Yeeeesh. What a bummer to hear from a studio I really dig. If only my friends weren't such blind loyalists and got a PS5 instead. There's little reason to own an Xbox these days. :\
This is the issue I'm running into. I bought a Series S last year primarily for Game Pass but only sign up when there's something new and interesting since I've already gone through much of the back catalog. I check every couple weeks to see what's being added. It's been almost 5 months since I last signed up for a month of Game Pass and I don't think I've fired up my Series S this year at all. They just aren't adding anything interesting (outside of maybe a few Indies that are cheap enough that I'd just buy them on Steam rather than signing up for a month of Game Pass to play them), and what they are adding that had the potential to be good hasn't been.
This was one of the games Microsoft was pushing hard as a tentpole release when talking about Game Pass for this year. For it to be what it is can't be good for them. From here, I guess they have to hope Forza and Starfield are good because it doesn't seem like there's anything else on the horizon for them, and certainly nothing else worth buying an Xbox specifically for.
Dan had a pretty horrible family thing come up and was away for a bit as a result so they postponed Blight Club until he's back (CW: death, cancer Dan mentioned on his personal stream that a cousin he grew up with and was close to died of pancreatic cancer. Dan's doing a charity fundraiser this weekend during the Fire Escape GOTY podcast stream).
I really dug this format and thought it worked quite well, especially with a bigger team. Using personal point allocations for each person to create an aggregate top 10 makes a lot more sense than tearing down and picking apart games people had already agreed were good just to move a chosen pick up a place. The top 50 -> top 20 -> top 10 idea was quite good too as it allowed almost everything significant that came out this year to be discussed at least a bit.
The old "knives out" format some people seem to want still worked great when GB's game of the year coverage was 4 people who had a large overlap in taste for games. It started to fall apart the second they added more staff and by 2017 when the staff had doubled and had a much more diversified taste, it was no longer fit for purpose since it ended up with people arguing against games they hadn't ever played and people trying to make cases for games others had not touched. If you go back and look at the last couple pre-pandemic GOTYs, there were a lot of complaints about the format from fans and it seemed like staff were increasingly unhappy with it too. A change was needed.
It's not a coincidence that pretty much all of the remaining old-school GB staff who still do GOTY in some capacity don't go anywhere near the old format. Dan and Jason obviously used this new GB format. Vinny, Brad, and Alex devised a format at Nextlander that is designed specifically to avoid arguing and talking negatively about games they all agree are good. Though they also go out of their way to all play at least some of the same games, which helps a lot with their podcast and GOTY discussions. Obviously that's a much easier thing to do with 3 people compared to 9.
This was great! Also returning the the pre-2018 format of lots of categories, including goofy ones, was 1000000% the right call, especially when combined with a much more relaxed atmosphere like how this was.
@janhepcat: What's the alternative? GB's a business. Are they supposed to make money purely off subs? It's part of a corporate entity, it's not just the original 4 anymore, the world's more expensive than 2008, etc.
I've always been fine with them finding new avenues for cash because the core crew are trustworthy.
And it should be reiterated that the original site wasn't sustainable. They had backing by Shelby but I believe they were losing money and had to be sold to survive.
Exactly! People always think back to the original site and mission statement while forgetting that for the first couple years of the site it was not really making any money and wasn't a realistic business long-term. Of course the second GB tried rolling out any type of means of monetization, it was a huge outrage and people would immediately bring up "integrity". I remember the early anger over premium because people claimed they would ruin non-premium content. I also remember a lot of the same people complaining when they rolled out advertising for free users because they thought it would turn them into a bunch of shills and ruin their journalistic integrity. Same for adding ads to the free version of the Bombcast. No matter what they've done to try to survive as a business, people have always complained while ignoring that the alternative is that Giant Bomb ceases to exist.
And yeah, Vinny talked about the topic of Whiskey Media on the Nextlander Ramblecast. The various bits of the company being sold was a necessary because the state the company was in during early 2012 was not viable since it was becoming too expensive to run in the way they did. They were self-hosting much of their podcast and video content and it was massively expensive to do that at the time.
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