@burnttoast said:
@thornie said:
@Humanity said:
The arguments for these sort of threads never get any less real and the response of "wasn't there a thread like this just a month ago?" doesn't actually resolve anything.
Yah there was a thread like this a month ago, and no there still isn't any more content than last month. They're not settling in anymore. They have all their equipment. Quick Looks don't take a long time to do, I've done video editing and I'm no pro so it's impossible it takes Vinny that long to slap intro/outro bumpers on unedited footage. For whatever reason people thought that the lack of a studio was stopping them from getting more Quick Looks and original videos done - now they have a gigantic space for themselves. Brad complains about how theres nothing to play and nothing to do - quickly followed by saying he doesn't have time to get into a game. That Never Dead copy has been sitting on his desk for over a week now. It's an AWFUL game, whatever, just record yourself playing it thats all people want. They said they are not planning to do an Endurance Run any time soon when it's basically just doing 1 Quick Look a day. Theres no games out right now so why not, what else are they doing? Oh right, Brad goes to a lot of meetings, a lot and lot of meetings.
Listen I get it's the Giant Bomb and Jeff and crew don't give a fuck. Don't like it don't watch it. The crew doesn't feel like doing an Endurance Run so fuck everyone it's not happening, despite an obvious drought in gaming where this one piece of content produced daily would keep people super satisfied. But that sort of attitude seems strangely out of place when you're asking your fanbase to pay a yearly subscription for things like listening to Dave talk about vague details of the future site redesign or the Flight Club Quick Looks. Some other sites have paid memberships that only affect ads but I think Giant Bomb is the only website that I personally know, about video games, where you have to pay to see certain footage. I hate to dredge up this conversation but people paid because they saw GB starting up in a tiny murky basement and they were doing wacky, fun stuff and were all pro-members. People just want more of that crazy fun stuff. Why is I Love Mondays just a flipcam recording now? I just don't understand some of these changes and they never go on record saying "hey we're not doing XYZ because XYZ."
I wholeheartedly agree with this statement.
Agree with this and agree with a prior statement that only Vinny/Drew/Dave seem to have much enthusiasm anymore.
I would argue that why I, and a lot of the community, paid for giant bomb is that when we paid there was a lot of very funny, very creative, very original content. I would never pay for a no-ads on a straitlaced review or video game news site. Giant Bomb was something wholly different.
By no means do I think it was a bad idea to pay (its not that much), but will I renew? That is much harder this time. Giant Bomb seems to have transitioned or is transitioning into a more traditional video games site. It doesn't seem that the culture that came up with TNT/Endurance Runs/Breaking Brad/or the current form of the quick look is in full effect. I don't think new unique features like that are going to come up anytime soon and it will just be the grudging continuation of those existing features (note that I consider flight club/dave fortress as awesome but they aren't really any new feature, just the great technical game Vinny/Dave/Drew feature).
The one way Giant Bomb has added content in the last year is by adding more news stories/coverage/trailers. That content is pretty worthless on the internet and tangential to why I am on Giant Bomb. I think GB would benefit from a refocus on making funny videos and just drop everything else.
Begrudgingly agreeing with all this (apologies for the big copy-paste), bar the slightly extreme "drop everything else". To make a sweeping statement, i think premium members are backing an echo at the moment - the predictability and lack of personality Giant Bomb has been seeing lately certainly aligns towards a more 'traditional' (read: professional) model, and perhaps longtime users (of which there would appear to be many) are banking on the crew re-finding that spontaneous "you're hanging out with your friends playing video games on a friday night" tone the site's content used to be saturated in. 'Traditional' doesn't necessarily mean 'boring', but Giant Bomb's core philosophy of video games coverage was (is?) so refreshing that the transition seems more apparent than elsewhere. I kind of miss the days when i would get back from university with a cheese salad from the shop, and rather than put on the TV, go to Giant Bomb, put my feet up and know that i could rely on being able to watch the next installment of Jeff playing the hell out of Star Trek Online... whereas last week, maybe we were going to have a Dwarf Fortress Part 2? It was a 'maybe' and then sadly, Friday went by and it didn't happen. I think @burnttoast is on the right lines; the 'culture' (and perhaps punctuality) has dissipated - i can only hope it's reigned in. I know websites like Rooster Teeth are targeting comedy videos and not journalism, but Giant Bomb has Jeff Gerstman, and that guy is incredibly funny - the site's humourous potential and lightheartedness used to be a main attraction, and the team used to play towards that strength, but now that tone seems more background-orientated. And i've got to agree - as essential as trailers, news and coverage supposedly are to a video games website, they are in actuality largely redundant and interchangeable with all other video games websites. That's not really 'content' in the user's eye per se.
(Funny: i.e. Jeff fucking around with that Russian Ham Radio beeping sound in the Bombcast a few weeks back. Hell yes i was laughing).
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