It makes sense but I'm a little sad that Giant Bomb seems to have abandoned the "Quick Look" term

This is not an angry post. I've always been on team "Giant Bomb has to evolve" so I get it. There are reasons that GB seems to have moved beyond the Quick Look. For one these streams have gotten longer and longer to the point where they're usually between 60-90 minutes, which is not that quick. For another I am sure there are SEO reasons, since GB seems to have moved more to Youtube and other video hosts rather than focusing on the site's internal hosting (which also makes sense.)

And I'm sure there's something of a desire to break from the past now that the originals are all gone and the people with longer tenures weren't necessarily Quick Look focused anyway (Dan was on some but more focused on his various gimmicky shenanigans.)

So I can't really argue with the decision, but it's just another sign of how the old Giant Bomb is kind of fading. Even its branding doesn't have the power it once did. And that whole era, of games coverage, games, my life, the world, is just getting old. I mean I already know that I'm getting old, but this is just more confirmation.

Meanwhile Twitch just laid off 35% of its staff, so the new era of games coverage doesn't seem to be going that amazingly either. 2023 was, by some measures, a great year for games, and PlayStation and Nintendo are both in very strong spots right now, but man, the industry just feels in flux and unstable and I'm doing the old man thing of missing when in 2011 I could go to the GB website and delight because some goofy looking game just got a Quick Look uploaded and I suddenly knew what I was going to watch during dinner.

I will now go search my sweater for Werther's Originals. Maybe that reference is too outdated for younger people to even get it. That's depressing in and of itself.

I think it's a combo of journalism in general really struggling for the last couple of decades and the tech industry failing to deliver on its promises of sustainability over roughly the same timeframe. On the former, it's been tough seeing people who got laid off in 2022 still unable to find steady work. And on the latter, even going "independent" puts you fully at the mercy of the TOS of an unprofitable tech company like Twitch or Patreon. I don't think it ever occurred to me that maybe the internet era just fails instead of being the eventual destination and springboard for all things from 2005 to perpetuity. Turns out you can move backwards on the Civilization tech tree.

RE: Werther's, I have never understood why it gets its rap as the bad old person candy. I see it in stores all the time, it tastes great, and there are so many more deserving candidates for candy punching bags. Looking at you, Necco wafers.

I'm fairly certain I'm in the minority of people on this, but the thing I've always been interested in seeing in games coverage is variety. I'm rarely ever interested in full playthroughs of games. It takes a lot for someone to be able to hold my interest by playing the same game for two to three hours at one time. It's why I don't do Twitch. I've always appreciated the Quick Look style of trying to cover as much as possible and the UPF format of "everyone brings something different to the show".

@allthedinos: I think the issue is that the Internet's monetization is screwed up. A lot of the money ends up flowing to people other than those actually producing the content (and I don't mean just the literal journalists but the publications in general.) Also the advertising market is not quite as robust as it was for print and traditional media. Add in AI content farms and other "spam" material and you get a recipe for the problems we're seeing. It's not just bad in gaming of course, it's bad across all of journalism.

AI is going to make it much worse too, both the content and the employment issues.

@brian_:

I mostly agree with you. While I do like some longer form stuff I think that "just a taste" can be great, especially when the people have prepared and have things they want to say so there's not a lot of dead air. I absolutely love the early Quick Looks. Longer form stuff can be good too but can drag and have too many spoilers. Not that it's never good, but I don't need to see 90 minutes to 2 hours of most games unless it's a wildly entertaining crew or a game that's entertaining to watch but that I don't want to play (usually a garbage fire.)

I agree though I'm of two minds about this. One the one hand, I do like the succinctness of Quick Looks where they are their own individual thing for a given game. On the other hand, the new "GB Plays" format does seem to allow for a bit more flexibility, which is nice. Often Quick Looks in recent years have been essentially watching them play the tutorial and maybe a bit of the post-tutorial content. With GB Plays, they have the opportunity to come back to a game and show off more of it, which is what they did with the recent Avatar game. GB Plays seems to just be Quick Looks but with the opportunity for there to be multiple parts. This seems like a fine progression of the concept.

I will say though, if you want a more standard Quick Look/classic UPF segment type of thing then Nextlander's Grab Bag streams/VODs are what you should check out. Each video is 2-3 new games played for 30 minutes to an hour while they all discuss the game. It's a good format. They do one every Thursday or sometimes Friday.

Also, yeah, the "good" internet and everything that came with it is long gone and we're never gonna get it back. I've come to accept that the internet isn't for me, or most people, anymore and seemingly now exists to be a money-making venture for a bunch of business people and tech bros who don't understand what made the internet good or useful in the first place.

@ben_h: I have no issue with GB Plays, though it could co-exist with Quick Looks. But as I said it's not so much that I think it's a mistake as that it's just another thing that's fading.

I do watch Nextlander stuff sometimes but to me it's not quite the same for whatever reason. It seems a little...looser for lack of a better word. Not that that's always a bad thing, but it has a slightly different tone.

I think that a lot of people like the new Internet more than the old, or at least they act like it with their wallets. I don't really understand them, but I don't understand a lot of what seems to be popular. Part of it is that I'm getting older but part of it is that I have always had offbeat tastes. I think that's true for a lot of GB fans.

Quick Looks were the only content I watched after falling off the rest, its nice seeing newly released games in 15-30min vids not being tied to 2hr+ streams that I have to scrub through.

The phasing out of Quick Looks seemed eventual once reviews got phased out in 2020 (for whatever pandemic morale and/or business reason).

I assume reviews just add to a metacritic score but do terribly in terms of traffic, and I assume Quick Look “let me explain this game to you that I’ve already played” as a brand/format doesn’t do the same numbers as a more loosey-goosey GB Plays format.

Internally I’ll admit I’m still curious how review codes/advance copies are distributed to staff, given that nobody is playing the game “for review” anymore. It feels like the end result of staff time spent on a game is a video, or talking about it for 5 min on a podcast. I’m personally disappointed that reviews on GB are basically gone except for the couple times Dan wanted to write one since rejoining.

Nextlander's stuff is a good gauge for where my current interest in game coverages is at. I'm always interested in the Grab Bags streams. I watch them all. They're other stuff is much more of a toss-up for me. I loved watching them do the challenges in Scrap Mechanic or inviting Abby over for some one-off multiplyer or FMV lunacy. But I have no interests in watching a full playthrough of Remnant 2 or Cyberpunk.

I was re-watching during the break the old Sleeping Dogs DLC Quick Look that was over an hour long and Dave deployed code to production during the Quick Look. Vinny also has a story where he stayed late at work to play something and almost missed the train home. Dave asked why don't they publish more raw content and even then between Vinny and Drew, there was too much work just to handle raw unedited stuff in addition to special features. During those days, the only real platform for them was to share video via the site. There wasn't any competing platforms and even just streaming personal stuff on Twitch.

Fast forward to today, it's only Jan working as the video producer I think and he also hosts the podcast. He allowed himself to fall sick and the site is scrambling to find back-up plans.

Overall it doesn't matter since it's just the name of a stream title. But the change to GB Plays is only weird to me since it is functionally identical to Quick Look. Like they've done Quick Looks Lives before with chat and there are some Quick Looks (though not the majority) that the people didn't play the game beforehand. I was curious about the length thing too since Quick Look was always a misnomer and there are a ton of QLs that go past the 60 minute mark similar to how the GB Plays do too.

Plus I thought when they started GB Plays one of the points was the staff was playing the game for the first time, but Jeff had played a small bit of Avatar ahead of that GB Plays. So it just seems to be a show title change just for the sake of it.

And they've been fine with bringing back TNT, which is cool! So I don't know if anyone's worried about using show names that the previous staff used.

The more pet-peeve thing that gets me is it just makes the site more messy. If you go to the Shows page right now, GB Plays isn't even on there. But I doubt that page is ever going to get cleaned up.

I liked when Quick Looks were long, because you fully saw what the new game they were playing had to offer. You can't get that in 30 mins or less in most games these days, not even the Indie ones. And I've been accepted that this website is now Giant Bomb in name only. Nothing against the current staff. I know they are doing their best to keep the ship from sinking. If they can come up with some good ideas to keep the site going, even if they have to drop the Giant Bomb name, then so be it. It will be sad, but the reality has already happened years ago. On the bright side, this site has outlasted G4TV twice, and that station had a lot more backing during both attempts to make it work.

The two formats have different objectives, different purposes for me. I'll watch short format stuff when I'm trying to figure out what's up with a game. But I'll watch longer format stuff when I'm interested in watching how the people playing the game are reacting to the game.

I haven't been looking for Quick Looks in years and haven't even noticed if they're started to fade away. I think my issue with them is that, even in a good year, there aren't enough games to cover on a weekly basis, and the big games deserve more than just a "quick" look. So for me a lot of them end up being either weird indie games, and certainly there are gems to be discovered there, that end up with a lukewarm "I don't know, it's on Game Pass so give it a try if it looks interesting to you" where I can just tell that it wasn't doing anything to the streamer and once that recording is done they have no interest to continue playing, but it also isn't terrible enough to be entertaining.

I freely admit that I barely watch anything on the site anymore and lurk on the forums more out of habit so I wasn't particularly aware that the Quick Look name had faded to the extent it has. Having said that, it just seems like such a "but why?" kind of change.

I'm all for trying new stuff, but the Quick Look label was so strongly associated with the site that I don't see the gain by dumping it. They basically coined the term to such an extent that it became like Kleenex - technically a specific brand name but just what everyone ends up calling tissues generally. I have to say, I kinda don't like the term "GB Plays" either. It's one of those perfectly descriptive but entirely generic terms that just literally describes the product is while not having any personality behind it.

Honestly, if they wanted Basically-a-Quick-Look-But-Kind-of-a-New-Thing type show, I actually really liked the very few times they tried to play a game blind for review while developing thoughts on it in real time.

My favourite types of Quick Looks were "first look" type of things where the staff were launching the game for the first time and discovering what it is along with viewers (ie me).

Of course the internet completely freaks out if the person holding the controller on a Quick Look isn't 100% knowledgeable about the game and leave angry comments demanding them to be fired or whatever, so I understand why they don't make them anymore - the pressure and time commitment required to play a big portion of the game first in order to prepare for a Quick Look is just unrealistic especially when they're short staffed.

yeah, similar to @therealturk i'm not reliably consuming gb video anymore. i shoot the bull with you chuckleheads here and on the discord, and catch bits and pieces of the pods on their respective RSS feeds, but that's the extent of it.

which is all to say i'm probably not the best judge of the current video product.

however i do remember hearing various staff throughout the years describe the prep that went into quicklooks, and i think if you compare content from the pre-COVID era to now, that's the big delineation (for me). i understand why basically everything is shooting from the hip/live to tape these days (it's probably the shrewd decision), but the caliber of the commentary has changed for me. part of that might be just due to staff churn, but i do think there's a tangible, meaningful difference when more structure is imposed and there's a less of a 'streamer reacts' vibe. i gravitate towards outlets that focus on curation and expressing their interest in a thing more than just coverage of 'what's the current thing.' quicklooks used to strike a pretty good balance there for me- but everyone's mileage will vary, though.

Truthfully, every year is the year I wonder "Is this the year I don't renew my subscription?" But there's still such a mountain of old content that I haven't explored or don't really remember that I'm not really lamenting the loss of quicklooks or the old staff, even if that's only because I'm barely consuming the new content (hell I haven't even listened to a new podcast in a month).

I just went through and watched/re-watched the Kinect and PS Move launch videos - oddly nostalgic.

I guess we'll always have Inaba...

I think this is the biggest reason - they don't do pre-recorded videos anymore, it's all just livestreams.

Yeah, I would miss that too.