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

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214 points minimaxir | 2 comments | 11 May 25 00:00 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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drumhead ◴[11 May 25 10:15 UTC] No.43952747[source]▶
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.

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1. bartread ◴[11 May 25 11:18 UTC] No.43952999[source]▶
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.

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2. chris12321 ◴[11 May 25 20:15 UTC] No.43956782[source]▶
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.