it was always so awesome when theyâd pay attention to something you sent in. Thereâs an episode of the bombcast where they read a story about some shit that happened to me that I sent in by email and they lost the entire episode because of technical problems but they were still talking about it on UPF that week lol
As you know, Giant Bomb live streaming is temporarily paused. We understand this programming pause isnât ideal for our audience, but itâs part of a strategic reset and realignment of our media brands.
We appreciate your patience as we build the next phase of exciting gaming and entertainment content for fans everywhere. Out of privacy for our team, we will not comment on any staffing changes.
We know you still have questions and want answers. Our promise to you: weâll update you in real time as soon as we have more information. So stay tuned for more updates and we will be keeping this thread open as a place for you to discuss these changes.
The thread is going as well as you might expect.
Edit: Damn this would never get by Giant Bombâs new brand safety standardsâŚ
I followed GB pretty closely for years, and like a lot of people fell off, but before then I had been a premium subscriber and even went to a live event they held at pax (nine??? years ago??? whewwww). I had tried to follow other creators but none of them had that same chemistry. I think WayneRadioTV is closer to that kind of vibe, but the live shows and streams from Giant Bomb were really fun. Mario Party Party especially. The themed shows were fun. The podcasts were really good - I didnât have anything to really replace that for commutes home.
I gotta wonder if TikTok and other social video sites are eating away at this too. Apparently theyâre eating into videogames as people will just scroll tiktok instead of playing casual games.
These were the glory days
let me dip into my inner contrarian and suggest that giant bomb killed games writing. people actually started writing shit about games there for a while, you could even pitch stories to Real Websites in addition to writing for Good Websites as you saw fit. then giant bomb put a camera on some dudes and that was the end of that. I realize Iâm simplifying things and clearly the corporate degradation of the games media space in the years since is a bigger problem, but hey
i think at the time when i was blogging i was wondering why everyone including game critics were so obsessed with the exploits of these random dudes who as far as i could tell didnât have any particular distinguishing features about them. it didnât make me feel any less like games/internet media just inherently reward Weâre Normal Dudes Beinâ Goofy! kinda content. and itâs like you were judged as inferior for having a different perspective because you never could be as important in the space as just these random ass Weâre Just Like You guys. i guess iâve softened on it all now esp because i listen to other Random Dudes podcasts now and i follow Jeff Gerstmann and he seems to have pretty good taste in a lot of things. but certainly at the time it was never my thing.
Cosign both posts.
I always looked at Giant Bomb content wondering when I was supposed to be engaged. Yes I am an intellectual and very sapio.
the giant bomb wiki was a good resource but I never really used any other part of the site, have literally no opinion on it one way or the other
still, the wiki inevitably getting turned into fandom-tier junk is a shame
I canât really blame people for hating that site. I was like a teenager when I was on there so I didnât care about shit about people writing about games. Matt Rorie sent me an email right after gamergate happened because my 16 year old ass was like why are you guys playing Kingpin Life of Crime on UPF and only killing the female NPCs while thinking itâs the funniest shit ever. Like the most teenage complaint email ever. But he literally sent me like an eight paragraph response about how he knew it would look bad but didnât do anything about it so in retrospect he looked dumber than a child.
I always confuse Giant Bomb with MobyGames. I have no idea what Giant Bomb is. MobyGames is cool!!!
Yeah I mean I know I deliberately avoid âvideogame journalismâ and have for many years but, still, I find it pretty weird that there was this apparently load-bearing group of journalists and critics and Iâve never encountered a single shred of their work, not even here. Literally the only thing I know about it is its name. Youâd think if it was really that great somebody wouldâve posted an article or something sometime in the past decade.
itâs either the parasocial appeal of long term investment in particular personalities or just that youâre paid to constantly keep up with the news cycle if you work for one of those websites so youâre always present. online video has now just taken that but with much less standards or requirements for people to like, be vetted or know what theyâre talking about to any degree.
i donât know how much any of it rewards people having distinct critical Takes, at least not at this point. i guess iâm happy that at least a few of my pieces of writing will continue to have reverberations outside of the moment, but i also wouldâve liked it if i had anywhere near the degree of audience or resources a lot of people from that ecosystem ever had. i know i sure feel mighty precarious pretty much every day.
Yeah, I never see anything actually from Giant Bomb. I just hear people talking about them really generally. No idea what they actually made or did there.
Jeff Gerstmann is a name that comes up from time to time but I donât follow him or anything he makes. He says a lot of Nintendo leaks that have a 60% chance of being real.
Iâve seen some giant bomb stuff, but if I have it was always Gerstmann. I have seen his stuff on its own on social media a bunch.
That said at this point in my life, I donât necessarily think my lack of exposure to something means itâs totally irrelevant. The second I started hanging with Zoomers more regularly I discovered an entire world of video game YouTube stuff Iâd never encountered before that is massively popular.
Yeah, whatever he does next will be more successful than Giant Bomb itself ever was.
a friend once joking had would call any kind of lets play / video essay / casual game media thing a âgamer podcastâ basically regardless of scale or media format and most of this stuff really is just white noise in that way. i think a lot of enjoyment came from just picking a format you could easily digest, or single out a few personalities to identify with and idle through things.
i realize in the wake of mass layoffs the âthis stuff never really engaged meâ is kind of crass though. i think there were a lot of shows that have just managed to stick around long enough and got started early enough to just be in the periphery of conversations the last couple decades. these days i just do not have the capacity to jump into the 400+ episode legacies of a lot of this stuff and even trying to do so feels futile for me when you know part of the enjoyment people get out of it is having a picture of the broader âarcsâ different cast members have. a lot of it is really not made with any sort of plan for longterm curation and are no longer capable of cohesive âentry pointsâ
i think the last real âcasual styleâ stuff i paid much (and not much) attention to were the super best friends; they had all worked in QA at different points and bringing out that sort of context, and having the larger histories of different studios down made more sense to me than general comedy stuff. its odd to me that a lot of these video/podcast format series come from folks ostensibly in and around games journalism but the weekly friend-hang type series are intentionally taking a break from owning up to that
just to clear up some factual points â jeff gerstmann has not been at giant bomb since 2022 and has been running his own somewhat solo show since then. and for nintendo leaks youâre probably thinking of jeff grubb, who was a current and much more recent giant bomb employee until this weekâs events.
for my more speculative take: iâm fairly certain people didnât like giant bomb for its criticism, or if they did it was because it was literally the only games criticism they were consuming. rather they just wanted to watch dudes goof off in videos or listen to dudes goof off in podcasts.
like theyâre notable largely because they were so prolific (hours and hours a week of videos/podcasts) for over a decade and half and thus wormed their way into many peopleâs routines, especially nearer the beginning when it was more novel and there werenât umpteen other places like it.
TIL theyâre not the same person