Vinny, Brad, and Alex have started a new Podcast and streaming project called Nextlander

Right on and congrats to them. I bet some of the folks here at GB wish they were over there, too.

@dan_citi: Giant Bomb is awesome and it was great when Vinny, Alex, and Brad were a part of it. But they left. Now @rorie says Giant Bomb is getting ready to announce some exciting new changes and the current crew is still pretty darn rad, and for everyone who was super upset that they weren't going to get podcasts with Vinny, Alex, and Brad on them anymore, well, now they are. And while paying more money sucks, it doesn't sound like there will be much Patreon locked in Nextlander, so you really don't have to spend if you don't want to (I personally supported as soon as I saw the announcement.)

This situation may be worse for viewers than when they were all part of Giant Bomb, but it's better than when we thought they might not do this stuff anymore.

It sounds like Vinny, Alex, and Brad are happier in a smaller more nimble organization and as a long time fan I'm happy for them.

And the new direction for Giant Bomb could be really cool too. So in the end we might have more great content available, which would be a net win.

I say that as someone who has never watched everything Giant Bomb put out but always picked and chose. I am excited at the prospect of having more stuff to choose from!

TAKE MY MONEY!!! <3

Update: Done! Subscribed / They have my money through their Patreon.

Between Fire Escape, Giant Bomb, and Nextlander (sounds like a B-tier game from 2005), there has never been a greater time for a GB multiverse fighting game. It can be like Rival Schools. As much as it will make the community go nuts, I hope they play up their rivalry and do some dumb stuff in the future.

Ha! Well I never saw that coming. What a great surprise! Im not at all surprised if Jeff has something similar planned for GB - Twitch streaming / podcast / Patreon model. I can imagine it being much easier to support 3 or 4 people with this kind of model than trying to support 8 or 10 people with the same kind of subscription service.

Listening to episode 0 of this new Nextlander pod was like seeing Goku and Vegeta fuse for the first time. I suppose that sentiment will make sense for some people somehow.

...well now I want THIS to be true.

This is probably just jealousy talking, but it seems like the vast majority of people who leave big companies to go off on their own (e.g. KindaFunny, NoClip, etc) use the following that they garner from being associated with a large brand to build the new brand. Essentially using the company they are working for to gain fame and/or notoriety and then cash in. I mean, I would probably do the same, but I'm a nobody. There are a whole lot of other nobodies with zero following out there working their asses off who put out great content and are getting little to nothing out of it.

I'm happy I still get to hear from those guys, but I feel for the little guys out there who see this and think, "Man, must be nice to have a built-in audience and financial backing on Day 1".

They're playing the new game from the Contradiction people on Twitch right now!!!!!!!

So I don't ever watch GB stuff on Twitch and haven't watched much live over the past year, but I've always been a little caught off guard how rarely the watching count ticks above 2,000 on the GB live page.

Nextlander is at almost 6,500 right now.

@bigsocrates said:

One of the things that caught my attention right away was that they have this planning podcast and are making it available to subscribers. I don't think I'll subscribe at that level, but it does make me wonder if this is a bit of long-running criticism of GB that they've taken to heart and want to address at their own company.

I don't know, maybe it's because I've been with GB since near the beginning that I still think that it's this scrappy upstart out to shakeup the world, but it's on its 2nd corporate ownership now and I can see how that gets to be old and the guys see how successful other people have been doing it on their own...and then they had their non-compete contract run out (or invalidate after the sale) and saw the opportunity to jump ship. I don't blame them. I've worked for a Fortune 200 company for 10 years, I can relate.

@timoneous: I definitely understand this sentiment. I had podcast with friends for years. It was just fun, and was never gonna be a job. Still, we wanted to have a larger reach than we did. But at the same time, this sort of thing isn't functionally different from someone working at a company for years and using the skills and business knowledge they acquired to then go on and create their own business. Jeff Gerstmann himself did this.

After the fire escape cast post a while back, and this title being almost the exact format, I legitimately half expected this to be a joke or some post about dreams that may come true.

Was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

Joined the patron and am looking forward to the new content.

I also am hoping that since there's all these former giant bomb folks doing their own things we'll have a lot of cross content.

FireBombLanderPoint

I'm happy that Vinny, Brad and Alex have found their new calling of... covering video games... wait a second, it's the same thing they've been doing in GB before!

It's not that I'm not surprised but this will effectively split the GB userbase. I'm probably going to watch less GB content and more of their content because I gravitate more to the games Vinny and Alex like to play.

Should've called it Fireboylt.

Very excited for what they can do with Nextlander, what with the lack of corporate interests and the groundswell of patreon funding that seems to be coming in. As far as the patreon seeming to be questionable in terms of value to the backer, it seems to be in line with the majority of patreons (pay for access to a discord, extra podcast, all that fun stuff), so I don't really see a problem with that.

Watching the current live Twitch stream. It feels so good to have these guys back.

The first stream that's happening right now is just them playing games, and the only thing missing from it is Audio Network songs. Good stuff.

@bladeofcreation: You're right, but Jeff didn't have the choice to leave. He started up GB with Ryan with the hopes to create the site they wish they could have made at GS and they were successful. And in '07-'08, the internet was a completely different place. Everything we got with early GB was stuff they built themselves. Now anyone has free, ready-made platforms to present their content and easy to use subscription platforms to monetize their work. The more I think about it, the more I'm surprised this mass exodus didn't happen years ago. Look at everyone leaving IGN, GS, GI and GB lately and you'll see that the future is no longer in game websites...and that's unfortunate.

And I can relate, I host a movie podcast (Here) with just me and I my wife. We don't do it to make money; we both have full time jobs. It's just fun for us and a way for friends and family to hear our voices twice a week. If somehow it becomes popular, great...if not, no big deal.

Good for them and I hope it goes well! From the looks of their patreon count they will be well for a while. I wish I cared more about Brad and Alex to really follow this cause Vinny is just the best. But I'm happy they're doing their own thing on their own terms.

what.. what?? WHAT????

My GB premium sub is up in a week. Thinking of moving over to Nextlander.....my gaming tastes have always lined up more with Brad and Vinny, and I'm super not excited about Giant Bomb moving in the freelance direction like Jeff said in a recent garage stream.

I am very excited, and would love to support them but I can't afford to. I'll still be following everything they do.

Really happy to see it. Supported them immediately. Nothing particularly against Jeff and crew but I cancelled my annual sub for GB (still good til Feb '22) when everyone left and stuff was up in the air. Hard for me to imagine where GB goes from here but eager to see.

Do I have time to watch any of this stuff from anyone? Not really. But I need as much podcasting as possible since I drive 7+ hours per day, 5 days a week. Need things to listen to.

Happy to see not nearly the amount of speculation over bad blood and whatnot as there is over at the subreddit or hand wringing over Nextlander being in direct competition with Giant Bomb. I'm dropping this comment a lot over there, but it's more like three of your favorite bartenders are leaving your favorite bar to start their own thing with their own ownership stake. For some, that means you'll never see that bartender again, for others that means you'll be splitting time between two bars and for yet others that means you'll be a regular at the new bar and eventually be saying "wow, I haven't been to Dive Bar in almost five years..."

Things change, people move on, and it'd take a real jerk / emotionally immature person to take that personally or presume anything insidious is going on just because people left one job to continue doing that thing they're good at under a different roof.

Everyone should check out Brad & Vinny’s Hitman run from the stream today... it was a mini Hitsmas 2016. Highly entertaining!

I happy these guys found a new project that works better for them. I'm not really sold on it as a product just yet. The immediate concern I have is that it is going to be a choice between Giant Bomb or Nextlander. For instance, right now on their Twitch they are playing the power washing game, which just appeared on UPF on Friday. Like, as much as I like the crews at Giant Bomb and the trio at Nextlander, it doesn't seem that interesting to watch both of them play the same games and comment on the same news. All of which is to say, I'm sure they've got ideas, and I look forward to seeing what they create over there. I hope letting these guys run wild in their own project will lead to something pretty cool.

@shindig: A large amount of their content so far has been about how hard it was to name the thing because every name is taken. They apparently briefly considered Horse and Cartridge, which would have been spectacular.

@nodima: How many game studios are started because a group of people who work at some larger studio split off to make an indie game together? It's incredibly common. And while it can be the result of bad blood it often isn't. Sometimes people just want more autonomy, and also the potential to get more of the upside if the thing takes off.

They all gave a super clear answer to the question of "why?" during the podcast when they said that they were tired of grinding away at a corporate job and they didn't like working within the confines of a larger organization that had different goals than they did. This is not a mystery. And it's also not important. I assume that if the reason they left was that there was something nefarious going on they would have said something. It's quite possible there was a personality or vision clash between them and Jeff or them and Red Ventures but...that's really not our business.

We aren't owed any answers. They don't owe us anything except podcasts and streams (Which they owe us because they asked for and received money on Patreon; if they hadn't done that they wouldn't owe us that either.)

@nick: these dudes all in an office together was truly the best. we'll always have the memories

They put in 20+ years of work to build that audience, the 'little guy' needs to do the same.

This mindset will get you nowhere

I really don't get the negativity that is going on in a lot of places. We'll never get a clear answer about what exactly happened, or didn't happen that caused the split and we don't need to. That's between them, not us.

Jeff and the guys are friends, so I doubt there will ever truly be any bad blood. Also sure, they might be considered "contenders" now, but whatever, there's thousands upon thousands of twitch streamers etc. out there, who also want a part of the cake. What I'm saying is: there's more than enough (cake) to go around for everyone to succeed, and GB will be just fine.

The "high" pricing for their Patreon tiers are also a completely logical thing, since they are now just trying to get a new business going, and will probably change (along with the amount and quality of content they'll put out in the future) too. If you want to support them, go ahead, if you don't or can't, that's also fine. You can still catch their free stuff and just support them in words and deeds instead.

I for one, am just really, really happy to get both New Giant Bomb and Nextlander.

Glad I'll still be able to hear from those guys! I guess between this and Fire Escape my podcast feed is already back up to capacity again :D

i'm not really surprised this is what they ended up doing the way vinny had been talking about having corporate bosses that didn't really get this and holding them back at times in the past n such and the feels that go with it . either way i'm really happy to have them back again , honestly the past month has felt like longer .my funds are low but when i get working again i'll definitely be tossing a bit their way and at least this way we know it directly goes to them n all ^^

It's probably refreshing to not have men in suits lecturing them on how they should be doing things.

HOOOOORAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Damn will the higher tier patreons requeat a full Persona 5 playthrough???

Persona 4 at the start of GB and Persona 5 at the start of NL is kinda cool

FWIW, random thought, this is of course why non-compete clauses exist, and when the exodus happened a month ago, I vaguely wondered if any/all of the guys had one. Clearly not! Also, apparently non-compete clauses are illegal in California, so I don't think Jeff could have one either since he resides there.

@frytup: I think if you take advantage of most of the stuff they are likely to produce than it is a considerably good value. It just isn't as good of a value as GB Premium - I'd still happily pay $10 to watch and listen to a month full of stuff from these folks.

good for them. i hope it all goes well.

Of course I'll join but it feels like the only real secret sauce here is the known personalities.

Yea, I'm feeling this too. Honestly, I think the Nextlander/Waypoint power combo will outplay the current GB lineup for me (tho who am I joking, I love E3 time and will watch both versions of the conferences, lol).

My initial reaction was “what the fuck?”. Now, after reading up on things, my reaction is “the fuck!”.

Also, if someone had suggested a month ago that Vinny, Brad, and Alex would resurface doing E3 coverage along with Waypoint, they would have been laughed off the planet. Well, here you go.

Nextlander/Fire Escape crossover forthcoming, I’ll bet.

I want to just echo this point once more. I wish all involved the best and am supportive of their creative endeavors.
The path forward will be hard, but I trust all three of them to figure it out. Personally, I don't have it in me to create a start up.

If they also start to do MiSTer and old games streams, I might not stick around here any longer. With huge apologies to Rorie.

It's funny but after seeing that they basically immediately started their own patreon thing my thoughts are less about why did they leave Giant Bomb but more why did Jeff not come too. The three of them immediately banning together to start Nextlander is such an obvious answer to the "what will they do next" question that I actually didn't think it would happen

Congrats to Vinny, Brad, and Alex. I wish the best for them starting their own thing. I look forward to see what they create and entertain us with content.

@efesell: that is good news and the part I was worried about most. Being based in Asia, I pretty much am never able to catch any streams live of the people I follow (GB, EZA, etc.), so I only have the option of VODs after the fact. Glad to hear the vids should be available on YT (I just woke up and haven’t had a chance to sub to the Patreon or listen to ep 0 myself yet).

Good luck to Nextlander! I really hope it goes well.