BisonHero

I’ll admit that I judge this genre pretty harshly. It’s something I really directly associate with YouTubers overreacting to jump scares, to entertain kids that really hold YouTuber game opinions in (overly) high esteem. While conversely most game reviewers and serious game players I’m familiar with think very little of “mascot horror” or just don’t talk about it at all.

So I’m honestly really checked out on this genre of horror. Maybe it’s gotten noticeably better since early FNAF? To me, it’s emblematic of lesser-informed players who just follow trendy games on YouTube, perhaps missing more interesting games, horror or otherwise, that don’t make for such bite-sized react videos on YouTube.

Ohhh, Zelda would have max graphics, and MGS would have no issues. This addresses all my outstanding questions.

Yeah, unfortunately for Dan video game opinions, you’re kinda just spinning a roulette wheel on the 5 different places he might’ve talked about it. FWIW, very low odds his game opinion is on the Bombcast because Dan isn’t on that podcast 99% of the time, unless he specifically went to a preview event or something on GB’s behalf and has to present his findings to the audience.

@jstaunton: It’s likely that post is from a chat bot. They’re necroing an old thread but then have hardly anything to say, the account only has one post, the post is just vaguely summarizing the situation for no reason, and the question at the end about embroidery is very weird but seems like a normal clothing-related question to a chat bot.

@gregpivo: It’s likely the podcast feeds are messed up, not that the archive has been deliberately deleted. There’s already a thread about this here:

https://www.giantbomb.com/forums/general-discussion-30/is-there-anyone-around-for-support-beastcast-feed--1911644/

@dtoast is the contact person for us to raise support issues with, taking over the role from Rorie.

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/vice-media-group-files-chapter-11-protection-facilitate-sale-2023-05-15/

My apologies for the non-clickable link, but I’m on mobile. Just thought I should pop in to close the loop on the whole “Vice is slashing and burning divisions with layoffs as they crumble into bankruptcy status,” which was rumour a few weeks back but now confirmed.

Still very sad that it was preferable they just shutter Waypoint instead of try to include it in whatever bankruptcy-protection restructuring is going on.

OP, if you want to spearhead the TotK first impressions thread, be my guest, but could I suggest that the thread title mention if you mean story spoilers or gameplay/mechanics spoilers?

There are Zelda lore nerds who don’t want the story spoiled, there are Zelda gameplay nerds who don’t want the new abilities/dungeons/gameplay spoiled, and everything in between.

To be honest, I don’t really want the corporate owner to “do anything” most of the time anyway.

The video player being fucked is bad and should be fixed, but beyond that my hope is that Giant Bomb meets whatever arbitrary metrics/KPIs that Fandom expects from them, so that they continue to get their budget/expenses paid for and are allowed to just fuck off and do whatever ideas Bakalar and Dan come up with.

Agreed that I’d like Fandom’s people to provide proper web development support for the website (and the store and the wiki and API and so on), so we’ll see if that ever gets better. But all I really expect from Fandom (or previous owners) is to handle hosting, engineering, paying for stuff. I really don’t want any mandate coming from ownership to waste the staff’s time, because I’d rather the GB staff devote most/all of their time on their own editorial/content ideas.

To give one small example, it does kinda seem like Fandom foisted the Dreamhack trip on a lot of the on-camera staff at Fandom/Gamespot/Giant Bomb. I don’t know what the general vibe is on that trip, between the audience or the staff, but it did strike me as a big time commitment and a little out of character, when GB otherwise isn’t doing panels at cons (what was the last PAX they did, 2019?).

To be honest, I don’t really want the corporate owner to “do anything” most of the time anyway.

The video player being fucked is bad and should be fixed, but beyond that my hope is that Giant Bomb meets whatever arbitrary metrics/KPIs that Fandom expects from them, so that they continue to get their budget/expenses paid for and are allowed to just fuck off and do whatever ideas Bakalar and Dan come up with.

Agreed that I’d like Fandom’s people to provide proper web development support for the website (and API and so on), so we’ll see if that ever gets better. But all I really expect from Fandom (or previous owners) is to handle hosting, engineering, paying for stuff. I really don’t want any mandate coming from ownership to waste the staff’s time, because I’d rather the GB staff devote most/all of their time on their own editorial/content ideas.

To give one small example, it does kinda seem like Fandom foisted the Dreamhack trip on a lot of the on-camera staff at Fandom/Gamespot/Giant Bomb. I don’t know what the general vibe is on that trip, between the audience or the staff, but it did strike me as a big time commitment and a little out of character, when GB otherwise isn’t doing panels at cons (what was the last PAX they did, 2019?).

On top of the statements specifically about whether Waypoint is covering their operating costs/growing in audience/growing in revenue, it’s possible that completely independent from Waypoint’s performance, if Vice is looking to sell and the potential buyers think the video game news/reviews sector is a waste of time/money right now, if Vice’s people are desperate enough they might just axe Waypoint (and whatever other components of Vice that aren’t absolute profit rock stars) for the sake of smoothing over the deal.

Maybe they wouldn’t if the brand had some real power behind it, but Waypoint is relatively niche and new. If you ask random people on the street, most of them are probably much more familiar with Vice’s other work than with Waypoint specifically (though maybe that’s a bad metric, as I feel every man-on-the-street hasn’t heard of any video game news source).

My point is there are big enough moves happening at Vice that there could be other big picture reasons that Waypoint is getting shut down that were largely out of Waypoint staff’s hands. Or maybe not, and the specifics of their earnings were very much under the microscope! We don’t know.