Games Journalism General

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Giant Bomb is probably doing alright financially. Even if only 10k get a sub, that's still a half million a year. Their production costs are cheap as hell, and it isn't like getting rid of the site is going to save CBS any money on their skyscrapers or tech people that get whored around. CBS probably paid more to buy the damn site than everything since then.

They have ten employees who all make more than 50k a year though. I don't know if the dudes programming/running the site is part of Giantbomb, if they are that would bump them to over ten employees and hiring web front end/back end programmers in SF can't be cheap.
 
They have ten employees who all make more than 50k a year though. I don't know if the dudes programming/running the site is part of Giantbomb, if they are that would bump them to over ten employees and hiring web front end/back end programmers in SF can't be cheap.

They sell advertising on both podcasts. The Bombcast is one of the most popular gaming podcasts last I checked and probably brings in quite a bit of money on advertising alone. I wasn't able to find solid figures on how much it would cost to put an ad up, but I think podcasts are very much "booming" now, so there's probably a good bit of money being traded around. The Bombcast also has dynamic ads, so you get different ones depending on when you listen/download. Squarespace is their main advertiser AFAIK, but they also had ads for dick pills (LOL)
 
Here's a blast from the past. Games journalists were sucking off the DmC reboot and saying that fans who didn't like it should shut up and just not buy it. Fans said "Okay!" and it completely flopped. Games journalists then start berating fans for not buying the game. Here's one of the saltier articles:


Brenna Hillier calls fans immature brats for not embracing change. She then goes on to berate and body shame them as basement dwelling small penised cheeto dust covered neckbeards. Irony, thy name is game journalism.
 
Push Square got weird and corporate after TLOU2. Here's the most recent example:


You'd think the massive amount of comments would imply a backlash but half of them seem to agree with the article. Apparently only a "vocal minority with their knickers in a twist" want to own their games, and one of them even says "oldheads" not embracing and accepting games as a service is why TLOU2 failed. Yeah I'm sure that's what happened. I guess this is where console fanboyism leads people.
 
Push Square got weird and corporate after TLOU2. Here's the most recent example:


You'd think the massive amount of comments would imply a backlash but half of them seem to agree with the article. Apparently only a "vocal minority with their knickers in a twist" want to own their games, and one of them even says "oldheads" not embracing and accepting games as a service is why TLOU2 failed. Yeah I'm sure that's what happened. I guess this is where console fanboyism leads people.
I'm ok with people not buying physical media


That means there's more for me.
 
Kotaku UK is done for

Not a shock frankly considering it was Future involved with the handling. They've only just recently got out of debt

Some more context: Future once held a monopoly over gaming media and press publication via it's magazine branch in the UK. As traditional legacy media failed to maintain pace with the digital landscape, Future begun to bleed money rather badly. With the Wii U a massive failure, the Nintendo line of magazines was purged first. Shortly followed by it's Microsoft wing thanks in part to the Xbox One. Today Future has EDGE (which costs £8 per-issue last I checked) and Official Playstation Magazine leading the charge of it's gaming sector. Beyond that, you'll find that Future has managed to reestablish it's brand by prioritising traditional hobbyist culture (boomers who prefer to read) and double-dipping with brands like PC Gamer.

Kotaku UK and it's affiliated parent brands are yet another example of Future overextending it's reach in a market it shouldn't bother contending with anymore.
 
Any bets on how long it'll be before Kotaku US follows suit? I have a feeling it'll fold by the end of the year.
 
God, I wish we could go back to the games journalism we had in the nineties. The console warring was childish in retrospect, but they all had a sense of fun. They all seemed to genuinely care about games too, instead of wanting to watch a movie where you press the X button every ten minutes.
 
Any bets on how long it'll be before Kotaku US follows suit? I have a feeling it'll fold by the end of the year.

It will probably limp on for some time. It isn't really the same thing as Kotaku UK, which was just licensing the name.
 
Any bets on how long it'll be before Kotaku US follows suit? I have a feeling it'll fold by the end of the year.

Depends if G/O has any other gaming media and press pubs. They can afford use it as a loss as long they maintain exclusive access to the lines of publicity.

God, I wish we could go back to the games journalism we had in the nineties. The console warring was childish in retrospect, but they all had a sense of fun. They all seemed to genuinely care about games too, instead of wanting to watch a movie where you press the X button every ten minutes.

Enthusiasts all went to YouTube where they live at the mercy of the algorithm and isn't smart enough to hold worthwhile opinion pieces and no pr branch of a company wants someone who can't pull 5 figure earnings.
 
Future once held a monopoly over gaming media and press publication via it's magazine branch in the UK.
In other countries in Europe too.

Isn't Kotaku US funded in part by a Mexican media empire?
I think Univision sold Gizmodo and the other Gawker websites.

Any bets on how long it'll be before Kotaku US follows suit?
They're still fighting for the union so it's only a matter of time before the owners tell them to fuck off and shut down the website.
 
Man, the Giant Bomb subreddit is proving to be super useful.
Full thread: https://archive.is/vMcbk

Thread title: Merritt K on the beastcast is super disappointing.
After that big song and dance a few months ago about learning from past associations with bad apples and promising to do better vetting in the future we got someone who is openly biphobic and has a long, public history of harassment/bullying showing up..
You can look at the twitter thread of Abby announcing the beastcast lineup for some receipts but a google will bring up more. https://twitter.com/ybbaaabby/status/1304112382055153666
I was looking forward to seeing what kind of show Abby was going to put together and I will give her some benefit of the doubt as finding a entire podcast lineup probably wasnt easy, and clearly she tried to have a all non male lineup which is admirable and a first for a GB podcast but we can do better. A lot better.
 
Wow, that community has turned into ResetEra. That's what you get Gertsmann for capitulating to these douches. That's your community now.

I hope he is dead inside...

Some of the comments are trending in the right direction IMO. About halfway down the thread someone says: "I have no idea who this person is and there are no coherent allegations made in this thread" followed by a handful of people with similar thoughts on the matter. Also note that there's people calling out Waypoint (Austin, Patrick, and whoever else) for essentially working alongside whoever this person. This kind of talk is super funny given that the mods explicitly put rules in place to prevent "staff criticism" (aka PROTECT ABBY AT ALL COSTS) and then later extended it to include "friends of the site" so the Waypoint people were safe. They did all of this claiming it would kick out any GG leftovers and result in a nice, happy community. After 3 years of constantly banning people for stepping out of line, they've finally realized they're left with nobody to kick out and have taken to just fighting each other instead over shitty Twitter drama. The subreddit was insufferable a year ago, but now it's getting funnier and funnier as these little spats break out over dumb shit.

For the record, I've never heard Jeff bring up the subreddit directly. Most of the current staff and a few ex-staff have mentioned they deleted their Reddit accounts or stopped going there entirely. So I guess it's saying something that they'd rather use Twitter than fucking Reddit LOL.
 
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