PAX West 2017: the Giant Bomb Panel

@hungrywinnebago: That was me, and you're on: PM me and I will gift you a year of premium. Not joking!

I'm the guy who asked why I can't give Giant Bomb more money. Sorry if it annoyed everyone, I promise you it was not done because I'm a sycophant or because I wanted to try to appear to be some sort of special fan. It's simple: I spend a tiny bit of money on Giant Bomb per year but watch THOUSANDS of hours of awesome content. I have been running my own business for 7 years, and I'm well aware of how hard it is to keep something going for this long, successfully. The short of it is, I get so much out of Giant Bomb but don't have an easy way to help ensure its long-term survival. As I joked in the question, there's CBS money, but I want to keep Giant Bomb around as long as I can and the only way I can directly help that is by both spreading the word and by paying for their content.

Being able to more easily gift subs is great, and I plan to use it. But rather than subscribe myself for 5 years at a time, I'd just love to be able to up my subscription cost to benefit the site and help secure it. That's all. Wasn't trying to be annoying or tread old waters, I've just thought about this many, many times over the past near-decade and saw an opportunity to ask Jeff directly why this isn't a thing.

(Relatedly, Alex made a great point that because they're a CBS property, me giving them more money means some percentage of that actually goes toward Young Sheldon, and I had nightmares that night because of it. Oh well.)

Jeff was super good, he has this hosting thing down

@pslyy: Ah ok. I thought it was going to be Dan, like how he said Weezer sucked on that Rock Band QL or whatever it was. At least I know Jeff is (partially) joking about it.

The reason it's a cover of the Bowie song in Metal Gear 5 is related to the story. Ending spoilers: Think about who you play as, a clone of Big Boss, a cover.

Well that was a pretty uninteresting panel of 3.2 people talking about topics they have beaten to death months and years before.

Vinny, please give Abby some training operating the camera, that was incredibly shaky.

Dan is the Lu Bu of questionable eateries.

I know a lot of people ask indie wrestlers a similar question, and they often suggest just buying more merch or whatever. Maybe you can try that? Or slip Jeff a few singles every time you see him at a show?

The nice crazy man who wants to give you guys more money for no more content is, to betray my cleverly misleading wording, super not crazy.

I don't need merch. I've enough crap in my house and while sure, I would like a Giant Bomb coffee mug at some point, at least in theory, that's still like a one time thing.

Meanwhile I just sat through two hours of bonus entertainment this week because a Pax happened. And it really brightened my day. Maybe that says more about my life then Giant Bomb but hey. Value is in the eye of the consumer...something something... Capitalism maybe?

For how much I've given Netflix for me to then not watch it (cancelled), or the cable companies (cancelled), or paid for a random game I honestly knew at the time of purchase I'd never really have time to play, it seems fair. It's not even a matter of "You guys deserve more", rather then I've gotten so much value out of my subscription that you've earned a tip or something I suppose. So much of life demands money up front regardless of intrinsic value or even a personal desire to spend it. Choosing to support a thing you don't have to is a nice change.

I don't know. Raising the price doesn't seem like the answer, might scare off new subs. Maybe you don't even need it! Then I think we're all cool with the status quo. But it seems like a cagey business to be in so if dollars help keep you going...

I think "whale" based economy is super gross, so I do worry that some poor fool won't be able to help themselves and give you guys all their savings. But I'm not rich and have self control. I'd happily kick an extra twenty bucks in six months into my yearly subscription if I happened to have a spare twenty on hand that month. It'd all add up.

There's probably a good, not gross way to do it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I do wait for the sale myself, so I give GB like $30-35 a year. Meanwhile, I pay a couple podcasts $5 a month for 4 episodes of an hour or so. I understand the point you were making @gutsack

I don't make any money but if I did I would feel the same way.

to those that have suggested wanting to throw more money at giant bomb, I have an idea. Why not buy a bunch of shirts or whatever and then donate them to charity? Helping giant bomb and a good cause, and a tax writeoff

@ryan3370: this is a great idea. They can also buy a size M of the new shirt and have it shipped to my house.

Press X to make a great game

wasn't there a tip jar in the store for a while for something like this?

Dan is 100% right about Mario Sunshine. I actually didn't know it was a polarizing game until GB started doing Steal My Sunshine. Continues to blow my mind that people could consider Sunshine a 'shit game'.

Also the guys being down on Persona 5 is a bummer. Definitely in my top 5 games of the year so far, but ah well.

Dan Ryckert - Sponsored by Insulin.

GB should just do a fundraiser towards some weird event. I think they've said they'd like to do a college tour? Is that just a matter of not having time/people or is that actually a money problem? There's a bunch of things GB staff have said they've considered doing and I wish they would actually pull the trigger on some of them. This isn't a start-up anymore. Hire people so you're never understaffed and expand. Do events and more weird stuff, or build a news division.

You're under the impression that this is all just Wayne's World. Disabuse yourself of this notion. Giant Bomb is a very small piece of a much larger entity called the CBS Corporation, a global media conglomerate.

Before you say that such a large, well-funded business would be just happy to throw money at these duders and their silliness at a whim, I'll gently point out that you're not talking like a corporate accountant, or a brand manager, or anything remotely similar to the side of the table opposite the staff of this video game website. Just "doing events and more weird stuff, or build a news division" isn't really up to the talent of a what is ostensibly a niche comedy troupe subscribed to by way less than a million users. They have enough leverage to pitch to their money managers annually what they want to do for pretty much an entire year (and that's the whole smash, P&L, payroll, everything for a year because, you know, corporate accounting) and then they go from there. They don't just announce to Human Resources that they need somebody this week and that person materializes by end of business on Friday.

Jeff talks about this kind of stuff all the time on Jar Time. UPF two weeks ago they were talking about how Jason has been waiting forever for HR approval for a new hire. They talk about the reasons they can't do this kind of stuff as much as they talk about wanting to do it. They've pretty much struggled with this unfortunate dynamic for years, because if they do a big road show, that's great for the live audiences, but the site's content will suffer because getting temporary hires to do substandard quicklooks and a ton of text articles is something the audience is loathe to endure. Hiring somebody full-time on a NYC or SF salary would be great, but then we come back around to those money people I mentioned before. Those are the people that control Giant Bomb. The duders just work here. They have control of their content, and Jeff, Brad, and Vinny probably have some job security given how integral their personalities are to the site, but that's about as far as it goes. Their internet celebrity means about as much to the C-suite at CBS as junior high school football stars mean to an NFL scout. That's not to knock on them, I think these guys are great and I've been giving them money for years. But maintain some perspective, what they do is obscure, and difficult to explain to suits in a conference room how exactly it makes money on top of their salaries, their equipment, and other services that have to be paid for before any content can be produced and profit is assessed.

At least that's what I'm assuming CBS thinks. I don't work there, I don't know. Listen to these duders more, they talk about this stuff all the time, almost every couple of videos.

Huh, so apparently i know more than 1 sixpence none the richer songs.

I'm not sure how i feel about that 'how can we give you more money ' question. Especially since GB has introduced all kinds of ways to spend money on GB stuff in the last months. There's a steady flow of merch appearing and you can gift memberships now.

It feels philosophically wrong to have a customer tell the supplier that he wants to spend more money for the same product. If i go to Gamestop and give them 80$ for a 60$ game, and tell them to hand 20$ to the developers of said game, it's just not going to happen. The price has been set at 60$ for many reasons, and can therefore be seen as a viable price for all shareholders in the transaction. I would expect the same to be true for Giantbomb memberships. I don't think they would have sales so often if it was unsustainable / hampering the site. I frankly don't think it's the customers job to look in on a business and suggest them to make changes to their business when we don't have any insider information. I rather trust the people in charge that they are not shooting themselves in the foot by asking for unsustainable prices.

If you really want to spend more money on the staff without dipping into the merch, send them a cool mailbag. Go support the things they support, like that video game museum archive initiative that Jeff is passionate about. Donate to a charity that they feel strong about. Go to Taco Bell. Go to Buffalo Wild Wings. Buy a Zojirushi Tumbler. Tell all your friends to subscribe.

@mendia I think people have a hard time thinking back about the time frame in which 3d games got released. When you go back to a classic 2d game like Final Fantasy 6, the game still looks appealing because there was time to master those 2d sprite techniques. But when you look back on games like Mario Sunshine, Tomb Raider, Kingdom Hearts, Gex, Croc etc, you see a lot of games that are still figuring out how to make 3d games work. How to make the camera work. How 3d movement should work. These issues are now mostly solved, so looking back on those games that are still figuring things out will look bad to most. That doesn't mean that for their time they might have been mostly good games back in the day. Hell, you have people saying that games like Metal Gear Solid and Kingdom Hearts are bad games, when anyone who played them at release would know that it's not only a hot take, but also a wrong take. In hindsight, there are problems with those games for sure, but that doesn't diminish how good they were for their time. Truly bad games of those times simply don't get talked about, because they don't matter. No one knows what Militato is because it was a bad game. No one talks about Tonic Trouble.

With the specific case of Sunshine, it also seems that it's just a different type of platforming than other Mario's. By having a jet pack, suddenly the game isn't about jumping at the exact right time to clear an obstacle in the one specific way that the game wants you to. Instead, it seems to be more about getting good air time and using the array of moves Fludd gives you to freely move around. That increase in freedom, means that the platforming is naturally less 'tight'. It being the game between the game that created a genre and the 3d game that is seen as one of the greatest Mario 3d games, also makes it hard for Sunshine to be seen as being on an equal level. Especially since the style of platforming in it is so different.

@hkr: Salad?

I love that Jeff calls Dan out on both how Dan plays PUBG, and on Dan's absurd love of brands.

@johnymyko: No, Dan doesn't give a shit about 'fancy' beer. I don't know where you're at, but I know in my home country of English Texas, beer is fucking crazy expensive; over here beer is cheap as fuck. So I've been known to double fist some draft beer (we've got a nanobrew / grille that has dollar craftbeer drafts).

That said, most Americans appreciate a good beer.

Was Abby shooting handheld here? It's her first PAX show and it seems difficult to run solo but could nobody give her a tripod to make those close ups less shaky? As someone in video production I totally get it you have to work with what you got sometimes but the footage here is a bit rough. Can anyone who was there confirm what she was using to stabilize the shots (if anything)?

I'd totally be down for another pay-tier of GB. Like the duder in the audience, I actually feel kind of guilty paying less than $50 a year for hundreds of hours of entertainment. Maybe introduce a $100 plan where subscribers get some exclusive signed merch or something?

ben is Giant Bombs best hire.

Do they sell Buckfast where you live?

Zoomed in shots are a little shaky. Otherwise, great panel!

holy crap some of you people are so miserable

I agree with dude that you should spend more time thinking about how we can you money. What if there were, like, a daily thing where we could come to the site and spend $4 on something dumb instead of a latte or whatever? I would honestly, HONESTLY feel better about spending that $4 on Giant Bomb than on some cheap Starbucks. There's gotta be a way.

I really respect Jeff's comments about the early access Goty thing. It would feel kind of dirty changing the rules cause this time they really like a game, when in the past they've stuck by it. Pubg will most likely release this year, so it doesn't really matter in this specific case, but I still appreciate the stance on integrity.

Also, I'm all for them changing that stuff for 2018.

@aimlessaj: yeah. The close up stuff was pretty shaky. Maybe the stabilizing wasn't on? I don't remember drew being so wiggly.

@hehfay: there's a huge difference between business models. A company like CBS needs to show growth, once growth slows it's then about increasing revenue/profit.

Donating sounds like a good idea but it doesn't increase the number of eyes on the product. Eventually some business guy or even an investor is going to look at this part of CBSi and ask if the subscriber count isn't increasing what is being done to increase profit. This could be cuts or consolidating back end stuff, it could be increasing the subscriber fee. There would be some losses, people pissed off but the goal is to get two bars on a graph to cross figuring out the limit. It's like you're growing a tree and once it's grown as big as it will go you decide to bend it to the point it almost breaks.

And if there comes a point where you've met the limit of growth and have pushed the costs/profit to the limit, you can then extrapolate how much the business will earn over the next X number of years. It then becomes a decision of is it worth investing this much money for this much return, or "we can potentially make this much money over 10 years" or we can sell it now and definitely make this amount of money. In doing so we meet this quarters figures.

The guy's heart is in a good place, he wants to guarantee the health of the site. The best way to do this is what Jeff said, gifting subs. Get your friends involved, talk to them about getting a free trial or instead of buying a sub for 2020 get someone else one. Hopefully it hooks people in, and for the business people they're looking at GB thinking they're a growing business let them do their thing.

Mass Effect was rad. That is all.

The food at Buffalo Wild Wings tastes like they should have a drive-thru.

I'm late to this but this was a great watch! Dan's BWW story is hilarious!

Also I'm happy they addressed the PUBG GOTY status problem on that panel too. I'm totally in support of Jeff's stance where they shouldn't change the rules this year just to show favoritism to PUBG over other EA titles this year or in the past. Maybe give it GOTY with an asterisk to honor the joy they've had with it while giving a complete game the traditional award. This is of course if PUBG stays in EA all year. It won't matter if it's "officially released" in 2017. Also the rules might change otherwise for actual GOTY talk, but I think Jeff has an excellent argument.

I have really enjoyed GB's end of the year coverage in the past, but it feels like everyone has been talking about GOTY since March and at this point I'm kind of just burnt out on it.