thumbs down is MUCH faster, and therefore better rather than reading someone talking about stuff.
FYI Since you two don't seem to have engaged with Giant Bomb previously. This is exactly what Giant Bomb did NOT do. Most of their new games video coverage was their Quick Look series that was typically 10-20 minutes from maybe a few different points in the game.
Yeah, Quick Look’s are what brought me to Giant Bomb initially. They aren’t reviews and they take pains to not spoil too much of the game. They give a good feel of what the actual gameplay looks like, which is almost never available from the game trailers, and which I find is hard to get a good mental picture of from written reviews (especially short ones).
Just watching their quick looks introduced me to so many different game genres that I’d never tried before. It’s a shame they stopped doing those a couple years ago.
> don't seem to have engaged
I don't engage. I read or watch. If it looks like engagement I close.
I apologize. It doesn't seem like you two have watched or read anything from the folks at Giant Bomb.
Have a nice day.
Well I haven't. And with the deluge of "video content" these days I'm afraid I'm not tempted.
Yeah my read on things is that "contentification" is just the more permissible branch of "enshittification".
If theres no article and I have to watch some clown in a video to get at the information I want I usually turn off.
Since gamers are a subculture, they want a mirror of any part of real life you can think of, except about games.
There's a sub-subculture in this of video game journalists. There's a further subculture inside this of people who want to be writing for a video game review website (or a sports blog etc) but only ever actually write about their half-baked opinions about American politics.
There are some great videos about videogames out there.
This is one of my personal favourites, just for all the background it reveals about how the game was made.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0058A651EB882B48
I used to spend a lot of time reading old Gamasutra post mortems.
You obviously are not alone. Sorry to break it to you.
> It would never occur to me to watch someone else talk about or play a game online, let alone pay for the privilege.
You must have missed all of professional sports, pay per view, etc.
Yes.
> It would never occur to me to watch someone else talk about or play a game online, let alone pay for the privilege.
Wait till you find out about American Football, or Soccer, or any of the racing events.
But seriously, we talk about programming. And people pay to talk about programming. Why wouldn’t people interested in gaming or other things do the same?
>But seriously, we talk about programming. And people pay to talk about programming. Why wouldn’t people interested in gaming or other things do the same?
I dont watch people talking about programming and I dont pay for the privilege of watching people talk about programming.
You might want to learn about society. And other people. And culture. Get outside, meet people.
I dont see the relevance?
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Is it right to say that giant bomb is in social.media terms was equivalent of myspace, vimeo is something like a far smaller linkedin, twitch is the equivalent of twitter, and that YouTube is Facebook?
Not really. Giant Bomb is a content creator, not a social media network. They have some social features on their site, but it's all centered around GB and the content they produce.
As an aside, Vimeo isn't a meaningfully social site anymore. They pivoted to commercial video hosting long ago - there's still some commenting features on videos but it's not a significant part of what they do.
I dont know how popular Giant Bomb is as a site, but in general video game journalism online is pretty much in the doldrums. Most of the big players from the last 20 years seem to have either disappered or are cutting staff back to the bare minimum. They seem to have become click baity and but dont even get much interaction from viewers.Looking at the Titan of the industry, IGN, they barely get more that 20k views for videos they put out on Youtube, even though they have 19million subscribers. Their audience seems to have moved on from them to individual Youtubers or twitch.
As a business proposition, video gaming sites seem like a money pit with no guarentee of a return. They may have a chance at survival by serving a niche audience that wants a specific type of content, limiting their scope and ambitions. But at the moment I just dont see a comeback for them.
Giant Bomb is a bit of a tragic tale because they essentially pioneered the idea of personality driven game streaming at a time when most video game sites were still doing the templated 5 section review. The problem is that they were a bit too ahead of their time, so they had to rely on outside funding which caused them to be sold - first to CBS, then Red Ventures, and now Fandom. If they were launching today, it would be a patreon funded YouTube channel without the overhead of an in person office, rolling your own video streamer, etc
I don't think they had issues making money, they had issues hitting unrealistic growth targets being set by their overlords. This was discussed on the most recent Nextlander podcast. Nextlander being 3 of the Giant Bomb OGs.
Jeff Gerstmann, one of the founders, also goes into details about this, Giantbomb was always making money, but had issues scaling up because corporate wouldn't invest in them. He says that it was very hard for them to monetize the podcast, which was one of the biggest podcasts before the boom, because they wouldn't allow him to sign a deal with a ad network, nor would they provide a sales team so they could get those ad deals.
CBS also owning Gamespot was a big issue, because it wasn't making money but it had the potential of bringing much more if they could fix it. It got even worse with the last 2 rounds of buyouts, because the buyers never wanted Giantbomb, it was a package deal.
No issues making money once they were up and running, but they needed to bootstrap somehow and therefore weren’t just owned by Jeff G from the start
While the monetary overhead of an office is a fact, that couch also built their show. The in-person dynamics of both the podcast and their other shows were a class above the remote-only version that was forced by the east/west split, and later COVID. I miss that couch.
They pioneered it, but they lost because "gig-economy" streaming is better at finding diamonds in the rough. Giant Bomb couldn't find more Vinny's or Dave's no matter how hard it tried (and it did try).
Youtube can pay okay when you hit those 6 figure subs, but it's still not quite enough to pay for a traditional office setup. Not even a small one. Sadly, geting 10 vinnies on one channel doesn't get you 10x Vinny income, it's better to do a setup like Channel Awesome (minus the whole harassment and rebellion of the clients) and manage 10 Vinnies if you had the choice.
I think they all lost a little something when Ryan suddenly died.
That was definitely the case in my opinion. I used to listen to the Bombcast religiously, and it just wasn't the same after Ryan died. I kept listening for a while, but eventually tuned out because he really did bring something irreplaceable to the table.
I can only give a personal perspective but I don’t necessarily trust reviews from large, established mainstream outlets, as opposed to independent creators and reviewers.
My taste in games tend to lag by at least a few years, so I’d often far rather watch a let’s play or an independent review - especially one created some time after the fact - to get a true impression of the game than an overly curated take whose perspective is often overly skewed and coloured by then-current trends and tastes in gaming.
For anything >10 years I still find myself looking for content from CGR and, particularly, CGR Undertow, for example.
Plus it’s not unknown for mainstream reviewers to overhype new games.
The plethora of content, and view counts, suggest I may not be alone in this point of view.
That's certainly not a criticism that could be levelled at Giantbomb, considering it was started when its founder, Jeff Gerstman, was fired from his job at GameSpot for giving a game a low review score while the developer of the game was doing a big marketing campaign on the site.
I think it's because there's no trust in the big names anymore. Most of their "reviews" seem to be largely written by the game studio. How many times can you see IGN gush about how awesome a game is before launch and then when you get your hands on it, is a buggy boring mess before you stop checking IGN?
A lot of it is on the publishers for their early review copy practices. Big media outlets will get early review codes for the games so they can be among the first to get a review out and net the traffic. But the publishers want good publicity in return for the early access codes, and reviewers that don't play ball can find themselves on an industry wide blacklist from receiving them in the future.
So the best, least biased reviews you can find are going to be 2-3 days post release, and not from someone who is large enough to get free review codes. I never trust pre-release reviews.
I'm not a huge gamer myself but game journalism the last decade has been scandal after scandal after politics after scandal after politics, so it's no wonder everybody has moved on. If I want to know what a game is like, literally the last opinion I'm interested in is that of a "game journalist".
Sites like Game Informer, Easy Allies, and MinnMax have shown viability through subscription/Patreon models that focus on dedicated communities rather than mass appeal.
> Looking at the Titan of the industry, IGN, they barely get more that 20k views for videos they put out on Youtube
I've noticed the same thing, and it confuses me. There are massive numbers of gamers in the world, and more every day. These gamers presumably want reviews of what is / isn't worth their time.
Sure, as you mentioned, there are individual YouTubers or Twitch streamers... but one streamer doesn't have nearly enough time to review all the games that come out. Not even just the AAA titles!
So, how are gamers making their decisions about what to play next, if they're not reading reviews on a site like IGN?
IGN huge, they review/cover a broad amount of stuff but since they’re so big they become known for having average coverage, and the average is not great. So I personally have never looked to them for opinion coverage.
I think most people have some specific things they like, and end up following community opinion, like Reddit or Discord for a game genre, and following a different personalities on YouTube or Twitch.
Personally I’m mostly playing mostly (indie) Metroidvania games which are not well covered by IGN, I hear buzz about new releases on Reddit or from Cannot be Tamed on YouTube. Beyond that I sometimes see cool stuff on Twitter, I picked up Clair Obscure after seeing a few tweets mention its great writing and music. I also end up seeing the front page of the Steam store, which has reasonably good recommendation profile for me given 90% of my game purchases are through there and I’m playing on Steam Deck which focuses the recommendations on titles well supported by Linux and the hardware.
> These gamers presumably want reviews of what is / isn't worth their time.
They seem to care very little about the opinions and taste of the people producing content for sites like IGN.
> one streamer doesn't have nearly enough time to review all the games that come out. Not even just the AAA titles!
They usually specialize in a genre, and a lot of gamers are interested in a fairly narrow range of genres.
But also, you don't have to know about every game available. "The perfect is the enemy of the good", also with respect to information. The goal is really just to find enough games worth the time/money to keep oneself entertained. Life's too short to worry about whether you might have enjoyed something else more than the game you actually played. (If you can even justify spending time on video games at all....)
> how are gamers making their decisions about what to play next
Metacritic, Steam reviews, the aforementioned streamers, word of mouth in their own communities... probably other ways....
Big gaming sites aren't as credible or informative as Reddit, and aren't as entertaining as streamers
Reddit ten or twelve years ago, maybe. That site is so poorly gamed by companies that its usefulness as a review aggregator is almost gone.
At least big gaming sites are pretty straight up with their sponsorships.
Hard disagree. That implies that that 'coverage' of new games on Reddit would just be generally positive without substantial critique, and I haven't found that to be the case.
Yeah my first reaction when I see an interesting new game on Steam or elsewhere is to search r/games (NOT r/gaming lol) for the game's name and look around at what people have to say about it. They're often very detailed and honest.
It's probably a good thing that reddit seems to have been too incompetent to enshittify their site completely yet. There's lots of it that has been, but there's still plenty of very good discussion there if you know where to look.
I find reddit to be so hypercritical of everything to the point of it not being useful anymore. A very good 9/10 game will get so much criticism you'd think it's the worst game to be released in a decade.
That's not my experience at all. Feel free to provide any examples of very good games getting dogpiled in the comments, but I've never seen it.
I'll admit that I stopped looking at reddit for most game content lately (last year or 2) so my opinion might be outdated. But I do remember the new Assassin's Creed getting quite a lot of hate for gross reasons. It becomes oddly political much like many subs for TV shows and movies. Misogyny and racism are rampant.
That said I suppose if good moderators filter the rabble out there's bound to be some good communities. I just find that if you love a game it's usually best to steer well clear of the subreddit for it.
>good moderators filter the rabble out
This is key and one of the reasons that ignoring r/gaming and subbing to r/games instead has been standard wisdom since like 2010 when reddit actually had a guide to which frontpage subs to unsub from (r/pics, r/funny, etc.) and which ones to replace them with.
I think most gamers use YouTubers and Twitch streamers as tastemakers rather than reviewers. If your favorite personalities are having fun and it looks like you'd have fun too, then you don't need a review.
This. I've bought games after seeing 10 seconds of gameplay from a streamer. And those were some of my best purchases, hidden gems.
The IGN review video for Doom: The Dark Ages has 637k views at time of writing, which seems pretty good to me. More than the indie youtube outfits.
> These gamers presumably want reviews of what is / isn't worth their time.
Judging by online reactions, what gamers want is their own opinion reflected back at them. Anything else brings frothing rage and vitriol.
For some extremely-online types who have made “gamer” their identity, the purpose of gaming media is primarily to have that identity confirmed, not to gather information.
> These gamers presumably want reviews of what is / isn't worth their time.
They want reviews that the can trust to predict their experience, and trust in the games media for that is (for a variety of reasons) very low.
> Sure, as you mentioned, there are individual YouTubers or Twitch streamers... but one streamer doesn't have nearly enough time to review all the games that come out.
So? No one has time to read/watch reviews of every game that comes out, either, or to play all the games that come out; if they can find a stable of trusted streamers that combined give reliable and timely impressions of games so that they can find a sufficient number worth playing and mostly avoid wasting money on duds, they don't need reviews of every game that comes out, and they especially don’t need that at the expense of reliability.
They have multiple revenue streams for dollars. Decent to large numbers on multiple platforms.
Check the TikTok numbers for example, and don't forget they still have the website.
IGN doesn't need YouTube
The IGN review of Doom: The Dark Ages from 2 days ago currently has 636K views
The problem is that TikTok/Instagram Reels have taken everything. The engineered crack that is the most addictive thing ever takes every second of our attention so it leaves no time to do anything - no "proper" journalism, no books, no films, even YouTube is too long format for someone addicted to TikTok. It's actual catastrophe of attention spans.
The best thing Fandom could do for the community is close forever. Talk about a cancerous website. People like to talk shit about Pinterest, but Fandom is tremendously worse, since its SEO efforts drown actually useful websites.
> Fandom is tremendously worse, since its SEO efforts drown actually useful websites.
This cannot be emphasized enough.
A clean, no-cookied, location-off search for "Doom wiki" (no quotes) returns the terrible, low-information, awful-layout, often-outdated/incorrect Fandom Doom Wiki as the first result.
The actual Doom Wiki, better-designed and far more content-filled - which is called "The Doom Wiki", and with a domain that is literally just "doomwiki.org" - comes in second.
Huh. Just checked kagi and it’s the same. At least you can block sites manually.
My goodness I clicked a link to Fandom on accident the other day - most external links on tvtropes go to Wikipedia.
A sidebar opens automatically, there's a pop-up at the bottom, tons of distracting design and things showing up asking me to take a poll. What a mess. And I have adblock ofc... can't imagine what it really looks like.
I am saddened whenever an IP I've just discovered has their knowledge hub on fandom.
There's extension called Indie Wiki Buddy that will replace Fandom links in SERPs with links to non-Fandom wikis.
> The best thing Fandom could do for the community is close forever.
Ironically, the community of wiki admins there wouldn't like that as it would kill their community. What other platform easily hosts free wikis?
https://icarly.fandom.com/wiki/Seddie
Whiskey Media was top tier back in the day. A group of folks producing really fun content, and having a great time doing it. The community was top notch too. I have no idea where the diaspora ended up, since the forums and wiki are comparatively dead these days.
FYI to anyone missing the core GB guys, they're on a Twitch channel called NextLander. Vinny, Brad, Alex, Will Smith, Abby.
And podcast. You can get more via Patreon.
Great news. Giant Bomb is in some ways one of the few remaining relics of the older / weirder internet. I thought it was done for after the past week.
In this context, the term “bomb” refers specifically to Giant Bomb, the gaming media brand that has now become independently owned and operated by its creators.
JEFF BAKALAR?!?!? THE 404 JEFF BAKALAR!!?!?!?!?
Insane. How times have changed.
His arc at Giant Bomb is pretty great. From guest to co-owner.
i worked with him at cnet all those days ago. super weird.
Did he ever show up to work in a hockey jersey?
Lol not that i recall, but I know he's ride or die devils.
Anyone remember 1up.com before giant bomb? 1up was how I got into podcasts. The computer gaming magazine podcast was hilarious. I loved those guys. I should try to download the archive.
Glad to hear, fandom is a horrible website to use
What are your concerns with Fandom?
For one, when I visit the site on my phone, the bottom 25% of my viewport is taken up by their recommendation algorithm, the top 30% is usually but not always taken up by an autoplaying video completely unrelated to the topic or wiki I’m visiting, and so I’m left with a tiny piece in the middle of my screen actually containing the contents of the wiki page I’m trying to read.
They also hold wikis hostage by not allowing them to move to another platform and redirect/get rid of their Fandom wiki. This means that if any wiki tries to move to be independent, the Fandom wiki will keep existing, and usually will still be the first result on Google for a long while, maybe forever, because of Fandom’s SEO. Of course the entire community of editors will have moved on, so this heavily outdated Fandom wiki full of ads and other elements trying to catch your attention and keep you on the site, will rank above the independent ad-free and active wiki with up-to-date information on Google search.
The https://getindie.wiki/ browser extension helps mitigate that problem.
Why should anyone download extra crap for a crap website? I'll pass.
Because it helps keep you from accidentally visiting that website.
Fandom would rather I do anything other than what I came to the site to do.
- Autoplaying barely related videos at the top as someone told them video content has better CPM
- "Have you tried looking at this page on another wiki?"
- So many ads
- Others like you viewed
- Would you like to join the discord?
- Fan Central?
Just go there without an ad-blocker and see for yourself. It is pretty bad even with an ad-blocker.
The worst part is that it wasn't always like that. When it started of as wikicities and then wikia, it was pretty good, very Wikipedia-like, which is to be expected considering its history. But it enshittified quickly as it became Fandom, all while making it hard to move the existing communities out of the platform.
I like Fandom it
I wish every website were more like Fandom.It adds a whole new meaning to reading between the lines.
I'm still waiting for a gaming site that could rival what TheGIA was back in the day. But unfortunately, the web that gave rise to TheGIA is long gone...
YOOOOO! Still a threat!
Wrong Jeffs!
That Jeff is still a threat but he's not these Jeffs.
<>
Boy that was a confusing headline. I did not realise that fandom or giant bomb were proper nouns.
These uppercase titles need to stop, why is that?
It's called title case and for as far as I'm aware this is a uniquely American thing.
German capitalizes all nouns, not just then proper ones, so missing title case doesn't change much.
But surely it'll help in this case, where an article is being published in English and being shared on an English language forum.
Fair.
It’s from newspaper headlines - using lower case starts to words looks really weird when the word is an inch plus tall on the paper.
That's just because you're not used to that, many European languages don't have title case and newspapers still look perfectly okay.
Eh, spent plenty of time outside the US. It always looks a little odd when that isn’t followed [https://www.pinterest.com/widget34/french-signs/] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_signs_in_Spain]
After all, which is clearer and easier to read - aeropuerto (road sign in spain) [https://images.app.goo.gl/iRcmkxvYX3hxLG59A] or Aeropuerto (road sign in Chile) [https://images.app.goo.gl/xcME6HEb4r1AnGS16].
Even more fun when for instance Spain doesn’t follow that consistently![https://images.app.goo.gl/P7cpegHC2unMsfJy7].
Talk about a typesetters nightmare. Still, better than India where a lot of signage is still done by hand.
The last two images you linked to are fake, and clearly designed by someone who doesn’t know Spanish and has never been to either Chile or Spain. No signs look like that in either country.
Nobody would dare capitalise “de” in Santiago de Chile for instance.
Confirming, the image linked by grandparent is tagged as 3d illustration on shutterstock[1]. A similar illustration with lowercase “de” spelling exists too[2]. Actual road signs in Chile have lowercase “de”[3].
[1]: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/santiago-chi...
[2]: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/santiago-de-...
[3]: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CARRETERA_COSTERA_...
> After all, which is clearer and easier to read
Clear and easy to read is the one that you expect to read, which depends on your previous experience.
It's like when Americans insist that fahrenheit is more "intuitive" since it's what they have experience with.
Well the one thing I do like about Fahrenheit is that it puts the average range of temperatures I experience on nice and tidy 0-100 scale.
I could say the same about Celsius as a person who enjoys tea, hot showers and looking at CPU temperature every now and then.
Your last two links are fake. And you can check on your own Wikipedia link that for Spain's direction signs, only proper nouns are capitalized: full uppercase on conventional roads for historical reasons, otherwise the usual capitalization rules such as on highways or town roads. Whereas full lowercase is reserved for service directions (e.g. service road, airport, hospital, beach). The exceptional capitalized service directions are really old town signs.
So UI designers prioritize form over function as always
It would be fairly easy to add minor elements fo add context and help: Fandom·com sells creator-led brand "Giant Bomb" back to its key personalities.
I even misread it as "sends" and thought this was a stunt of some kind
Also independent creators.
Ah, that's fixed now. And here I thought Independent Creators was a company. What a delightful puzzle.
Well, I didn't know about Giant Bomb, but the fact that the domain for the headline was fandom.com was a big clue for Fandom.
I want to live in your reality.
(Edit for clarity: because the literal headline is hilarious.)
Hahahaha. Upvote.
Fandom is a pit of the internet that you never want to find yourself in. Giantbomb probably should have never happened, it never hit the heights of Gamespot.
In English, there's this:
Fandom Sells Giant Bomb to Independent Creators
In other languages:
ֹֹ»Fandom« Sells »Giant Bomb« to »Independent Creators«
Everyone who clicked the link is not on CIA's observation list.
What the hell, this new title is worse than the original, which was already quite confusing! Can I propose something like the following?
“Giant Bomb (video game media company) purchased by its staff”
“Giant Bomb (video game media company) splits off from parent company”
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This is word salad dude. If you think decrying their kind of behavior is a sucky attitude then I am only further justified in my stance.
I probably could have thown in an extra comma.
What behaviour? Who did what? You made the vaguest of assertions, assume everyone downvoting you knows what you're talking about, then proceed to get upset over it, which is pathetic. Don't get on my back for not being clear when you can't even communicate what it is you're angry about.