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

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 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.

I think they all lost a little something when Ryan suddenly died.

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.

> 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?

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

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.

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.

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.

The IGN review of Doom: The Dark Ages from 2 days ago currently has 636K views

> 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.

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".

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

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.

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.

Sites like Game Informer, Easy Allies, and MinnMax have shown viability through subscription/Patreon models that focus on dedicated communities rather than mass appeal.

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.

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?

> 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.

> 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.

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).

This. I've bought games after seeing 10 seconds of gameplay from a streamer. And those were some of my best purchases, hidden gems.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.