If so, I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Yes he has.

It has been rough.

He streams on twitch, but it's pretty unbearable

Yeah it's already been a few months since he left.

I always had a soft spot for Dan. Because, i too had a great job but had to leave it because i just couldn't fit in with my co-workers.

As a result i always find a reasoning in what he says. Like, Who cares about whether or not pirates are good or evil?! They're long gone now :)

He left to produce podcasts at WWE. I get why he would leave a comfortable position, as sometimes you just gotta try something new. Sounded like it was time to broaden his horizons a bit.

@giant_gamer: My impression is he had a good relationship with the East team, and the only reason he left is because he got a job in an industry he adores.

Are you the guy who went to a PAX panel and asked Giant Bomb where Greg Kasavin was at when he'd literally been on Giant Bomb every month to promote Bastion via Building the Bastion?

Today I learned that Ben never had a hamburger until he was 22.

Dan's spirit lives on at Giant Bomb.

Yah not to clown on anyone, but what kind of a weird closed loop are you in to miss both the Podcast farewell and the on-site video farewell? I guess if you only like.. watch Ranking of Fighters and thats it, but then how would you know about Dan in the first place? In a way it's kind of fascinating how someone would not know.

@thechris: I'm really happy for him!

@humanity: Unfortunately, Real life has taken control over us :(

Really paying attention to the site, eh?

@retrometal: if you want some further reading, here is what Vinny wrote at the time Dan left the site to go work for WWE:

https://www.giantbomb.com/articles/daaaannnnnnn/1100-5980/

People get busy and miss a podcast or two. Also not everyone here consumes everything from this site.

@flstyle:

This is a great callback. Classic Ryan moment.

Yeah, sorry I work a lot and have a lot going on? Like my wife having major surgery two months ago...

I have not been on the site or listening to the podcast(s) (east or west) since maybe Jan/Feb. So I'm just now figuring it out.

Which is why I worded the title of the thread as I did.

Truly a great man.

@flstyle said:

@htr10 said:

@flstyle:

This is a great callback. Classic Ryan moment.

Truly a great man.

Fuck Ryan Davis

@sombre: Fuck, Ryan Davis

I would troll you for missing Dan's departure, but hey, life happens. I dipped out of following GB completely for over a year at one point, so I get it.

As for Dan leaving, I do miss his enthusiastic energy, but I feel like the Beast crew is still rock-solid without him. And I say that as someone who's followed Dan's work since the Game Informer days.

@quasiconundrum: Pretty much this. Shows how good East is that even without arguably the most entertaining person of the last 5 years around, they're still A++.

@retrometal:

Hope your wife is doing okay.

People change jobs. It happens. I am amazed a lot of the GB staff stay as long as they do. Way above the site average I would imagine.

I have no hard data to back this up, but I've always assumed that people stay at jobs longer if it's a smaller business/workplace, but they're less likely to stay at jobs if it's a large business/workplace. It probably depends on company culture, but I know people who work for a smaller business/firm where they stay there for years and years because they feel that their work/input is much more vital and they matter to their coworkers, and on the flip side, it's inevitable that in a larger firm you feel like your individual input is easy to get lost in the shuffle as there are so many middle managers and everything is so compartmentalized.

Even though CBSi owns them and we're well past the scrappy startup days of Whiskey Media ownership, I still get the sense that GB has a pretty tight-knit small business style of valuing every employee pretty highly and making them feel like they're part of a team/family.

Dan will go on to torture other people with Mario Party now, I wish him luck with that.

He's played them all. There's no more Mario Parties to spoil.

Dan is still VERY much being Dan.

@bisonhero Interesting theory, but I can see a counterargument too. Smaller businesses have less financial security, may be more volatile, and are more likely to go out of business. Larger businesses have resources and infrastructure that makes them harder to just vanish, and people might see that as job security. In fact, that's probably part of the reason why Whiskey Media/GB sought a buyer. So I'm not sure the small/large thing equates to employee retention quite as cleanly as you propose.

@tds418: Talking about big companies having job security on a site that follows the games industry, an industry known for people getting let go after the completion of most projects and an intense lack of job security... I know games and games journalism are two different fields, but it’s a weird place to stand by that perspective.

@tds418: I think the fragility of small businesses reduce dramatically over the first couple of years. While larger businesses might look well protected, these last ten plus years have shown they can just dissolve as quickly as any other business - it's just someone is more likely to either bail out a big business to reduce the knock on effect or someone buy the name giving the impression it has survived. That and the industry type it's engaged in.

People stay at jobs longer when they have good work culture and they actually care about the job and their co-workers.

This seems like a good place to say, I wonder if Giant Bomb will consider editors working from home even when human malware is over? GB was willing to allow/bet on Chicago and NY offices- even while being very small. Believe me, not many companies allow people to move around as much as GB has in the past few years.

I say this because even with Dan having moved to Connecticut that does not preclude him coming back without having to move to Bronx, Queens, or New Jersey.

@stantongrouse said:

I'm not going to say all big businesses are stable, but according to government statistics, half of small businesses do not survive 5 years:

However, from there the number falls sharply. Only about half of small businesses survive passed the five-year mark, ranging from 45.4% to 51% depending on the year the business was started. Beyond that, only about one in three small businesses get to the 10-year mark and live to tell the tale.

Companies like CBS, WWE...they are going to survive the next five years, short of nuclear Armageddon. They may have painful layoffs, but they'll be around in some form.

@tds418: I will give you that a company named CBS will exist in five years. But it will likely be a different company than the current one. Within the past 20 years Sumner Redstone has split CBS into two companies (CBS and Viacom), purchased and then disbanded Midway, hired Les Moonves as a successor before ginning up some me too related charges in order to fire him while giving him nothing, merged CBS and Viacom back together, and prepped his daughter as his successor before changing his mind again. He is 95 years old, can’t speak, is bedridden, and owns CBS. Hence his eventual death would likely see a dramatic shift in what CBS looks like going forward.

Things would be different now that they've had a couple months to try out working from home, Discord/screensharing tech, has gotten slightly better since that era. But if we may go to the specific examples you gave:

I don't think the early work-from-home instances of Patrick in Chicago and Alex alone in NYC were very successful periods, at least from a viewer standpoint.

I like Patrick, but once he moved to Chicago, it's baffling to me that he stayed on staff as long as he did. He did good reporting both in SF and Chicago, though that too has confused me as even when he broke major stories, I wonder how much traffic it generated for GB compared to how much traffic it generated for the other big news sites that people actually check daily for news. Patrick did what he could with solo videos and his Friday column so he still had a weekly presence on the site, but losing him from all GB podcasts and livestreams and Quick Looks and all collaboration was a big "what is even the point of this" for me.

Ditto for Alex alone in NYC. I like that it spawned the Patrick/Alex podcast, but once again I got a major vibe of "what is even the point of this". Alex was reviewing waaaaay more games in that period, and had a weekly column for a bit, but from a video standpoint he was basically invisible on the site.

Internal GB staff may have a very different opinion of that time period, but I just felt like both Patrick and Alex were under-utilized due to their remoteness from other staff members. I'm glad Patrick was able to transition to a news gig that was better suited to his work from home circumstance, and I'm glad Alex was able to join up with Vinny to establish the NYC office.

Covid-19 has temporarily flipped a switch and turned Giant Bomb back into scrappy, make-something-work-with-duct-tape mode like when they were starting out, and that's kinda refreshing, but I think I have almost zero interest in having work-from-home staff members once the pandemic has died down. I don't think it suits the collaborative video coverage they produce.

I'm not interested in Dan returning to the site.

Just want to echo the sentiment here that Dan didn't leave due to any bad blood or anything. He's even called into the Beastcast after he had left. It's just because he got the opportunity to work with WWE and any job with them is even more of a dream job for Dan than a job in the game industry. Plus he had worked in games for 10 or 15 or so years, and never worked with the WWE so that's why he left. It's all good people!

It is amusing to see how much Dan has been streaming games lately. But I'm sure that's in part because Connecticut has been very locked down for a while now.

Make no mistake, pirates are still a threat.

I kinda can't stand his twitch because of how hypocritical he is.

Do you know what episode this was? I'd like to hear it.

@omgfather: Beastcast Episode 245

How so?

This is Dan "Twitch is dumb" Ryckert, who, in his past has never "Understood" what twitch is. Fast forward to now, where he's streaming loads, does nothing but talk to his chat all the time, plays the game but pays no attention, and is always egging his viewers on to sub, and "Keep the hype train going".

I've said this elsewhere, but for all of his forced "Lol I'm so dumb and wacky" gimmick, Dan is incredibly smart and savvy. He knows exactly who he is, what his audience is, and how to make money out of his fans. Good on him.

I know who Dan is, but what's this Giant Bomb?

Depends what you mean by "dumb". It's always been obvious Dan is very good at marketing himself and he has clear goals in mind. It's also true he's massively ignorant of anything outside of his fairly narrow areas of knowledge. It's very easy for me to believe that he genuinely didn't understand Twitch until he found himself at home with nothing to do and saw an opportunity. I don't see hypocrisy there.

Now, personally I think it's weird people sit in his chat and help him push his brand for no compensation, but that's Twitch culture I guess? Whatever. It's free to me, and he's a mellow streamer. If he's playing something I like, I'll watch.

His stream is parasocial relationships turned up to 11

I haven't seen Dan's twitch stream or whatever wwe thing he's working on at all, no idea how people have that much time in their life to keep up with everyone. Danny, Drew, Dan, they were clearly among the brightest talents from GB/GS, but I don't think I've seen more than a couple pieces from Drew and Danny.

Hope your wife is doing better OP.

I don't know what's up with all the trolls. Dan fell off a cliff leaving a perfectly Dan shaped hole in the ground. He died instantly the following week.

It's time the truth came out: Dan and Brad had a Freaky Friday incident, and since Brad was leaving anyway, he left using Dan's body. Dan's still here, just as Brad.

@jjbsterling said:

Thanks! Good to hear him again.