What are you thankful for regarding gaming and Giant Bomb in 2023?

It's Thanksgiving in the US so I thought it might make sense for people to share some positivity about things they are thankful for this year in the spheres of gaming and Giant Bomb itself. If you want to throw in stuff in your personal life I'm pretty sure that @zombiepie won't force you to beat Kingdom II: Shadoan without a guide.

In gaming I am thankful:

Good single and traditional multi-player games are still being made despite industry trends and an executive push for exploitative live service games. We continue to get amazing games from every level of the industry,

Indie devs continue to push the boundaries of game design and give us new and exciting experiences. As AAA has gotten less experimental, with some notbale exceptions, indie devs continue to try new things, remixing old and inventing new gaming mechanics so gaming never gets stagnant. So many indie games are at such an incredible level of polish and creativity that I can't imagine sticking only to AAA these days.

The live service trend seems to be cresting and at least some publishers are realizing that not every game can be the only game people play. It seems that every few years we get these obnoxious trends that eventually go away and it's always great when they do. I am old enough to remember when motion controls had to be put into everything. Live service games aren't going away, but as long as those mechanics aren't shoehorned into every game whether they fit or not I will be happier.

Access to older games is slowly improving. A lot of older games, even licensed older games, have made their way to modern platforms recently. I love being able to find and play these older games without having to hook up a CRT. More compilations like Atari 50 please. Microsoft should get some of those old Activision games out and make it a priority.

Gaming in general seems to be in a decent place, at least creatively. Without discounting the business and employment turmoil that has rocked the industry this year a lot of great games have come out in relatively good shape. I love games and it's great to still have games I love coming out regularly.

For Giant Bomb I am thankful:

Giant Bomb still exists! There have been some tough years along the way but the site is still standing unlike a lot of contemporaries. That should be celebrated.

Most of the prior cast members are still putting out content so fans of every GB era have material from their favorite personalities. Jeff Gerstmann will always be a threat, but even people who aren't doing it full time like Ben Pack pop up places from time to time, which is cool.

Blight Club. It's one of the best shows GB has ever had and it comes closest to capturing the energy of in person content over the Internet. It effectively channels a lot of Dan's wacky ideas into a format where they work well. Right now it's the content I look forward to most on the site right now, so, yeah, I am thankful for Blight Club.

I agree with everything you said, honestly. Another thing in the gaming category is being thankful that Bobby Kotick will be out of a job in 6 weeks. Hopefully he goes far, far away from gaming.

My video consumption on this site has dwindled pretty dramatically, mostly due to having two young kids and work being pretty relentless since about April. But I’ve kept up with the podcasts, and the Bombcast has been great this year. Revengeance is something I didn’t think would interest me, yet I look forward to it every week for its sillier discussions (and more Tam!). Lastly, I’m thankful for anyone who still makes posts on these forums; I read most of it, even if I don’t leave a comment, and it helps keep me sane during endless meetings.

I'm thankful mostly for GB still being here despite all the issues and disappointments over the last couple of years. I'm thankful that the Wiki still exist, because myself and a lot of other duders put a lot of work into building it up since the site started, and there has been talk of getting rid of it in the past when things started to go downhill. And I'm also thankful that the forums are still active, even though the activity has decreased a lot because many people moved on from the site, once the main cast left. I personally like it this way, because I've never been a fan of highly active, chaotic, forums. In fact, I really started most of my posting after things slowed down. I was mostly absent during GBs golden years.

As far as gaming, I'm thankful that I'm still able to play and enjoy them, and that despite a lot of corrupt practices happening in the gaming industry today, great games still have a way of coming out for fans to enjoy.

hmm-

i'm thankful for these forums (cheap heat, as some cretins might say). but in all seriousness- real deal forums still encourage a type of discussion that's hard to get in more contemporary places like Discord or Reddit, so until the wheels fall off, thanks for sticking around gang.

re: games- i'm thankful for success stories like Larian. BG3 is the first game of theirs i've actively become a fan of, and while there's plenty of naysayers saying 'this can't be replicated,' i'm thankful they were able to have success on their terms while seemingly appeasing Gamers en masse.

I share a lot of these points @bigsocrates

Im thankful cool single player games are still being made. I had a lot of fun playing Spiderman 2, Jedi Survivor and 2.0 Cyberpunk this year. I really liked the Deadspace Remake. Excited for Alan Wake.

I'm thankful of this forum still being around after all of these years. I've been a huge Giant Bomb follower since day 1 and its accompanied me from being a nerdy teen to a happy, successful adult in his 30's. I havent consumed any actual giant bomb content since probably 2015 but the forums are what keep me sticking around.

I miss knowing that the site is thriving and healthy from a longevity sense but I also agree with some of the other users in that the smaller, more intimate state of the site has its own unique value. I feel like I get to participate in the discussions more and hear the thoughts and feelings of the special voices who remain and contribute interesting content and opinions that mean more to me then most gaming journalism.

So thank you!

Honestly, this. This forum's really nice because not only are most of the people on it pretty chill but also everyone puts effort into their posts which allows for more in-depth discussion of things. This is a particular topic I've been thinking about a lot lately as most of the forums I posted on or followed are either gone or ghost towns. Discord and Reddit aren't replacements for a good forum. On a recent podcast I listened to this was the topic for a bit. They concluded that Discord servers don't ultimately work as communities for anything other than very small communities (a group of friends, say) because they tend to be dominated by small groups of extremely online people who overwhelm all discussions which make having deeper discussions and finding useful information difficult. Similarly with Reddit, because of the karma system posts that aren't necessarily actually good or useful often float to the top while valuable information gets buried. A forum can be searched for useful information and generally if people disagree then they have to explain why which usually chases away the edgelords and reply guys since they never want to put in actual effort.

In general I'm glad GB is still around. I still try to catch livestreams and still watch Demo Derby whenever those show up. It's been a pretty rough couple years for games media. It still sucks that Jess and Jason were let go but the people remaining (they, of course, had nothing to do with that decision) seem to be doing the best they can with what they have and the output has been very good still even if it's scaled back a bit. Extra Life was a lot of fun this year.

For games stuff, I'm pretty thankful for the Steam Deck. I was on the fence about getting one but I decided to in March when they were on sale. It's weird to say but the Steam Deck has been quite beneficial to my mental health. I've had a lot of fun playing old games on emulators and it enabling me to play games without sitting at desk on my PC has been great. In general I'm trying to spend a lot less time on the internet (I purged all my social media accounts. I highly recommend that. It's really obvious to me now in hindsight how damaging Twitter was to my mental health) and at my desk in general so having the Steam Deck has directly helped that goal a lot.

Oh and Baldur's Gate 3. That game rules so much. I haven't been this invested in a game since Oblivion in 2006. BG3 is like a mid-00's PC game in all the right ways but without all of the downsides of that era of PC games.

Thats a perfect summarization of my thoughts and why I think I've lingered so long on Giantbomb - I've just never found anything to replace it on the corner of the internet that occupies my interest. Other then with one or two of my good online friends I've found Discord to be incredibly overwhelming and exhausting for the reasons you've enunciated. Especially the gait of the conversation being influenced by omnipresent actors with the time to participate and influence the rapid flux of conversation more readily.

Just thankful that this site is still around in any form there has been multiple times in the past few years years where I was like there goes GB and I am so happy it hasmanaged to adapt and overcome these challenges. It's not the same but I still love it

I share a lot of those points, especially access to old games and hesitation around the live service format, modern gaming is a hell of a lot less interesting to me currently, i didn't play a 2023 game this year, but i am still finding worthwhile gaming experiences and checking off the backlog.

I am also thankful for this forum, i like responding to things but occasionally i'm inspired to make a post about something and there isn't anywhere else i feel i can do that.

Most recently i'm thankful for the Perfect Dark PC port which now supports unlocked frame rates.

I'm thankful for GB, for Nextlander, and that next year we're getting a Riven remake.

@mach_go_go_go: WHAT

Giant bomb

This was announced last year, and still set for 2024:

While in Ireland we don't celebrate thanksgiving, a huge part of the Irish diaspora and my own relatives and direct family who live in the states do and I can't help but feel linked to the holiday.

It has been a massive year for me this year. About ten years ago I was a total mess, my mental health was in the shitter and I was floating from shit job to shit job after having to quit a college degree halfway after going back to college as a mature student. I decided to emigrate and help a buddy set up a business in a country where I didn't speak the language and was forced to make new friends and experience the world through a different lens. It was a gruelling 3 - 4 years and while I had an absolute blast, when I returned home after the business shut down, I vowed I was going to figure out my shit and start over with a solid, stable career.

I wanted to be an air traffic controller. It's something I had my eye on for years, but had no chance of getting as the recruitment process was notoriously difficult and I had zero experience. I did not make it past the first few steps.

I took a job in the civil service working for our police force here as a control room operator in their headquarters, taking emergency calls from the public and soon jumped at the chance to become a dispatcher.

This year, with four years dispatching under my belt and a wealth of experience in high pressure and serious incident management, I reapplied for the position of air traffic controller. Out of hundreds of applicants and a very tough year long recruitment process I not only made it through selection, but ranked only a few spots from the very top of the panel. At the start of next year I am going to be once again moving to start a new life at a new job, hopefully for the last time. I am beyond excited, and a little bit scared - but in a good way!

To say I am thankful is an understatement. Thankful for my family who supported me when I was at the end of my tether and getting myself situated upon returning to ireland. Thankful for my friends who encouraged me the whole way and kept me sane through an awful few years of working in emergency services through a pandemic. Thankful for my colleagues who made me laugh and kept my brain occupied.

I am also genuinely and sincerely thankful for this dumb website. It has gone through many serious changes since I started paying attention to it in 2010, just like myself. With all the ups and downs Giant Bomb has been my favourite, most consistent source of entertainment, distraction and comfort. This website has been there through some extremely dark chapters in my life, and I hope Jan, the Jeffs, and all the staff sincerely take what I am saying to heart if they happen to read over this thread. You have done a fantastic job keeping all this together, and are currently making some of the most fun and engaging content the site has ever produced. Thanks for being a great bunch of duders.

And thanks to the GB community for being consistently the most awesome community on the Internet. I read the forums a lot while not posting much. I mostly lurk on GB infinite these days as I don't have time to chat there alot, but there's a great crew in there all the time and I am thankful for the chats we have had at times when it was sorely needed.

Thanks world, and thanks Giant Bomb!