Games Journalism General

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Jesus Gamespot are scraping the barrel here. This reads like someone just googling some
Shit and calling it a day. I don’t think they get paid enough to care honestly.
 
7 Grandad said:
Jesus Gamespot are scraping the barrel here. This reads like someone just googling some
Shit and calling it a day.
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Even then, you'd think they'd pick a popular character like Captain Falcon or Fox McCloud over characters no one knows like "Bobby". Just list the cast from Smash Bros and you'd get a better list.

7 Grandad said:
I don’t think they get paid enough to care honestly.
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They get paid too much if this is the standard of their work.
 
Judge Dredd said:
Even then, you'd think they'd pick a popular character like Captain Falcon or Fox McCloud over characters no one knows like "Bobby". Just list the cast from Smash Bros and you'd get a better list.
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My cynical assumption is that they threw a few characters that are more obscure just so people would see the list and go "Who the fuck is X?" and then click the link to the article or whatever (like I did when I was trying to figure out who the hell Bobby was.)
 
Sorry if this has been posted before. SA's brought attention to this pretty long article by Nathalie Lawhead. Apparently it's about how easy and how heavily her fellow game journos all turned on her. Just barely managed to save the link and post, but not fast enough to save the original post drawing attention to it:

Jimbot posted:​

I don't blame them because Nathalie Lawhead's fans going into enthusiast press folks' timelines to urge them to join in the effort for kotaku to take down that article was akin to Gamergate 2.0 according to press and it was the most hilariously sad nonsense I've ever see. They were like milquetoast "please encourage kotaku to take down the article" responses to people with hot takes on the situation and they had meltdowns claiming it was a coordinated harassment campaign.

They fold under the most minuscule criticism and pushback. Utterly weak and they won't survive the winter. She chronicled the whole affair(CW: SA, gaslighting and other heinous things). In case people don't know what happened. They largely moved on from all this but occasionally repost it when they see said person get praise from their peers.
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Kotaku went fishing for rage click, but used bait that was too obvious. Calling an anti-epalepsy feature an option "for babies". I don't have an archive, or Twitter isn't working for me? Here's a screenshot from reddit.
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Here's the original link


Alcoholism said:
How's Giant Bomb faring? Last I heard, their new Jeff G made up some shit for the rumor mill and was called on it.
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(Sorry for the late reply, I thought I posted this) I don't know. Last I remember was when Jeff Gerstmann quit, meaning none of the Giant Bomb members were left. He made a post on his Patreon (or whatever it was) talking about why he quit, but that was the last I or seemingly anyone cared about what was posted on Giant Bomb.
 
Alcoholism said:
How's Giant Bomb faring? Last I heard, their new Jeff G made up some shit for the rumor mill and was called on it.
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Just checking in on their YT channel - looks like most videos don't break 10k.

Most of the videos look terrible and just look like boilerplate streamer content ("We watch xbox Parner review! We go to the store and buy games! Dan unboxes a PS5! A podcast!") that looks bland and uninteresting. Outside of Dan I couldn't even identify anyone in the videos. They've 100% lost any magic they had left it feels like.
 
I think a lot of people didn't even realize because Giant bomb has been irrelevant for like a decade at this point, but, they actually got sold again in 2022. That is another sell mind you: CBS got rid of them in 2020 and then the new buyer (Red Ventures) got rid of them 2 years later.

That's when Gerstmann left, or more accurately was fired. According to him anyway he was planning on quitting that year after E3 was over but Fandom (new buyer, yes the shittily designed wiki people) got fed up and purged him.

So yeah, there hasn't been an original member at the website for almost 2 years now. Kinda surprised they haven't been shut down yet. Maybe with no office and so few employees they manage to get by with people who've forgotten to unsub from premium + the little ad revenue they get. But I somehow doubt it lol. I have to imagine they'll get axed at some point.

Nextlander (if anyone remembers it, that's what Alex, Vinny, and Brad went off to do after GB) is still hanging around. Their patreon numbers are good technically (close to 9k) but the only time they've ever seen growth is when Jeff was fired from GB; otherwise their numbers have been stagnant if you're being generous but being real if you just look at their bar graph on graphtreon they lose like 100 subs nearly every month. Not a huge drop off but death by a thousand cuts I'd say.

Which isn't surprising, can't really grow an audience when you disable comments on youtube (which they do for every video lol) and you have such a shit lineup. Brad has always been boring as hell but he somehow gets more boring as time goes on, and, Alex is completely insufferable and apparently has only gotten more unhinged these days. Vinny only works when he has someone to shoot the shit with, which he does not anymore. Even the current zombified GB gets more youtube views than them lol, though probably doesn't matter a ton since Nextlander relies on patreon.
 
ltlftp said:
I think a lot of people didn't even realize because Giant bomb has been irrelevant for like a decade at this point, but, they actually got sold again in 2022. That is another sell mind you: CBS got rid of them in 2020 and then the new buyer (Red Ventures) got rid of them 2 years later.

That's when Gerstmann left, or more accurately was fired. According to him anyway he was planning on quitting that year after E3 was over but Fandom (new buyer, yes the shittily designed wiki people) got fed up and purged him.
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It sounds like they were both fed up with the future of Giantbomb. Jeff complained often about the lack of events and office and knew that GB's core was being explicitly not "another group of streamers". They were supposed to be professionals that did networking and reporting from live events that padded the in between stuff with behind the scenes stuff (like Mailbag, UPF, etc).

The old owners and the new ones likely looked at the cost savings from not having an office, not having production grade equipment, no hotels or flights, a professional staff, and so on and decided it wasn't worth it - highlighting they had no idea what it was they purchased.
ltlftp said:
So yeah, there hasn't been an original member at the website for almost 2 years now. Kinda surprised they haven't been shut down yet. Maybe with no office and so few employees they manage to get by with people who've forgotten to unsub from premium + the little ad revenue they get. But I somehow doubt it lol. I have to imagine they'll get axed at some point.
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They're heavily monetized and are likely on auto pilot.

- Premium Subscribers ($5/month per user)
- Twich Subscibers ($2.50/month per user)
- Merch Store
- Podcast Ads*
- Ads/Adsense from Twitch and Youtube

It all adds up and considering that it sounds like the current hires are all freelancers/contractors they are likely a lot cheaper then Jeff/Vinny's part owner/director title salaries. They also cut a lot of other people in layoffs after Jeff (Jess and Jason from GB, a bunch of people from other avenues).

ltlftp said:
Nextlander (if anyone remembers it, that's what Alex, Vinny, and Brad went off to do after GB) is still hanging around. Their patreon numbers are good technically (close to 9k) but the only time they've ever seen growth is when Jeff was fired from GB; otherwise their numbers have been stagnant if you're being generous but being real if you just look at their bar graph on graphtreon they lose like 100 subs nearly every month. Not a huge drop off but death by a thousand cuts I'd say.

Which isn't surprising, can't really grow an audience when you disable comments on youtube (which they do for every video lol) and you have such a shit lineup. Brad has always been boring as hell but he somehow gets more boring as time goes on, and, Alex is completely insufferable and apparently has only gotten more unhinged these days. Vinny only works when he has someone to shoot the shit with, which he does not anymore. Even the current zombified GB gets more youtube views than them lol, though probably doesn't matter a ton since Nextlander relies on patreon.
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Nextlander has the same revenue setup as GB but aren't getting siphoned off a parent company and only have 3 people instead of 5 (and contractors).

Jeff once slipped up and mentioned the podcast was the most profitable thing they did at GB. The ads pay well, the content is easy (just a few hours of sitting in a room), the hosting is free, etc so Nextlander likely is milking that as well.
 
Judge Dredd said:
Kotaku went fishing for rage click, but used bait that was too obvious. Calling an anti-epalepsy feature an option "for babies". I don't have an archive, or Twitter isn't working for me? Here's a screenshot from reddit.
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If this “for babies” thing is sarcastic and related to the people mocking journalists for wanting easy modes, then it is a positively pathetic attempt to compare actually important quality of life features to demanding that game devs let them play a glorified movie. If it is serious, then the hypocrisy is overwhelming. Neither option makes Kotaku look good.
 
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