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Giant Bomb Premium has been an integral part of keeping this site in the business of making silly videos for many years now. Many of you have helped contribute to the success of the site by plunking down cash, and we greatly appreciate your willingness to do so.
That said, the premium service as it exists has always been a bit wonky. Subs don’t always renew when they should, and sometimes they renew when they shouldn’t. Memberships disappear at odd times for no apparent reason, or they extend well past their expiration date without attempting to bill a subscriber. Want to update your credit card information? That form hasn’t worked in, like, six months. It’s kind of a mess!
A lot of these issues have arisen because we do most of the heavy lifting of subscription management internally, only sending information off to our credit card processor when we have to bill someone. As it happens, there are companies that do precisely the kind of subscription management stuff that we currently do ourselves, and as such, we’re going to be shifting our subscription services over to one of those companies over the next few days. This new partner (a company called Recurly) will keep track of all of your subscription info for the purposes of renewals and emailing you if your card's declined, etc.
What does this mean for you?
Well, first off, while we migrate our data to Recurly, we are going to extend the expiration dates of most subscriptions that are set to expire during this migration back a week or so to ensure that no one winds up being unable to renew during this downtime. If you were set to renew in this timeframe, you’re going to get some free time on your account.
Most of you, however, should see no interruption of service or even be aware that this change is taking place, as we’re aiming to make this transition as seamless and behind-the-scenes as possible. There’s always a chance of technical issues, though. Please get in touch atsupport@giantbomb.comif you run into any weirdness over the next few weeks.
Hey, my subscription went away! What’s going on!
One of the weaknesses of our current system of managing subscriptions is that some subs remain active well after they should’ve expired. As part of this migration, it’s quite likely that most of these zombie subscriptions will be removed from the system. If you find yourself suddenly subscription-less when the migration is complete (which should occur by next Monday), please look up the last subscription renewal email you got from us and check the date on it. If it looks like it’s more than a month or year old, then you likely didn’t get un-hooked properly and should sign up for a “new” subscription if you’d like to remain a subscriber. If you have any further questions, get in touch with me at support@giantbomb.com. Be sure to include your username in that email.
What else might get broken while this is going on?
You’re unlikely to be able to update your credit card number, change your plan between yearly or monthly subscriptions, or cancel your account during this transition. We anticipate wrapping everything up by Monday.
What about Paypal subscriptions?
Our new payment processor does indeed support Paypal, and we’re going to be working to implement that in the coming weeks, which will allow us to move away from the Paypal method of signing up through our store. We’ll update our payment methods when we manage to implement this.
What about gift subscriptions?
As with Paypal, we still plan on implementing gift subscriptions, but they won’t be available immediately when we go live with our new payment system. If you have outstanding gift codes that haven’t been used yet, get in touch at support@giantbomb.com and we’ll work something out.
How should I get in touch if I run into problems?
There’s this email address calledsupport@giantbomb.comthat you might want to keep handy if anything comes up! Otherwise, you can reply to this topic and I’ll do my best to answer any general questions you have.
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