Is Giantbomb making less content now?

yeah, i don't want for quantity- i think the output is more or less where it has been.

i do hope they try out some new stuff soon, though (and not just another play-through). so much of what gave the site dynamism (guests/devs on the couch, trying new gaming formats like giant bomb unplugged, controlled chaos like big live live show or whiskey media happy hour, jeff reading from a god damn space jam novelization, etc) just isn't done anymore.

i'm remain optimistic they're thinking about this stuff.

@mellotronrules: Uhh did you check out Steal my Sunshine or Burgle My Bananas? Because if you want new gaming formats and (barely) controlled chaos...

for sure! those were great- and this is one of my favorite videos on the internet (which makes the move sting a little bit more, to be honest). i hope they find ways to keep the zany-ness quotient high.

This made me chuckle.

@flstyle: @brainscratch:

I Hate Mondays

Thursday Night Throwdown

Unprofessional Fridays

Bombin’ in the AM

...IT’S TUESDAY...nothing stops the Bombcast...

The joke is that 99% of the time Pokemonday Night Combat doesn't air on Mondays

@flstyle: Ah, I’ve never seen an episode. Pokemon does nothing for me.

You can count on the Bombcast being there and ready every Tuesday but thats about it. Not sure if the lack of consistency is something to excuse, because there really isn't any reason why they can't be consistent with their shows when they have proven to be able to do it when they want to, but as has been said before - it is what it is. In a weird way the quote-unquote "unprofessionalism" has almost become a badge of honor which to be honest does them more harm than good when the days of zany antics are pretty much gone. Now instead of the odd video with someone wearing a full body green suit, sprinkled at random throughout the month, you instead get your regular plain ol' shows just at inconsistent intervals. When the newest Pro Skater video gets randomly dropped without warning after a prolonged absence and it's the same low energy banter about energy drinks and ska it's just not as exciting - but hey it's still content.

@humanity: Agreed. I don't think it's a matter of the amount of content; maybe just the amount of content that OP finds compelling at this point.

@wrighteous86: Yeah, that point had been made several times in the thread. Count me in on that group.

When Ryan died, content suffered. I get it, that’s a horrible thing to go through personally and professionally. Dan seemed to provide a spark to life the whole site up for a while. His thoughts on things like the Terminator franchise lead to some great moments between him and Jeff.

I think Ben had been a great catalyst for Jeff for a while, but that seems to have cooled a bit. The Aftermath seems to have the highest concentration of fun moments over the last year or so.

I haven't been into most of the QL's this year so far so I'm finally trying to finish up Metal Gear Scanlon MSGV.

Jeff, Brad and Jason are aging out of the kind of shit they used to put out. Everything is pretty straight forward these days, which I'm fine with since I'm also getting old as fuck. I am going to miss Dan's crazy shit though. I always looked forward to stuff he was in.

As a recent free user, it definitely is pretty dry on the "free" end of things, especially when no games have come out recently. But that's to be expected I guess. I do feel like I remember way more streams and stuff like mailbags etc before I turned premium, but that was like 2011 or something lol.

27 videos and streams this month (not including podcasts), shorter and slower month.

I'd say because of the slow season they are producing what they can with what they have and during this slow period they are probably in planning and production mode so we'll get some good shit in a month or two and then the lead up to E3.

Personally I'm not really interested in any of the QL's at all right now. The Playdate's are always fun to have playing to the side while I'm at home working or I go back to old shows I never finished as I mentioned earlier MGScanlon has been going the last week or so.

@jarp12: Phew...I LOVED that series, but MGSV is a hard game to watch someone play. I kinda skipped around a lot looking for high points in the game that would be fun to watch.

All the other games in the series were super fun to watch Drew play.

I agree, he just started using Quiet and I have so much more to go.

I need to start skipping to story missions, watching side missions and other non-story related missions is quite boring. It's nothing like the other games that had a constant flow of story and no open world.

@oursin_360: Whenever I have a free moment at work and sometimes visit the site to check show times or what the playdate is going to be on the upcoming I am instantly struck with how horrendous the site looks with ads. They are gigantic and nearly frame the page from every angle. If you're not on premium then it almost seems like running an adblocker is a necessity to retain some semblance of usability.

@humanity: you really hit the nail on the head with your post there with something I have been feeling but hadn't really put into words quite how you had there. I also think that with so much of the content feeling standard, especially out West, it feels more and more like any video game site out there.

This sums it up. I wish there was something to shake up their comfort zone because while I really like them all the content is so stale. I've pretty much stopped listening to the Bombcast which is sad to me. I also think the Aftermath being on a whole different day has really been a bad move for that show. No episode since it has moved times has been as good. I know it's a lot of podcasting after the Bombcast but that aftershow delirious, ready to unwind feel was what made that show a bright spot, for me.

Just trying to do the cruel math of "will mass alex 3 will finish before my premium expires forever". Ah, i guess i said that out loud.

@stephen_von_cloud: That’s a bummer. I unsubscribed to the Beastcast and Bombcast to kick-off 2020. GOTY left a ROTTEN taste in my mouth and made me realize that I didn’t love the podcasts anymore. They were just habit. It was like staying in a relationship because it’s habitual, even though there’s nothing there for you anymore. They became AMC’s Walking Dead. Dan leaving the Beastcast didn’t help.

I held off on unsubscribing from the Aftermath before eventually pulling the trigger. Jeff still brought it on that show. Things like riffing on the Paul Stanley soundcloud file were fucking hilarious.

I really just want Brad to host something where Jeff can go off and Vinny can react, but it sounds like there isn’t much interest in returning to anything along those lines.

It’s a bummer, but holy shit did this crew make some amazing moments over the years!

@north6: Oddly, Alex’s Gaiden the Ring is the one series I’m watching (unless you consider Business Dave’s Top 10 a series, because that shit is great!).

I think (hope?) it’s fine to say “I’m not going to continue paying for content” around here. If it’s constructive and well-intended feedback, what’s the harm?

I can’t fathom paying for more GB at this point. I’m not going to cancel to prove some point or stick it to them, but I will probably let it lapse.

Jeff’s been pretty clear that the stuff I want is in their past. I don’t want them to churn out shit they don’t want to make, but also I don’t want most of what they’ve made for the last couple of years. So I’m happy to wish them the best and part ways, if this is what they want to be doing. There’s always the amazing back catalog, which is second to none.

Man this comes up almost every year. And every year since my first kid was born I just wish I had time to watch even the content I’m most interested in. Before that (since the beginning) I watched every single quick look, live stream, pretty much everything. The output is still quite high considering. I could get just as much out of GB each week as I get out of a week of cable. And that’s at the same price of GB for a year that I pay in a month to watch a couple hours of sports on YouTube TV.

Yeah - basically same.

I just basically want them to play good or interesting games over a longer form format. For most of the history of GB there has been at least one series going where this is true, but since ME there has been nothing. That's why I cancelled. That said, there are a few things east does that i enjoy.

It's a combination of things at this point, but where you are in your fandom with the crew and interests will wildly change how you view this. A lot of people have been with the site for a LONG time and view the member loss / aging of the crew to be a contribution, but there are a girth of members who are fresh and are starting to dig into the archives / are starting to get to know the crew now so they're enjoying the site. If anything, as someone who's been around on/off for awhile: the content heft doesn't feel THAT different but with the advent of video game streaming sites I'm now in a constant struggle between what to watch.

Back when it was just articles to read or videos to watch: it was easy to fit GB content in. Now I have tens of hours of content generated daily from multiple streamers I enjoy and that's just from one site. Combined with a professional job: my time is less than ever and the competition for my time is greater than ever. Because of that I have to apply an even greater level of scrutiny to the quality of content I intake and I can be even more picky to what I view. It's the age of streaming personalities and I'm absolutely overburdened with choice.

@north6: @north6: Format isn’t really my issue, these days, it’s more the content within the format. But I get where you’re coming from.

I could watch Vinny and Ryan play Dragonball, Pokemon, Harry Potter, and all sorts of shit I would NEVER play and give ZERO fucks about. It was because they were having fun with the games and each others company. Same with the old Xbox Game Room stuff, motion games, etc.

I think the Hotline Miami quicklook is AMAZING as Ryan goes on a real journey from “hey, another indie game, time to goof!” to being super fucking invested and just falling for the game.

I don’t get that same sense of fun and enthusiasm these days. If people dig current era stuff, I’m happy for those folks.

I don't think it's the actual amount of content, per se. But I think there is less and less content that I'm interested in. I dunno, I feel like the site's gotten a bit . . . corporate? It's the same shows in the same format on at the same times every week, like they've got a recurring Outlook meeting that isn't that useful but no one wants to come out and suggest skipping it.

Back in the day, I'd watch a bunch of random stuff because you never knew exactly where the show was going to go. Case in point, I found an old UPF clip last week where they spent like 15 minutes going down a rabbit hole about Steak Ums. It was fresh and unpredictable and frequently very funny. I miss that sense of spontaneity.

@therealturk: You never knew when someone might confess to their cake sitting fetish!

This has been going for a few weeks now and we have the regular distribution of people either complaining there's not enough content, complaining there's too much content, or arguing about the quality of the content without quantifying how that quality is being measured.

"There's not enough interesting content" is not constructive criticism.

So we're going to lock this up, and you can all start your countdowns to the inevitable identical thread which will appear once E3 is over in a few months. X