Jeff Gerstmann was fired from Giant Bomb !!! WTF

Yeah, I'm still standing by the perspective that we shouldn't speculate. Internet sleuthing has gone wrong and caused unnecessary damage in too many situations.

People start making baseless statements and pointing the blame at people who had nothing to do with it. Sooner or later, all the inaccuracies, rumors, and lies get repeated so often that people take them as fact. You want to avoid making fanfiction out of real people's lives.

We have more details now than we had then. And some people are going to view Jeff's statements as confirmation of their speculation. But this still doesn't justify speculation. For as right as you may feel now, you might feel much more wrong as more details come out. Saying "I don't know" when you legit don't know is intellectually honest and usually the most responsible way to go in this kind of situation. imho, etc

Any drug has the capacity to hurt you. Alcohol in excess is bad for you. It can give you cirrhosis of the liver. Caffeine can mess your heart up. I'm not up on the latest with weed, but I'm sure people using the stuff in excess are not doing themselves any favors. Everything in moderation.

Everyone's going to get used to middle-class professional types talking about cannabis over the next 10 years.

@av_gamer: Because that thread was full of instant experts crafting their personal versions of everything and that’s fuckin obnoxious when you have nothing to actually work on.

Damn, when did the community get so interested in yucking my yum?

Weed is a real, sometimes important, part of people's lives. Let 'em talk about it.

Can't believe we're getting gatekeep-y over the thought of talking about weed ffs.

Weed talk:

Man, for me the weed talk is great. I grew up a DARE kid with a ton of anxiety and insomnia. Weed has been a overall positive life changer. But it took a while not feeling like a total scumbag.

I think I needed people on podcast normalizing it a bit. Now I don’t think I need “Weed only” content on the site.

Overall im happy with Giantbomb and friend’s content. I feel like I have at least 2x the content to enjoy.

Man, our experiences are so similar. I agree so much with the normalization of it. It has helped my anxiety so much, and as we get closer and closer to having fewer people super judgmental about it, I don't have to have dirtbag feelings associated with it, like I'm slinking away to do some bad thing that if I did it, mother's would cover their kids eyes or something. We're not there yet, but it's nice how far we've come, despite some of the Jr. McGruffs we have in this precinct.

Including moderation. *tips fedora*

For the record, I didn't say I believed Jeff was fired back then, even though I suspected as much, but I did express how I didn't like how things were done, and this was after I waited to get what was supposedly all the information.

Anyways, people giving there opinion on what might have happened is not being an instant expert. When there isn't clarity on things that suddenly happen, people are going to speculate, that's human nature. Complaining about it is like complaining about a person going to the restroom when nature calls.

@av_gamer: I dunno go back and review that thread and see the ratio of opinion to let me tell you exactly what’s happening.

As to the latter, no in fact you can simply choose not to, especially if asked.

@efesell: Even if they start their sentence that way, it's still an overall opinion not fact, because again there is no clarity on the situation so "I believe this is what happened" is common in chatrooms and forums. And everyone speculates about different subjects. Anyone saying otherwise is lying to you. Even the GB staff speculate on things that are happening in the gaming industry all the time, not a big deal. Like I said, it's human nature. You don't have to like it, but it's going to happen.

All true - but remember people speculate and offer opinions because a lot of people CARED about this place and the people who ran it. Change, especially unexplained, unexpected change is always going to provoke an emotional response in people, especially when you consider the change to be negative. It's really hard to tell people "yeah, we know you felt like you lost a good friend, but don't try to figure out why, don't think about it, accept that you'll never know the truth."

If people really want the speculation to stop, to give people a chance to move on, they need to have the conversation Jeff G. and John Davidson had when CBS bought Giant Bomb. But that's not going to happen for a while, if ever. Even if things get to a point where Jeff can speak about it with some objectivity, and assuming the current GB crew would be willing to have that conversation, I doubt anybody from RV would ever be willing to have that conversation, even though they don't own Giant Bomb anymore.

@undeadpool:If he cared about his community being full of shitbags, he'd ban them much like Nextlander has been doing. Instead, he's not doing anything. Thus, not caring.

@ultimaxe: Given that we have nothing to go on, it's just as likely that the Nextlander guys said "Nah" to Jeff's ideas. In fact, that's more likely, given how Nextlander has collaborated with Giant Bomb minus Jeff since they split and now that Jeff's solo he's literally the only person in the Giant Bomb sphere that hasn't done anything with Nextlander. Another factor making it in fact more likely is that Jeff literally said the reason he was going to quit was because he had ideas but RV didn't want to implement them. Both of the uses of the word literally by me are the literal definition of the word too, not just hyperbole.

EDIT: I need to make it clear, that's still baseless speculation and my point is that there are a shitload of scenarios that could've happened.

If you'll allow me a hot take: I think there's nothing wrong with claiming that "Giant Bomb is bigger than one man." Obviously the timing was poor since that statement went alongside the site's founder unceremoniously being fired and not being able to sign off one last time, pass the torch, etc. But Giant Bomb could have gradually transitioned in new editorial staff over time. I didn't need Giant Bomb to be some shrine to Gerstmann from beginning to end, but some members of the audience seemingly disagree with me on that one. So if I can put their entire 14-year history on blast, they've done a terrible job of cultivating junior editorial talent to pass the torch to.

I recognize that as much as Jeff was some kind of manager of GB West, and Vinny was some kind of manager of GB East, they still can't snap their fingers and just expand their staff. They had to justify it to managers above them, and I'm sure it's middle-to-upper management that stifled staff growth. Also I'll admit up front I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm sure job titles/roles are more multi-faceted than what I'm going to refer to them as, and there's so much context we as viewers don't have. But let's take a quick look at GB hires over time:

• Whiskey Media intern program: seemed like it was kinda just for a lark because everybody was too busy to find work to assign to the interns, but that's often the problem with all internships/co-op programs. To their credit, it eventually led to Ben rejoining GB
• Random absorption of Alex: I've always wondered how this happened, but in the final months of Whiskey Media, Alex was suddenly doing a lot more GB reviews and Quick Looks despite ostensibly being part of Screened. Maybe I missed some announcement. Anyways, Whiskey Media gets sold to CBSi, and somehow GB sneaks Alex through the Soviet checkpoint, claiming "Yes, comrade. Is Alex! Here are his papers. Alex always proud GB editor, of course he comes with us in the sale." I'll admit I didn't follow Screened very closely at the time so maybe I'm forgetting aspects of Alex's transition to GB.
• Ephemeral newsman role: Patrick, then Austin, now Grubb. Patrick had a decently long tenure and was fun to have around, but I genuinely wonder how this keeps happening since GB really isn't a news website.
• Video production: the only arena where I feel like the site has retained new staff they've brought on board. Jason came on to make up for GB West losing Vinny, Jan eventually came on to make up for GB West losing Drew. Abby got hired on as an actual new position because Vinny was spread way too thin being a manager, on-camera talent, and senior/only video producer.
• Editorial: other than the aforementioned newsmen, almost no one. Dan was essentially hired to fill the editor vacancy left in GB West due to both Ryan passing away, and Vinny moving away to the east coast within the same year. Then it was years and years until Ben was hired, who was a legitimately great addition, but he has chosen to leave games journalism for personal reasons.

It always felt weird to me that the senior editor roles were essentially locked in stone for years at a time, with Dan and Ben (and that one shining year of Austin) being the only new editors across the entire CBSi period. I know GB has never been the size of GameSpot or IGN or whoever to be a revolving door of new talent, freelancers, etc., but holy cow, they just never cultivated/retained any junior staff ready to step up if Gerstmann/Vinny/Brad/Alex ever wanted to leave. It was like, just Jan, once push came to shove in 2021, and then Gerstmann/Bakalar had to scramble to pull in people out of thin air since they hardly had anyone on staff.

Obviously no one could see the pandemic coming and how that made some people re-evaluate their work. Maybe it was a surprise when Dan got poached by WWE, and Abby and Ben resigning for their own reasons was a disappointment to me as they were great on GB staff. Red Ventures' business goals seemingly had more of an impact on the departure of Vinny/Brad/Alex/Gerstmann. When Nextlander left GB, and then Jeff finally left, I can't say I'm surprised that the audience lost their damn minds, because there just wasn't staff waiting in the wings to step up and naturally take their place in the limelight (again, really only Jan, big ups to Jan). Jason and Rorie are great duders, but they're dependable background staffers that aren't really the defining voices of the site.

So I commend their efforts to try to keep this thing called Giant Bomb going. I like the style of GB game coverage, and I'm fine with seeing other people take up the mantle and evolve it over time. But the inability to retain and grow junior staff over the past decade of Giant Bomb really seems like a colossal failure on management's part.

There was actually a short period of time when they contracted news writers or at least that one dude that was pretty chill. I forget his name. Brad maybe? He wrote for Destructoid at the time and was known for his muscular physique (I guess not that odd now but stood out in 2009).

@bisonhero: honestly those are super valid points that during the whole of the time between the guys leaving till jeff getting fired n dan coming back were super glaring. it was understandable to be blind sided but the hiring /replacing of new talent has been n i would honestly say still sorta is. tam n lucy are great but its rare i see them in much other than a podcast appearance here n there which is understandable given they're doing double duty with gamestop but honestly it makes them feel less like GB proper n more like guests even tho they fit in great . n while video stuff i think has gotten better since dan returned n grubb joined i still feel the amount of ppl for games videos seems lacking compared to years gone by tho still alot better than it used to be. jess isn't bad at all but it sounds like her n jan have plenty on their plate production-wise. i'm not saying they need a ton of new staff at this point but i feel like one or 2 more regulars for videos would be helpful. guest spots to call attention to cool ppl are nice and all but guests aren't the same as regulars.

anyway thats a long grumbly sorta way to say yeah i agree with the need to cultivate new talent.

Brad Nicholson was an alright dude

@bisonhero: I had actually thought about this exact thing quite a lot in the wake of Gerstmann being fired. I think I would have been a lot more comfortable with this "next generation" of GB if that "generation" had actually grown with the original group. And the weird thing is, that was kind of happening for a moment there! Ben, Abby, and Jan all joined at basically the same time and very much had a vibe of the young ones are who going to learn the ropes from their "seniors" (Jeff, Vinny, Jason, Etc.). But then you had both Abby and then Ben leaving shortly after the Pandemic started.

If a hypothetical world existed where Ben and Abby wanted to stay, and the Nextlander crew and Gerstmann stayed on for another couple years (with maybe 2 more staff hired along the way), it would be very easy to see a comfortable transition to a next generation of GB. Ben as trained by Gerstmann, Abby as trained by Vinny, and Jan filling the Drew/Jason void.

As things stand, the only one who actually feels like they have any real connection to original GB would be Jan, and I guess Dan a little bit, but he was already pretty well "defined" before coming to GB. Jess was too new to know most of the crew or learn from them, and the rest only joined once everyone else had left. I'm sure a lot of this probably doesn't matter to most as long as the content is to there liking, but it's a big part of why GB leaves such a sour taste in my mouth when I look at it now, it has all the trappings of the thing and people I loved without the real connection to it.

TLDR: I think GB had something going for a passing of the torch, but a number of factors led to that not happening, it's hard to say what's to blame.

@joshth: I can see where the "sour taste" thing comes from since for a lot of us this site was a thing we spent a bunch of our lives with, and with the same core group of people. Other than agreeing that I think the new group works well together, I'll say that most of them were regulars or guest stars anyway previously. Bakalar was on the Beastcast from the beginning making him feel like he'd always been here, Grubb had been on a few things, and Tam & Lucy had a series going with Bakalar already.

For those that care, Jeff actually goes into more detail about the video game coverage business and how cutthroat it is, and that he understands now why a lot of people used it as a stepping stone into other professions in the gaming industry instead of making it their life's work like he did and plans to continue doing so. He talks about it during this week's show on Twitch during the Emails segment.

@retris: Yes. And Gerstmann could have lost a dance off for the fate of the website, for all we know. I just don't like it when people who have no idea of what the fuck happened try to insert a villain into their personal narrative of what they think happened. "Oh, this person hated that person so this person left and that's why this happened!" It's like, dude, you're not a detective and your ability to read people sucks. Just . . . shut the fuck up. It's unpleasant.

I still say he was fired as a result of a high stakes match of Windjammers.

I like weed.

That's the one. Thank you. Wonder what that gaming beefcake is up to these days. So many of the duders and dudettes I loved back then went into PR which is a bummer (I understand of course -- not making money on press side ever, especially now).

@siamesegiant: this is exactly what I was about to say. There's really nothing to talk about.

The highest of stakes, or lack thereof! Jeff always talked about how he didn't smoke the Reefer Sutherland, follow the devil's lettuce!

I'm glad the information is out there. It provides some sense of closure for some of us at least. I haven't really consumed much new GB content since Jeff's firing. I got love for all the current staff, but I don't feel great watching new content after the way Jeff's firing was handled by RV.

Weed is great.

What a thread you've made here, folks.

Regardless, the way they unceremoniously shoved Jeff Gerstmann out the door and made the staff sign a nauseating corporate statement about how "GiantBomb was never about the people working here, it's a brand with throwaway personalities!!!!!" was a real fucking low blow. If any of the current GiantBomb crewmembers had the balls they would have not signed that bullshit statement and made that tasteless "New era of GiantBomb"-video.

To me, GiantBomb always was Jeff Gerstmann, Ryan Davis, Brad Shoemaker, Vinny Caravella, Alex Navarro and Drew Scanlon. And later on Dan Ryckert offcourse. Those who deny this, are only worshipping an empty shell. A hallowed-out website in which the spam topics made by bots are more frequent than new discussions on the forums. A website which needs external contractors to keep running video content.

@ultimaxe:Apologies, I completely misread the intent of your original post. We're in agreement in that the whole vilification of Giant Bomb and deification of Gerstmann based on just conjecture is just infuriating.

Speaking of which @murderdeathmill: Have you tried not being a gigantic piece of shit? Life is much more pleasant if you aren't a miserable asshole.

@murderdeathmill: There is no need to disparage current staff who have chosen to continue working at Giant Bomb. You do not know the dynamic they have with each other, with Gerstmann, with upper management. They are not obligated to quit over Jeff’s battle with management, especially when really no one else on GB staff has the same ability as Gerstmann to be jobless but throw together a Patreon in a few hours and still make thousands of dollars of monthly income.

Firing Gerstmann, a founding editor of the site, does come off as a clown move the way Red Ventures upper management did it. Letting Jeff go in the manner they did A) possibly hurt staff morale, B) definitely hurt public perception of the site, and C) you’d think would hurt the valuation of the site and lower its sale price to Fandom because of point B. It seems like RV was not a good caretaker of the site, given that they were intending to sell it off after a short time.

I don’t think anyone in the Giant Bomb audience is “worshipping an empty shell.” If anything, I think you may be worshipping the original staff to an unhealthy degree. They’re great guys that had great chemistry and industry experience, but at the end of the day, it’s a website. Staff comes and goes, and you don’t have to frame everything in terms of loyalty/betrayal relative to the original staff.

Except when they were bought by RV the narrative (by the staff itself, mind you) was that CBS was the big bad meanie and under RV they had loads of new money/ideas/influence to try out new stuff. I don't need to tell you what happened but a lot of people left under RV. Jeff might have planned to leave anyway but especially regarding Jeff G's past this is was a very poorly calculated move to fire him AGAIN. The current crew co-signed the statement in which GiantBomb is merely just an influx and outflow of a smattering of people. That is the literal antithesis of everything GB stands for. Even when Drew was gone, the F1 podcast kept running and the old crew regularly was invited back to podcasts, events and such.

How can anyone work under such a corpo? There is no reason to assume Fandom is any different.

At least Jeff G‘s legacy won’t be that he is the GM of Giant Bomb who drove the site into the ground. Looking at the development of views on YT the site as a business does not seem sustainable for long.

@murderdeathmill: I don’t think anyone is a fan of either company but you are assigning a ridiculous degree of moral failure to a group of people working for a truly bog standard corporation.

You didn't have to make an account just to tell everybody that you've been unhappy with Giant Bomb's content for years now. The only person "worshipping an empty shell" here is you. If you want to revel in your glory days and only watch old Giant Bomb stuff over and over again, no one's stopping you. Look, Ryan Davis has been gone for nine years. A lot of us still think he was incredibly entertaining to watch and listen to. But Giant Bomb hasn't "always" been Ryan Davis. In about six months, Jan will have been here for longer than Ryan was. Go back and watch Ryan's stuff if you want, but you don't have to completely dismiss the rest of the staff to do so. I don't know how to break it to you, but forums in general are much slower than they were a decade ago. Things change.

Thankfully this is the GB forum, squirrelled away in the smallest crack of the internet where I don’t have to feel that much secondhand embarrassment for everyone engaging in this thread.

parasocial relationships and nostalgia are a helluva drug, yall.

everyone seems to be in a good spot now. probably time to move on.

@murderdeathmill: I won't attack you like the others, because I understand what you mean. But I don't think its just to accuse the other staff members of betrayal, which is basically what you're doing. Like Jeff G, himself, said this week, the video game coverage business is brutal with no job security. People who cover and review games can easily be replaced. We are living in hard times where people have to take care of their families and use every resource available to them, and it seems like its going to get worse before it gets better. It's easy to say the other staff members should've rebelled against RV and left when they canned Jeff G like what happened at Gamespot, but times have changed.

And not all of them have the presence that Jeff G and the other OG Gamespot guys have. Not everyone can just start a Patreon show and thrive from the gate like they did with Nextlander and The Jeff G Show. People claim they like Jan a lot, but how many people do you think would follow him enough on Patreon to make a living? Maybe some, but not nearly enough as those guys. The same with many other current staff members. Look at what happened to the G4TV people. They got laid off like it was nothing, and it was the online streaming influencers that cashed in and cashed out, which was part of the reason the relaunch failed.

They did what they had to do to save their jobs, and given the current climate, you can't blame them for it.

this in a nutshell honestly. i pretty much like everyone currently on staff but if you asked me to pay for any of them individually i'd say theres not a high chance of that the way jeff got my money for a few months already here. nextlander being a collective of 3 was an easier ask but if it didn't go well it would have been a worse situation for a number of more ppl vs the one. the fact that most the staff have families to take care of makes that a super risky move impacting more ppl if it didn't pan out, speaking up often leads to management just firing a person n i can't blame any of them for just doing their best to keep appearances.

as for the bad corpo statement of GB being more than one person. yeah it was a shitty statement but frankly its not wrong either. i'm sure most ppl wouldn't have stuck around for years just for one person but stayed cause they liked the collection of ppl on staff. i think as long as theirs a fun strong mix of ppl putting out good stuff every week then things are going fine n gb is ok. the drought that was the past yr seeeems to be behind us and things imo have honestly improved , sure its not the same as it once was but if you asked me this time last yr i'd be alot less optimistic for the site.

There is no way to lock this thread without specific sectors of this site and elsewhere misconstruing such an action. As things stand, the comments are currently oscillating between conversations about drug use, attacks on current and former staff members, and, finally, reminisces about "the good old days." None of these are relevant to the initial topic at hand. For that reason, as well as the general hostility of the most recent comments levied in this thread, the moderation team is locking this thread from further commentary. The Community Rules prohibit and discourage personal attacks and the derailing of forum topics, both of which are in force here.

However, I do want to say one thing. The people currently working on and with Giant Bomb care about this site and its community. To suggest otherwise is a terrible and disgusting falsehood.