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.
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.
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
Hold up what? I didn't know that. It seems insane to fire the man from the organization he co-founded.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nobody would dare capitalise “de” in Santiago de Chile for instance.
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.
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.
[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_...
This is one of my personal favourites, just for all the background it reveals about how the game was made.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
“Giant Bomb (video game media company) purchased by its staff”
“Giant Bomb (video game media company) splits off from parent company”
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.
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.
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....
Check the TikTok numbers for example, and don't forget they still have the website.
IGN doesn't need YouTube
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I dont watch people talking about programming and I dont pay for the privilege of watching people talk about programming.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
