Keeping up with the crew.

I am sure this has been discussed elsewhere, but I could not find easily.

• Do Patrick Klepek or Austin Walker stream anymore? I could not find anything recent from Patrick.
• Has Jeff, Vinny, or Brad ever spoken to why they don't occasionally team up? Or have I missed a rare team up between the Nextlander crew and Jeff. I know that Nextlander has occasional guests like Dan, Austin or Abby for Patreon supporters, but I do not follow that closely (as I am not a Patreon supporter). Just curious.

Thanks!

Austin is working on a game rather than being on the press side of things, he has a fancy title like "chief world builder" or something to that effect.

Patrick is with Remap Radio, I guess he occasionally streams with them but I haven't been able to keep up. That's the general idea.

As for Jeff and Nextlander? I don't know, I don't think anyone really does outside them. Jeff has 3 kids now, he's living a very hectic life, and Nextlander doesn't seem to attend the shows and such where they might run into one another.

Jeff did say he heard from Rorie recently, so that's nice

Patrick is doing a lot of fun stuff with Cado and Rob over at Remap, I don't have time to watch all of it, but what I have seen has been great.

Austin might be one of the most productive people I follow. His day job is as IP Director at Possibility Space. Still no news I have heard what they are working on, but looking forward to find out. Then there are the things you can actually follow:

Friends at the Table - The best actual play podcast out there. They are usually doing one main season (the current one is sci-fi) with several one shots and shorter series interspersed throughout the year. Austin is usually the GM. All of the people on it are rad.

A More Civilized Age - A Star Wars podcast, primarily going through the animated series, but has more or less evolved into becoming a "let's watch all the Star Wars there is" show. Because of the strike they are currently playing through KotoR instead. This is the only video-game related content he does except his day job. The other people on it are Rob (Remap), Natalie (formerly Waypoint) and Ali (who is also at Friends at the Table).

Shelved by Genre - He is also on this podcast about genre literature, currently on their first "season" which is about "The Book of the New Sun".

And I am sure he is guesting on various other podcasts here and there that I don't listen to.

Fell off what Jeff is doing now kinda hard, so no idea about any of that. Mainly wanted to write out all this to bring more people into FatT and AMCA.

This is pure speculation but Jeff was kind of their boss the entire time they worked together, they were friends of course and likely still are, and i don't think there's any bad blood from them leaving even Jeff could see the curtains closing on his tenure at GB, but maybe they didn't want to invite their ex boss with a big personality to their cool little Patreon thing.

I do hope they do some stuff together in the future.

Yeah as mentioned, Patrick is doing Remap Radio now (they even have a website for writing now). Remap's podcast is excellent and probably one of the best podcasts about games right now. They have a rotating chair for guests and every guest has been great so far (Austin was a guest a few weeks back). They also do a few streams a week, though last week and this coming week streams are cut back a bit as Rob Zacny took time off since he's going (went?) to Drew Scanlon's wedding and doing other travelling.

Speaking of Drew, if you still want Drew content he's still doing Shift+F1 (the spiritual successor to Alt+F1) with Danny O'Dwyer and Rob Zacny. Apparently this podcast does quite well now that F1 has become massively more popular in the US. It's weird running into fans of the show that don't know them from before. They started doing video versions and a few times I've seen comments that are like "Wait the blinking white guy hosts this?!" It's pretty amusing.

As for Gerstmann and Nextlander, I'm not sure. Brad has shown up in Jeff's Twitch chat once or twice and Alex mentions Jeff on occasion in podcasts but that's all I've seen mentioned. On a Patreon Q&A like a year ago Nextlander was asked directly about doing a collaboration stream with Gerstmann and Vinny gave a bit of a non-answer to the question beyond saying he hadn't really kept in contact with Jeff (which, Jeff has said many times now that he's bad about staying in contact with people so that's entirely believable). At this point, Nextlander has collaborated with pretty much everybody GB-adjacent except Jeff (even Rich Gallup was on a Nextlander stream recently. Abby's on their streams pretty much every week) so I'm not sure what's going on. They don't seem to want to talk about it so we should respect their privacy.

Yeah, that comment about Jeff being bad about staying in contact kinda struck me. I've always seen him as the guy with connections. I guess the need to do do so goes by the wayside when he's not in some kind of paid Senior Editor role. Flying solo, he sounds like he prefers his own company.

The NES streams have been constantly coming along, in spite of .... y'know, the time constraints of parenting.

Gerstmann's stream/podcast is still 99% him-only, right? I think I've seen people mention that he's had on Dave Lang, Danny O'Dwyer, and Rich Gallup maybe like once each? Jeff solo is alright, but I got kinda burned out on it from his Jar Time videos at GB.

It's an interesting contrast that the Nextlander Patreon doesn't feel that different from just being GB East if they spun it off and recruited Brad and had no studio, but Gerstmann Patreon doesn't feel like it covers nearly as much as Gerstmann used to encompass when part of a larger team. But I've only dabbled in Gerstmann videos, so maybe his output is broader than I realize.

Yes outside of his Game Boyz 2 Men podcast with Glenn Rubenstein (that podcast is Patreon only). All of his freely accessible content is solo outside of the rare guest on his podcast.

It's a shame because when he does have guests his shows are much more interesting to listen to. He needs somebody to bounce ideas off of and things like that. He tries to do that with his Twitch chat but often his chat is pretty awful/toxic so it doesn't work well.

It's a weird contrast to Nextlander where for podcasts if one of them is going to be away they almost always find someone to be a guest on the show to make sure there's more than two people on.

@jaqen_hghar: I have a lot of respect for "Shelved By Genre," but my GOD, could they have picked a slightly...less intensive first podcast arc to cover than a book series with some of the most unpleasant content warnings imaginable? Especially since one of their patron-only podcasts is about bad movies, it kinda feels like those two should be reversed.

Shoot your shot and all, but it feels alienating.

Yeah. I went from "this sounds like a great podcast concept!" to "NOPE" so quickly on that one the second I saw what the podcast was actually going to be talking about. I don't need to hear analysis of a book series that miserable.

Maybe their second season will be more of my thing if they do one. Hopefully it will.

@undeadpool: I had to take a peek at the content warnings because this got me curious, and reading those makes it seem a lot worse than it really is. Like, way worse. Sure, those things are correct, but it's like putting the content warnings "mass death and torture" for Star Wars: A New Hope. It's correct, and you should know it is there, but it makes it sound a lot worse than it actually is on paper.

Anyway, it's a great series of books that I happened to just finish reading the week before the podcast started. I lucked into knowing about it because I wanted to learn more about it. It's kinda dense, but they do a great job guiding the listener/reader through it.

@ben_h: I wish they'd do more FMV/fun-bad games content, but they are STILL a delight. And the rotating chair really does help keep things fresh.

@jaqen_hghar:Good to know, cause yeah: I'm all for content warnings, but seeing that stuff on the opening story was a bit like... "Ok! I guess I'll have to BE IN A MOOD to listen to this!"

Thanks for hipping me to it, I've honestly really been missing Austin's voice/input on stuff.

I don't know about Patrick and Austin, but Jeff isn't going to be doing collaborations with Nextlander or anyone else anytime soon, except the guy he does the show with where they talk about their past in video game journalism. Jeff has a lot of personal issues he is dealing with, which he talks about on his show. And as the man said, he's mainly a family man now and doesn't have the time to travel a lot or link up with other people like he used to. He's barely had time to play many modern video games these days, but his ranking of NES games show that he does is the only thing he has been consistent at lately, and that's because he's really enjoying it.

I stopped following Jeff for awhile since I'm not big on solo stuff. But I checked back a few months ago and he seems to be having a great time doing it. His NES series is one of my favorite things on the internet these days.

Awhile ago, he mentioned being bad at reaching out to people (can relate). And he's super busy with young kids. I'd love for GB to team up with him some day for E3 season, because there's honestly no one as good as him on that interview couch. Plus it seemed like one of Jeff's favorite things to do.

I understand needing some distance, though. Whatever stuff happened behind the scenes, those guys all had such good chemistry on camera that it'd be really nice to see a reunion.

I also really miss Jason, but luckily he's been doing his show with his old friends, Interactive Distractions.

I haven't kept up with Jason, so it's good to know he's among friends.

Jess's new project is Skulltenders, a D&D podcast. I listened to the first episode and it's well produced and they seem to be having fun. It's not quite to my tastes, but I may warm up to it over time, so I hope it finds an audience.

In the latest Nextlander Ramblecast it was mentioned that @drewbert apparently just got married. Congrats duder!

It's good to see them all doing well. I saw the late stages of a stream that Jeff did yesterday, he seemed happy to be busy. At the end he listed quite a lot of social media sites that he's on - I can remember Mastodon being on there, didn't remember the name of Hive to look for it.

Maybe I’ve got a bit too much showman in my blood, but I think Jeff reuniting with Vinny, Brad, and Alex is something you save for as long as possible. At least, that’s what I would do if I were them. That content would break the internet. You wait a few years and then do it down the road when the right moment comes along.

It’s like when they brought back the HotSpot on Giant Bomb and then had the episode with Rich Gallup. Sometimes it takes years for the time to be right. Worth the wait.

On the most recent show Jeff was talking about the staff exodus from The Escapist, then when talking about what game journalists do now he suggested there being an "opportunity to do something big" but that the time isn't right, then stopped before giving too many details. I don't think it's anything, but Jeff having thoughts is probably worth reporting on.

https://youtu.be/uTW2UtDeleE?t=5659

Timestamped 1:34:19, didn't embed the video cus it tends to break timestamps.

It's interesting to think about. We've been seeing the old ad market paradigm die a slow death for probably over a decade at this point. As it does, people attached to the big media brands continue to spin off into smaller, Patreon and podcast ad (BlueChew, Manscaped, HelloFresh, MyBookie, etc) supported outlets.

It seems like he's suggesting that the small niche outlet thing is not The Final Paradigm (because nothing is), and at some point, market and environmental forces could make larger, more ambitious efforts more sustainable. Maybe someone will figure out how to make enough money and find enough demand to justify building and maintaining something bigger. What that "something" is is unclear. Having listened to Jeff talk about this stuff for a very long time, I think the "something" for him might mean bigger outlets organized for both personality-based and professional coverage. Not a carbon copy of Gamespot and IGN in their primes, but maybe something with similar capacities.

Beyond video games, we're seeing a lot of things breaking down in a lot of places. On one hand, we could catastrophize over everything burning down. On the other, we can begin to creatively imagine what possibilities we have to build The Next Thing after the dust settles.

I think what Jeff is largely referring to is the fact that a lot of the current spin-off outlets that are successful were also in a way successful at their old jobs as well but because of the way those companies were run, their success wasn't recognized. The way many of these companies were being managed, as we are seeing now, wasn't actually good. The perpetual growth and click-driven web business model is starting to be recognized as unsustainable and bad (not to mention the extreme amount of damage this model has done to journalism overall, but that's a different discussion). If personality-based games media can get away from companies that continue to run with this model, there's a good chance they could be successful. Right now everyone's spread out doing their own things but there is a chance they could team up in the future and do something larger together.

A good example of this phenomenon is Waypoint/Remap. Patrick has talked at length about how Waypoint's launch being so successful actually doomed them since it caused Vice's management to get ridiculous expectations of what Waypoint's growth trajectory could be. With their subscription offering, Waypoint more than paid for itself but that wasn't good enough for Vice who wanted to see all of the numbers continually go up. Now that they're on their own, Remap are thriving.

I think Jeff is definitely right. Once growth- and ad-driven internet has finally growth hacked and AI generated itself to death there will be a good opportunity for someone to try something new that's relatively big but it'll be a while and now is not the right time. The way I view the internet right now is basically we are in the midst of returning to the internet circa 2002ish where everything good is spread out again among a sea of garbage rather than being centralized in one of a few places. The internet based on social media and web search that dominated the last 10-15 years isn't going to last much longer since both are becoming mostly useless and aggressively enshittified. It's no coincidence that people have been talking about using RSS feeds, curating bookmarks, and directly visiting websites again instead of using Twitter or whatever as a content feed. It's also no coincidence that all of the recent spin-offs we've seen (Remap, Aftermath, etc.) all have dedicated websites again that they direct people to when many of the previous spin-offs did not and just pointed to social media for their "where to find us" section of their content.

@ben_h: I'm very interested to see where things go from here, the dedicated website was always an expensive endeavour especially when it comes to hosting video but everybody just uses Youtube now, so i'm left imagining a website that is basically... all the cool shit Giant Bomb ever wanted to do without the video cost and whatever Web 3.0 shenanigans my old ass can't imagine, Patreon supported ventures are obviously successful all you'd need is a group with a vision to base it around.

Currently, one of Jeff’s babies has a lung issue. Something happened where no his wife needed to separate the baby from the other two because if the baby gets sick it can cause complications, so he has been doing solo dad duty. He also isn’t feeling Modern Warfare 3 very much, but to his suprise, he is enjoying Alan Wake 2 a lot.

Also, Patrick has become sort of a cohost to Decoding TV with David Chen, a podcast/youtube channel that does in-depth coverage of streaming based TV shows (stuff like Loki, Ashoka and Black Mirror). It used to have different guests for different shows, but Patrick was recently "promoted" to fixed fixture...

Austin has been a third chair in Nextlander show "Never been a better podcast" several times, with Abby, Bakalar and Dan.