I’m gonna be honest: I was hoping Giant Bomb would ride off into the sunset.
A quick recap for anyone who doesn’t keep up with video game journalism: Industry staple Giant Bomb, founded in 2008 by ex-GameSpot writers as a sort of punk-rock alternative to the grind of reviewing everything a 7/10, received orders from their parent company, shady wiki host Fandom, to stop broadcasting live streams and to keep their content PG-13. Fandom being the third consecutive owner who completely did not understand what Giant Bomb fundamentally is, the crew openly revolted. A flurry of departures ensued, followed by a suspicious silence. Finally, the crew reunited at PAX to announce they had purchased the site from Fandom and would now be operating independently, receiving a standing ovation from the crowd and prompting at least one blogger to unschedule a much more elegiac post.
I wish them the best. I’m a little skeptical they will succeed. And I’m about 10% annoyed that we got the objectively best possible outcome.
I’m finding it difficult to explain my mixed feelings on Giant Bomb’s in large part because I find it hard to explain what Giant Bomb actually is. The pithy answer is “a website about video games,” which the site adopted as a sort of explanation by omission. What about video games? “Nothing in particular. Anything goes!” So I guess the best way to describe the site is to start with its output.
The flagship Giant Bombcast is a weekly podcast that covers video game news and releases, uploaded on a schedule so consistent that even the death of a cofounder couldn’t disrupt it. Already I’ve undersold it. A Bombcast that doesn’t frequently stretch past the 3 hour mark due to unrelated tangents and riffs is no Bombcast at all. Other podcasts feature the same crew discussing movies, wrestling, and anime.
Their video fare was built off the strength of “Quick Looks,” 30-60 minute chunks of commentated gameplay to demo a new release. These had become much more rare in recent years. Arguably their most popular series among fans are playthroughs of full games or series: Metal Gear Solid, Mario Party, Garfield: Lasagna World Tour, and several others.
So: a network of podcasts containing largely unedited, rambling conversations about media, plus videos and livestreams of video game playthroughs. They sound like influencers. What’s the difference between this and a team of Twitch streamers?
There really is a difference—or at least there used to be. Giant Bomb was born from a journalism background. Admittedly their output of text reviews has completely dried up and written criticism has been dead on the site since Austin Walker left in 2016. But there was always the sense that these guys aren’t just “playing video games as their job.” You could tell they took their roles as professional critics seriously.
I felt that sense of professionalism leave the site after the quarantine era. For those who don’t remember, in 2020 a global pandemic of a novel coronavirus forced most companies to pivot at least temporarily to remote work. Giant Bomb’s was not so temporary. They never returned to their studio. Without that studio, they became just a bunch of faces in a grid on the screen, microphone in the foreground, messy bedroom behind. Just streamers. Nothing special.
During the week that it seemed Giant Bomb was gone for good, many fans optimistically proclaimed that Giant Bomb would always live on in its past crew and its community. That even in diaspora, as Nextlander or Remap or The Jeff Gerstmann Show, the soul of Giant Bomb still exists. Giant Bomb isn’t a website, they said. It’s a people.
I disagree. Giant Bomb isn’t a people. Giant Bomb is a couch. And the soul of Giant Bomb dispersed when its members did, on March 13, 2020.
The current era of Giant Bomb absolutely has its fans, and every one of them will tell you Blight Club is their best series. I’ve been watching it lately and it’s true. Dan Ryckert’s Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) playthrough at least is a fun time. It’s still not Giant Bomb. It’s a guy riffing on a notoriously bad game with his friends. There are dozens and dozens of those on Twitch and YouTube. There are not dozens of channels doing it live in a studio. That in-person energy can’t be manufactured.
Which finally brings me to why I feel so unenthused about Giant Bomb’s continuation.
My main mode of engagement with Giant Bomb these days is the Twitch channel Giant Bomb Forever. This is a fan-run recreation of a discontinued premium feature and broadcasts old videos 24/7. Take a look at it now and I bet you dollars to donuts the currently running video is from before 2020. The viewers voting on the videos, like me, are not interested in non-studio videos. There’s an air of disappointment in the chat whenever an archive of a solo home stream accidentally wins.
Continued production from Giant Bomb means more dilution in the videos I actually want to see on that channel. Yes, this is the most absurdly selfish reason possible for feeling ambivalent about five people keeping their jobs. But it all goes back to that question of what Giant Bomb is. Without a couch, this is something else.1
I’m still open to embracing what that something else could be. The current crew seems brimming with creative verve right now and I sincerely hope they create something that draws me back in. Unfortunately, I can’t shake the sense that, despite winning control of the brand, they’re on life support. Can this model support five salaries? I’m watching. But I’m not invested.
It strikes me that Giant Bomb was created at a very specific moment in time. In 2008, launching a website meant launching an entire website. It meant having a bespoke video distribution system instead of offloading that to YouTube and Twitch. It meant having a custom forum instead of directing fans to a Discord server. It meant charging subscriptions directly instead of through Patreon. It meant having an office.
Part of the appeal, I think, of early Giant Bomb and going back to the crew’s on-screen appearances at GameSpot was the sense that these were people who worked there. When the cameras were off, they had stuff to do. And so an Unprofessional Fridays stream was them taking time out of their day to entertain you. They were journalists first. Maybe that wasn’t actually true, but working out of an office gave it that quality. I found it valuable.
Compare it to Nextlander, a channel formed by three Giant Bomb former members so core to the site that many fans point to their departure as the day Giant Bomb lost its soul. I’m an intermittent Nextlander listener and viewer, yet I’ve never felt compelled to subscribe. I really do get the sense that they fire up the microphones, expel themselves into the internet, and call it a day. Certainly there must be off-camera work to be done. Outside of essential logistical duties, I couldn’t tell you what those might be.
I was hoping getting all this down in words would help me figure out what I’m actually annoyed at. Venture capital firms? Too easy. The stranglehold that companies like YouTube have on independently produced online entertainment? Sure, who isn’t. The dire state of video games journalism? It’s hard not to view Giant Bomb’s crisis in the context of the simultaneous gutting of Polygon. Or maybe I just want it to be 2014 again.
I listened to a lot of podcasts and interviews from ex-Giant Bomb members in the last few weeks, and I keep coming back to founder Jeff Gerstmann’s statements. To Jeff, Giant Bomb failed in 2012 when it was sold back to the same owner as GameSpot. Since then it was an afterthought, an add-on in the sales package, with every new manager asking “Why do we have two of these?” It never should have lasted this long, and to hear him tell it he wanted to have one foot out the door for years before he actually left.
In spite of that, that’s the era that I as a viewer remember fondly. Now, for the first time in decades, Giant Bomb has owners who actually know what it is. Maybe there’s a new golden era ahead.
It would be better on a couch, though.
- Technically, both studios had desks in the final years, but nobody liked the Giant Bomb West desk. ↩
