cornbredx

@cikame: Just on the question of how many people visit the site/how well the site does with subs.
Last time I remember them talking about subs was last year and they were "up year over year."

It has not really been said how much COVID has affected their subscriptions, but I feel like they'd have mentioned if it was affected significantly which suggests to me it's still going well as far as they know.

So, if it's anything like it was on average Giant Bomb regularly has 50k subs. That's by no means an accurate count. This is based on me having watched a lot of Giant Bomb content over 10 years, and at one pointmaybe 2 or 3 years ago, 30k subs was mentioned. It's never been clear how many yearly versus monthly so I don't know but I know all the regulars here have multiple years of subscriptions (like me) and buy more occasionally so there's that and I know Giant Bomb regularly gets subs on the monthly plan even still.

So, Giant Bomb actually does very well as a subscription website. If we assume at this point they made 30k yearly subbed from this year they would have made 1.75 million at the sale price. And that is just one sale. That doesn't include the store/merch, monthly subs, or ad deals on the podcasts/non subscriber parts of the site.

This is all speculative. They do not openly display their figures, and have only briefly mentioned numbers years ago. So, I can only speculate based, again, on last year being a very good year for them and not really getting the feeling that anything has changed because Jeff would have said something- if even in passing- about it. That's what he does.

If anything happened to Giant Bomb with this sale to RV I honestly do not think it would have anything to do with how profitable Giant Bomb is since Giant Bomb tends to be very profitable and self sustaining which is why mostly they have been left alone up to this point.

The real thing to be worried about is how/if that will continue. There is just currently no way to know since no one on staff here actually has any say or foot in the door of those meetings.

If they did, it's not theirs. It belongs to the company (whoever that is now).

Although after reading responses it actually makes sense. Since Giant Bomb doesn't do technical coverage they don't need the ones that have been sent out. They need an actual retail box. If Microsoft isn't sending those out (and let's face it, they may not anymore) then it makes sense Giant Bomb didn't get one. They need actual systems that they can use regularly.

As I think about this more: Giant Bomb has always bought their own consoles. At least as far back as I remember. But on the companies dime. Look back to when they moved to CBSi. I remember them talking about it then. Or when Vinny set up the New York office. It's not unusual for them to not get one from the game company. I even remember Vinny talking about getting consoles for the office from Bestbuy at some point.

I don't recall if this has been said specifically, but I do know Jeff thinks about credibility a lot and he may have decided a long time ago they would just get their own stuff on the companies dime so there is no sense of an ethical violation. But I don't remember if he fully took that stand or if it was just easier. I only remember him talking about thinking about that kind of stuff all the time.

Nice.

@asylumrunner: Here you go

@electricbarrier: I believe Between Worlds is also still available on Netflix in the US.

You may be mixing fantasy with reality here, friend. Dan has always been about consumerism and money. He's very open about that. He was never your friend. He was always getting paid to entertain you. Everything you say in this very long post comes off to me like you don't completely understand that- especially if you think this is everything Dan "hated". I'm not sure whatever made you think that.

Yes, you could argue Dan is not necessarily great at the singular streamer thing, but I think that's beside the point. Dan is still doing Dan. He's just not with Giant Bomb anymore. If anything the whole Twitch thing feels, to me, like Dan misses being a part of Giant Bomb because now he's mostly a behind the scenes guy and so he's lost some of whatever little fame he had as well as that group of friends atmosphere.

I don't really understand why it upsets you so much- it feels like it does just reading this- that Dan is making money off his personality, but that's what Dan has been doing all along. I'm sorry if this has disillusioned you. Maybe that's what it is. Maybe you never noticed it before... for some reason. Just a guess. I don't know.

No. Buying from scalpers is why they keep getting away with this. If it's profitable then why should they stop doing it?
You're experiencing FOMO. I would let it pass before making a rash decision. You could just wait and get your consoles eventually. Just be patient.

No. I just won't buy most games at full price.

To be fair, I already wait for sales on 90% of games anyway since most games these days are full of boring filler that is not fun to play and is mostly the reason I will quit a game without finishing these days.

Now if they stopped having sales I'd probably stop buying most games. I'd only buy the games I really really want with no exception.

But Jeff is right, we gamers buy too many games these days as it is. I don't know. I think that's more of a problem with saturation, but it's a fair point anyway.

@dariusgalaxyz: I don't know why you are replying to me. The comment says I wrote that 7 years ago. Fuck, I don't even remember where I was living 7 years ago let alone what this thread was about or what was going on at the time in games that formed my opinions or even really why I found it so important to have an opinion on this topic. I'm a pretty big idiot half the time and I say stuff. Then later I regret it and people hate me and the cycle continues. I know a lot of nothing so nothing I say is worth replying to- let alone 7 years later. If you're not careful you'll find something on here I said 10 or so years ago, too. It was probably dumb.

Sorry; I'm not reading your reply really or trying to figure out what this thread is about. I'm not sure why you replied several times to an really really old thread, but I'm sure it was important. I'm declaring everyone a winner.

So the second option is kinda what I feel about this.

The problem is not that games are "too long" so much as they are full of filler content that bloats the length but adds no substance so it takes a long time but isn't worth it because it's dull or uninteresting busy work.

So the real problem is that big games are too bloated with meaningless content you don't want to do.

This is not a new problem, though. It's been this way for about 5 years, maybe a little longer. Ubisoft started it and WB games was following suit. It's a disturbing trend caused by the children that whine 20 hour games are "too short". Total nonsense.

I don't know if this has been answered yet, but is there a way to currently make it so your page selections stick? For example I do not like carousel view in the shows pages. Every time I go to a different shows page I have to change it to grid view. It's probably a cookie thing if my limited knowledge is correct, but just checking that will be a thing. It's slightly irritating that I have to change it every single time.

I really like the "this day in Giantbomb" carousel you have on the main page. There are so many shows it's a really great idea to highlight what happened on this day in different years- for new people especially but even for me, a person who has been here since 2009. It's very cool to have stuff I can go back to if I wanted to or if it's a slow week it almost feels like there's an... ahem... infinite amount of content. Very very smart to highlight that stuff, though. For many years now I have felt like Giantbomb is just a video games TV channel and this just adds to that feeling even more.

You may already have gotten this impression long long ago, but more filtering options is always a good thing. If we have to use outside sites still (like qlcrew) that's fine of course, but more filtering options on the site itself will always benefit the site.

No offense to Dan, the UI and design altogether is amazing, but I think the old podcast player "looked" cooler. There was something neat, satisfying, about clicking play on a simulated tape player. Ya, you still have the tape moving, but it's not a tape player now. Something is lost by losing that for me. I will admit, it's entirely nit picky. I mostly download podcasts on my phone app now-a-days. Maybe it's just nostalgia for Dave's work. It should be noted that: It was cool, though.

The play-through of Bloodstained should be listed under "Vinnyvania". Maybe it's supposed to be, and just isn't currently due to it being a beta. I don't know. I know it's not really a "Castlevania" game, but as a spiritual successor it's damn close, and as such they played through it like it was another Classic Castlevania game. It was in the spirit of the series so I think it counts.

On this note, however, It would be special if ya'll dug into this minutae when adding to shows. For example: The first episode you should see before watching Metal Gear Scanlon is the very first Demo Derby because it's when Dan and Drew officially (publicly that I recall anyway) decided to play through all of the Metal Gear games. Or maybe a better example is Bioforge: which is a tough one because when you list it you technically should list the episode of UPF they played it on as the technical first episode because when they decided to play through the whole game they started off where they left off on that UPF- so you have to see that UPF if you want to see the entire play through. It feels like there are many of these examples, but there are at least a few times they have done this (Contradiction is another one- the first episode was a quick look- and then a second video they posted when they finished the quick look but just didn't want to stop playing so they started recording again). And I know. It's irritating I make such a bold suggestion. I would do the work for you if I had the time (well, some of it I actually did already in my own downloads). Maybe another fan has the time to find all these or there may be some other way to inform you. I don't know. I don't even know if you would take this suggestion (I mean, several of these play throughs were done on shows that weren't intended for entire playthroughs of games) or how else to handle this beyond adding these singular episodes of alternate shows to the shows pages. Then there's the live shows- at least the ones that were archived because let us not forget all the ones from 2010 and before that. They may not even exist anymore on the site (I, and probably others if I had to guess, have some of this stuff though if ya'll actually wanted to post any of it on the site- like the XBOXalypse for example which is not even on the live site right now). It's the small stuff that always makes the biggest differences, though. This is the kind of stuff that makes it so some TV shows never get released on home video haha

Anyway, ya'll are doing a great job. As a long time blogger for this site, tester of the last big redesign, and long time listener and viewer I look forward to the changes. I cannot really seem to test Blogs right now to give feedback on that, as that part of the beta site doesn't seem to work yet, but the wiki still seems fine (I love that, at least on this beta site, the changes do not seem to break formatting on wiki pages like the last time we had a big change- woof that was a pain to fix, and I'm sure worse for others who have more wiki pages than I do).

I work roughly 50 hours a week and still manage to watch all the videos and listen to all the podcasts. If I don't like a video I skip it. Same with podcasts. You should look at it more like they make enough that you don't have to watch everything. Watch what you're interested in and skip the rest. Like the majority of TV.