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Fandom sells gaming media brand Giant Bomb to long-term staff

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214 points minimaxir | 1 comments | 11 May 25 00:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.341s | source
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kevingadd ◴[11 May 25 01:45 UTC] No.43950569[source]▶
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.

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protocolture ◴[11 May 25 07:43 UTC] No.43952125[source]▶
>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.

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1. Wololooo ◴[11 May 25 09:15 UTC] No.43952504[source]▶
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.