Was Giantbomb part of the CNET Sale?

Really hope everything works out, and personally I hope they have a studio in the future, I feel like they are better with it, but then I don't like change. Cnet/GS will presumably need at least some studio space when things get more normal, hopefully GB can have a space there as well.

"Twitch previously used competing data provider Giant Bomb"

It's pretty funny to think of this fan sourced wiki as a "data provider"

I mean, that's what wikipedia is.

@humanity: As far as I know, Twitch hasn't made that change yet and is still using the GB wiki.

I rolled my eyes so far that they're now stuck.

FYI, I have the majority of the videos archived (except the podcast videos and trailers) and it's around 21TB (highest resolution copy only). And when I was leeching them there was a 100 download a day limit but this might've changed in the 3 years since I backfilled.

I also had them in Plex when it supported plugins so it would pull down the meta data but I watch most videos at 2x these days so I can't use Plex. All my videos have the database/media id in the file name so Plex could hit the API for the data (i.e. mc_vinnyvania_09182020_8000.mp4 became 20684_mc_vinnyvania_09182020_8000.mp4)

@tfarchive: Oof, thanks for the heads up. Maybe I'll have to settle for a slightly lower resolution because ~$2100 in external drives doesn't sound like a wise investment.

Well, I am guessing that if GB was a cash cow then CBS would have not sold them, meaning if they arent a cash cow new owners may not care too much about keeping it around.

I see Patreon and side hustles in crew's future. Brad/Will make Techpod style some free, with ads, others 100% paid etc.. Twitch streams etc. I cant see the current format of the website being around a year from now. I think the crew will stay together under one name, but I think it will be more akin to 8 to 10 solo ventures with frequent gusting on each other's streams/podcasts.

Sorry for being pessimistic. But I just dont see a company picking to keep GB around over Gamespot. And I dont know how the crew would feel about being rolled into Gamespot.

I see Jeff, Brad moving, I dont see Vinny moving. Vinny probably has the most transferable skill set, he can go to a non gaming job pretty easily. Which is maybe what will happen. Unless they are under a big company I dont see the rest of the crew staying in SF/NY, its just too expensive for Patreon/Twitch/Yotube streaming.

Some of the crew (Brad) spend hours in Techpod discord, when was the last time you saw him (or anyone from the crew) actively engage in discussions here?

This is a job. Other stuff is hobbies. There is a big difference in interest between the two.

I used to reply to Erykah Badu's thoughts on teen pregnancy directly, and Desus Nice used to make fun of me from a public library computer! No forum is ever as good as its prime, which never lasts as long as you'd expect/hope.

I always got a kick out of Giant Bomb's logo being next to 60 Minutes & Late show with Stephen Colbert.

This past week Vinny said there was 'contract worker' from the mid-west on a call with a liaison of the new owners. That person wondered where "his" little empire fit in with these new owners too.

It might sound wild to us, but there are likely people very high up with these new owners who have NO CLUE what GB is what it does. They want to know 1) how many unique visitors a month; 2) what their Google Analytics are; and 3) how much advertising revenue GB rakes-in - that's it. Do we need GameSpot, Giant Bomb and Popculture??? We do...oh, okay.

This website has survived this long for a reason. I have faith Giant Bomb will survive this too.

This sale just screams of the Berman Braun sale of the other whiskey media properties. All of those died off or were sold off individually.

Doesn't give me a good feeling for the future of giantbomb.

I said before I had a feeling GB would undergo changes this year (Jeff changing his Twitter byline seemed ominous given it said "I'd be crazy to stop now") and the crew could continue under a Patreon model if they so wished. MinnMaxx seems to have done that for Game Informer and it seems to be going very well for them, but they are 4 people located in the same city, I believe.

I hope people do archive stuff. I'm still so bummed the Screened stuff didn't get archived which was essentially Giant Bomb as you had GB staff talking movies regularly and it was amazing. Those videos were so fun and now (almost all of them) are gone forever. I think GB is much bigger so that won't happen ... hopefully?

“Red Ventures is eager to invest in CNET Media Group’s growth with more personalized consumer experiences that will reinvigorate CNET Media Group’s brands and unlock unprecedented opportunity for all”.

ah yes, i love haveing a more personalized consumer experience on the internet!! thank god!

lol it's hard to feel anything but pessimistic hearing that kind of tech company bullshit. plus the rest of their portfolio of all the nastiest type of shit on the internet, the fates of other websites that change hands, the way this year is, so on and so forth.

I do trust Jeff et al. to make the right calls, but I'd be lying if I said it's not worrisome.

Could just go back to the original crew plus Jason?

The fact is, the press release didn’t mention GiantBomb but it did mention Gamespot. Also, Vinny and Jeff haven’t been given much information on how this acquisition will effect GiantBomb. Even if Red Ventures plans on keeping GiantBomb around, it is already clear that GiantBomb isn’t a priority. I wish GiantBomb would move away from being a subsidiary and instead became an independent corporation. I’m sure there would be willing investors that would help them out with initial cash flow. It would at least be the decent thing to do by Red Venture to have someone reach out to the heads of subsidiaries being purchased for a Q & A session. Red Ventures has the resources to reach out to the businesses individually.

Last week GB said they were 10 people out of 1000, so 1%. So yes, probably not a priority.

Hopefully such a small, profitable team (by all accounts) also won't become a target.

And if the worst happens then they know exactly what to do, so I'm not overly worried about losing my fix of Jeff, Brad, Vinny, Alex etc.

What exactly is Red Ventures known for? I looked them up I just seem the most generic sites imaginable like creditcards.com or schoolresources.com or whatever. Is it like one of those things you see at the bottom of news articles that take you to weird ads? Are we going to see Brad's face screaming with the headline "You won't believe what happened next in this Spelunky run!"

I'm sure they could make it work considering that they kinda had a Patreon model before Patreon even existed, but there are some things that would have to change - primarily leaning more into YouTube, Twitch, and other platforms because I don't think they'd be able to staff enough technical people to maintain a website, custom chat and video player, etc.

They now own videogames.com.

I had a brief discussion with James Barker, a member of the Mergers and Acquisitions department of Red Ventures. Evidently they will be giving GiantBomb a good deal of support moving forward. To me it seemed like they are going to push GiantBomb to grow more. That should be exciting. I feel like a moron for going into panic mode when all I needed to do was to be patient.

@malonehart: You caught a case of the fear, the madness, the mania. Best you and any of us can do is rely on the idea that such an outbreak gives you longer-lasting antibodies than COVID. And also yes, don't do that again.

But does Red Venture's idea of "growth" follow the same path as what GB wants for GB? All we can do is wait and see. Unless you know James Barker personally, I'd say you should take anything someone tells you, with a large grain of salt, if it has anything to do with them making money from you, them benefiting from your satisfaction, etc. etc.

The proof will be in the pudding! And it may be that it's fine for some, good for all, bad for all, somewhere in between. But for me, the one thing that politics has taught me over the many years is that nothing someone says matters if they are in the business of selling you on something, it's just what happens that matters!

Pointless ranting covered for the people who don't feel like hearing it, cause man do I understand!: I wish politically and socially people would pay more attention to what people, companies, governments, etc. do vs. say... not sure but I feel it would at least help with all the current problems. But hey maybe not, because we are all in pretty messed up situations that have extremely complex solutions at this point.

I'm sure that Jeff, Brad, and Vinny would be able to find a way to keep doing what they want moving forward (they've already shown that they know how to drop a brand when they have to and build a new one), but I am concerned about the back catalog. If CBS was even complaining about server costs for all of GB's videos, I have to imagine that a somewhat sketchy venture capital firm (sorry, employee dude who posted here, but looking at all the weird zombie sites in their portfolio makes it hard not to draw that conclusion) would raise their eyebrows at continuing to serve 12 years of old videos that aren't going to generate any affiliate-link clicks or new ad revenue.

This isn't to say that GB's business model isn't sustainable, as Jeff has told us multiple times that they turn a nice profit, but VC firms like this basically exist to strip-mine websites for short-term profits by turning them into ad-riddled ghost ships. If I had to guess, they're most interested in GB for its database and are willing to cut a lot of the more beloved features of the site in the name of streamlining and profit maximization. I'm downloading as many of the old classics as I can, especially the premium videos which aren't on Youtube. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong and everything will continue more-or-less as usual, but I want to make sure nobody can take Vinny's full Bioforge run away from me, by gawd.

Good to know some are archiving. We already lost those early community streams that were only hosted on uStream, JustinTV or whatever.

This is how I'd look at it, were I bigwig and just bought multiple video game sites at bargain basement rates, one with a lot of unique visitors and no paid sub model and one with 1/10 of the visitors and a paid sub model. GB has a successful long time paid sub model and talent that drives people to actually pay. The only scenario where such a model might transfer to another, say larger site, maybe something like Gamespot, is to merge the talent and the site together.

I haven't been to gamespot in years... they don't actually have a paid sub model right? I'm assuming not.

Nothing good could come of this.

@petesix0: Turns out much like COVID, telling the feaver that you know it is there does nothing to prevent the spread.

It's a portmanteau not a typo