I haven't been particularly impressed. As some other folks have noted, the tone has shifted away from "elder statesmen game critics cut through hype to evaluate games that are coming out" into something I'm just not as into. Nothing against the new crew, but they feel distinctly younger and just don't have the review experience I'm looking for if I'm going to listen to somebody talk about games for 2+ hours at a time. Austin and Ben were young, too, but they both had serious chops for dissecting games and could hold their own with Jeff, Brad, and Alex. The new crew seems to be less critical in their discussions of games, and the conversations they have about a game seem comparatively surface level. The OG crew's unique knowledge, industry experience, and sense of humor were unique to the site and drew me in. The new crew's discussions of games, while pleasant, just don't feel like anything that I couldn't find in many other places online. For what it's worth, the lack of transparency around the affiliate links raised my eyebrows, too, and makes me feel less confident in the site's editorial independence.
Overall, I think that GB is having kind of an identity crisis, where it's gone permanently remote and is basically being operated like a Twitch channel, but the site and all of the back content are... still just there. There are very few connections to Giant Bomb classic left. Basically no series carried over from the old crew, and very few people from the old days are still around, either. Rory and Jason aren't on much content and Dan is kind of his own thing, God bless him. There's no new premium content being produced, which is an understandable change given the way that monetization works now, but I'm still subscribed to premium for a few more weeks and it feels weird and bad to pay money solely for access to an archive of videos created by people who left or were fired from the company...
Honestly, I think things would be easier for the new crew if they had just dropped the Giant Bomb name when Gerstmann got fired and built a new brand away from the GB legacy and expectations. At this point, it kind of feels like Giant Bomb as a site only exists through inertia. The site's existence (as opposed to a Twitch channel) only seems to serve the purposes of maintaining the archive (which is, of course, a noble cause). All of the content being produced right now could be done with much, much lower overhead as a Patreon or Twitch channel. I wouldn't necessarily watch any more of it, but it would probably make more sense as a business and would alleviate the weirdness around Premium membership.
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