2020 Thoughts on Giant Bomb

I’ve been thinking for a while about how video game websites cover video games “not considered good”. I understand the importance of educating readers/viewers of games worth or not worth our money but I can never help thinking about the people who work so hard and for so long on the games we summarise in 20 minutes. Often not with the attention equal to the effort they have put in.

Don’t get me wrong. Bad games should be raised as a precursor to players spending their own money but I’ve recently developed a problem with people making fun at the expense of games in aid of their own entertainment value.

I’ve seen it a few times but it hit a boiling point for me with the east team’s coverage of the new terminator game recently. That development team have made massive improvements and strides in their games and to watch a quick look where a group of people spend their time doing nothing but trying to one-up each other in pithy, degrading remarks of the development efforts of the team just feels too much like schoolyard bullying without any focus on journalistic principals made me kinda sick.

It just seems so one-sided that websites, influencers and the like use years of hard work from many people as the basis for twenty minutes of entertainment for their own needs. Planning, development, securing funding... all in aid for a small group of people to cast fast aspersions in an amount of time equal to less than a percent of the hard work that went into it.

Again, this isn’t unique to GB but that Terminator quick look... made me sick and sorry for the development team who really are trying their best for a long time only to be greeted with feedback like “well it’s bad but better than their previous efforts which weren’t very high” (not a verbatim quote 🙏)

My thought is that there are A TON of games out there these days. The quality bar is the highest it’s ever been. The barrier to entry is the lowest it’s ever been.

Some things will be praised. Some things will be shit on. Some things will be ignored.

If I made a game, I think I’d rather people shit on it than ignore it. It’s feedback, it’s visibility, it’s a chance to make some money back on it. It’s better than being ignored or disingenuously praised.

Hmm... you're not wrong. Standards are really high these days, and anything that isn't highly polished can get unnecessary crap.

GB's done plenty of streams where the mics are off, cameras aren't focused, and cuts are distracting. Technical issues may be a factor, but that's part of the charm. But if a game bugs out or isn't that great, no one has a problem piling on it.

Hell, even a bigger game like WWE 2K20 gets so much shit. Despite having problems with developers moving on and a time crunch, making fun of something people put so much work into is a little offputting.

I'm not even talking about GB specifically, but the internet as a whole. Cats looks bad, but Twitter piled on that movie. The original Sonic design, you name it.

It used to be better

I think it is always important to consider that there are human being behind even bad games. On the other hand, I think that means just not being mean or cruel. It should not mean the media should give bad games any more coverage than that which is is necessary to say its bad.

There is certainly room for "what went wrong stories", and certainly it goes beyond Schadenfreude to want to know what happened in some cases? It's not always cruel for the 'games media' to ask, "What happened with Anthem?" because I think that story paints the rank & file workers on the game in a good light and the management and leadership at Bioware as the the root case of the problems.

Maybe the bottoms line is always try to keep it professional. If there are two roads you can take at any given moment 1) make a cruel joke about a game 2) say something insightful about why thing can fail; it is probably better to do the second choice more often.

I think it's a natural outcome when you have a group of people who more or less share the same taste in games, or follow the same formula for what exactly a good or fun game is. When there's nobody to argue against the dominating viewpoint, it can become a "shit-flinging show", regardless of whether it's Giant Bomb or some other site. The GB crew has a whole bunch of different personalities, but that does not mean they don't share the same values or ideas of what a good or fun game is supposed to be.

With Giant Bomb, I think your mentioned issue happens more or less every time there's a mid-level-developer game. I think the GB crew have a hard time accepting these developers, they've always had that problem in my opinion, while I think they find it much easier to accept and tolerate smaller Indie studios and your triple-A studios.

If GB had someone in their midst who is more used to playing games that are on the fringe, i.e. not highly polished mainstream games, you would probably have gotten a different discussion of the game.

And I agree, why make the effort of doing a video if you are just going to be insulting ? It is not contributing with knowledge that's useful to a potential buyer for the game, who will instantly recognize that 'yeah ... it's a shit-flinging show", and will stop paying attention to what they are saying. At least, that's what I do. I will then look elsewhere in order to get useful information.

To be honest though, I've never considered GB's coverage of games to be informative to me as a buyer. They either have too little experience playing the game and thus a poor understanding of it, or they don't seem to understand what the developers were aiming for. In contrast, TotalBiscuit's (miss ya') "quicklooks" were a good example of what informative coverage should be like (in my opinion).

I’d also note that you can put good, hard work that you’re proud of into a product that turns out to be shit.

It doesn’t mean your work was bad. It doesn’t mean you’re bad at you’re job, or a bad person. It just means that the project didn’t come together very well.

I’d think very few folks behind a game should feel badly about their craft or abilities if it turns out poorly...maybe the producer, director, etc., I guess would be ultimately accountable and impacted, but most folks are applying a more specific craft.

I definitely see where your coming from. I think the amount of games one has to cover will influence how much effort you end up putting into talking about a bad or mediocre one. But a spectacularly bad game is at least going to earn a more enthusiastic shitting on rather than just a whatever shitting on.

Honestly I need less preaching to the consumer about ethical consumption of video games from sites like Giant Bomb. I find it extremely disingenuous and selfish to here them heatedly talk about how the consumer needs to take a stand against developers and publishers like Blizzard and Rockstar when that staff member is going to get a free copy of their next game and play it and talk about it positively if they like it. GB has consistently talked about how they are less and less of a review outlet yet hide behind the ideals of that when it comes to companies they don't like putting out games they do like.

In my opinion, this is an entertainment website more than it is a video game website. I think that a lot of the trashing video games aspect of things comes from trying to create humor and not from a true place of malice.

I bet all of us have probably bought at least one game covered by this site that the GB team hated in the Quick Look because it looked good to us. Exposure is exposure for these games.

Video game coverage went to a weird place (and not necessarily for the better) over the last decade due to Twitch, Youtube and Twitter. It's probably going to get even weirder but Giant Bomb has always felt like it's been grounded (even after the buyout) due to their relationships with actual developers (and not just PR) while still being up front about that.

I can tolerate them being dicks and giving opinions I don't like (and I agree that most of the time any kind of exposure is better than none) but I hope I can trust that Jeff and the crew don't need to be forced to give disclaimers about sponsors, personal relations etc.

My gaming interests are a little more nerdy and not so much anime/wrestling/multiplayer so my opinion doesn't matter much. I just hope they can stay true to Jeff's original vision even though times have changed for game developers as well. Also I wonder if there is a next step to coverage after video and podcasts because it seems like there are so many options today for better or worse compared to when they started.