Saving Games Journalism With Giant Bomb

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3:04Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

3:16Better Offline. As a reminder, you can now buy shirts, hoodies, and even mugs in our merchandise store. There's a link in the notes. God damn it. Give me money. I need you to wear the shirt for me. Today, I'm joined by the new owners of gaming site Giant Bomb, Jeff Bacalar, Jeff Grubb, and Dan Reichert. Fellas, welcome to the show. It's pronounced as Petron. Okay. All right. Okay. Most people get... I definitely, on an interview a few days ago, missaid my own name. And missaid better off... I was like, better off shit. and Matt Oselski, my producer, regularly hears these things. So that's always fun.

3:53But congratulations, by the way. So walk me through, Dan, perhaps walk me through what happened. So there was some filing in and out from Giant Bomb and then you guys kind of took it over. Yeah, so I started the longest ago in like 2014. So in terms of how the recent stuff went down, I think the Jeff's here. Fellas, tell me if I'm wrong. I feel like you maybe have had some more time on the phone with lawyers. No, this is good. I like watching this guy sweat. Let's see. No, I just wanted to make sure I didn't, I'm not like, oh yeah, I did all this work. You know, it's like, I just kind of fell into this.

4:29No, Jeff and Jeff left Fandom, our previous parent company. And as part of the deal, we're able to buy Giant Bomb and are bringing in, you know, me, Jana Chowa, our longtime producer, and our good friend, Mike Minotti, who has been trying to be full-time at Giant Bomb for a long time. And he completely skipped full-time and went straight from contractor to co-owner of the website. That rocks. Yes, yes. So yeah, long history of corporate ownership and dating back to 2008 and four different owners basically. And now I guess we are the fifth group. Nice. So what is the new structure? So you guys are all the owners.

5:11You're going to be doing the same kind of games journalism you're already doing. I know that the YouTube channel went offline. Is it coming back? Yeah, we were streaming to YouTube just right before we came here. Yeah, we were doing our Black Club show. So right now, the structure looks like, are we getting all the stuff from fandom that we need? And they've been very helpful in that stuff. But it's like just kind of getting the keys to everything. And then there is a whole other process of us getting a business started because this wasn't like us necessarily buying the business. We bought a lot of assets.

5:42So we have to start our own business to sort of take these things on and make it make sense. So in parallel, while we were goofing off, while Mike was playing Rascal for the PlayStation One for our game where we play bad games, Baclar was still working in the background, making sure that we'll have a bank account and stuff like that. But as far as like the overall idea of what this company looks like, yeah, it's going to be us kind of taking it all on ourselves, kind of splitting it up evenly amongst us and just getting to work and investing our time and seeing a payoff because now it's all on us.

6:15It's weird as well, because it's like both one of the most depressing times in games journalism history and one of the most encouraging because the amount of layoffs are horrifying. But you and Aftermath have really come out of, well, I don't want to say nowhere because it's been quite public and chaotic. You kind of seem to be building a new model for journalism writ large. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think the lesson everyone learned, they learned 10 years ago, where the contemporary understanding of games media, or really any media that covers some sort of entertainment, is probably not compatible with what a corporation would need out of that in terms of revenue expectations and just filing in in a way that makes sense.

7:05And that's fine. And I think, you know, what this, with the aftermath experiment and all these other sort of independent journalistic entities has sort of shown is that this can work with a private sort of consideration of ownership as opposed to, you know, just having it be another asset in the corporate media portfolio. right that and i think the value that these types of entities present make a lot more sense right under the guise of private ownership than they do you know under the umbrella so kind of yeah it kind of feels as well like games journalism gets pulled in very hard by these big private equity i'm not specifically referring to any of them just to be clear uh these large entities buy them because i imagine they're traffic drivers and there's always news and there's always kind of search traffic coming in from games and guides and stuff like that.

8:01These things have been honed to be SEO, you know, sort of machines for a long time. The people who have been in charge of them have once understood that to be very important. Now, of course, like Google has made things very complicated for a lot of sites that built their sites in one way. And now they have to shift and no one really understands the way the winds are blowing. But yeah, that traffic means something to someone for sure. And that's why you see something like a polygon becoming the target of of a Valnet. I guess the public understanding is Valnet approached Vox Media about Polygon and asked them about it like some time ago and they've been trying to make this happen since then.

8:37Vox wasn't necessarily shopping around, but it became the target of that because it does have this traffic. It has this built in. If you search for something, there's a good chance Polygon is going to serve it to you in the video game space. And yeah, so these kind of equity firms, they spot this and they want to extract that value, it means bad things for the actual people working at these sites almost universally every time. And that's why this other model of us coming and being like, we're going to own it ourselves and we're going to have a direct relationship with the audience. That kind of is the only ground to retreat to at this point.

9:10We are either going to keep having this stuff because we're all in it together, as hokey as that sounds, or we're just not going to have it at all. Those are the options now. Yeah. It's also, I think it's important to to call out that like there does exist a type of person that i think we all sort of slot into in this goldilocks zone that has sat on both sides of the sort of influential divide where you know we all began our careers in a very kind of like i don't maybe not antiquated is not the right word but it's certainly a traditional sort of like media and and and publisher relationship and I worked for a newspaper I worked for PC Zone and CVG and let's be honest we're not that old 99 years young we sit in this very weird sort of like like I said this Goldilocks zone where we're like we understand what came before what happened during and now what's after and I think that very uniquely positions a small slice of institutional knowledge where you can leverage that in a way that not a lot of people have that sort of insight from both sides of the fence.

10:24And that goes back to the founding of Giant Bomb in 2008 because it was four guys that broke off from GameSpot, more traditional web-based gaming media and formed this very personality-focused thing. Kind of in the early days of YouTube gaming personalities and things like that, but it did come from that institutional knowledge. People that had work, E3s dating back to the 90s and things like that it wasn't just you know some kids that started youtubing and getting big it kind of straddled the line from the beginning i admit one of the saddest things to me was watching pc zone collapse it was the magazine i worked at the games magazine i worked in england and in a different time i think they would have come together we would have come together and done something but 2008 was when that happened i was moving to america as well but that was future publishing bought them fuck future i don't give a shit yeah what are they going to do to me so yeah and they repeatedly kind of do that stuff to people so yeah fuck for real real quick on that like i remember thinking like uh back when that was happening in 2008 when egn and one up was collapsing it's like it had the one up yours podcast kind of lasted a few more years they all could have easily just transitioned that into a a podcast with with ads for one thing and then a direct to a customer supported a way of doing things on the other hand and that really would have taken off for them instead they well maybe this guy had to go kind of filter into working in the the corporate side for making games the problem is with podcasts is as you well know like monetizing them is very difficult i mean people complain about the ads here being under iheart radio i mean it works great because cool zone media and iheart leaves us alone fairly but people complain about the ads it's like have you tried starting a fucking podcast it isn't cheap so it's it's just a frustrating but great time because aftermath's doing really interesting stuff that i feel is going to be i feel like giant bombs can be very like classic gamer stuff like creative but still very much about the games and aftermath is doing that plus what would have been called derisively new games journalism way back when god you remember that fellas yep new games i remember that i remember when people were talking about that let's talk about that ludu narrative dissonance there you go yeah oh Oh, fuck.

12:30Like the start of Polygon, press reset type stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Explain that for the listeners, because it sucks, but they should know. You talk about the Polygon thing or specific? Go ahead, Dan. Oh, it's just like games media going back to like, you know, EGM and Game Informer, like the magazines of the 90s to like the early, you know, web-based IGN GameSpot stuff. It was just, you know, we were parroting press releases and it's like news stories were basically like, there's a new box art for Assassin's Creed. How many guns does your game have? Yeah, exactly. You're getting more levels this time?

13:04That type of stuff. So it's like, that's why I even, back when I started, never considered myself a journalist because I realized it's just like, okay, I'm just kind of reporting on silly things here and giving a score to a game and things like that. But I think that there's something marvelous about that with games journalism. It's why there's, because I don't, like, Aftermath, they'll write, and Geeta especially over there has written like very long-form, thoughtful, emotional pieces. I think that that's what's, I don't want to say missing because it's happening, but that's what makes game journalism great.

13:29You can have stuff where it's just like, I played something, it stunk to shit, it made me angry, I want to kill someone, but I love it because it's got this one tiny, like there was, I remember reviewing a game, Zona, the Skyfall movie tie-in game. Oh my God, Activision and Bond game, yeah. Remarkably tight Gears of War clone. And I remember being like, this sucks, but I love it. That's great for gaming as well, but then the very deep emotional stuff. And I think that it's what lends itself to exactly what you're doing, which is this kind of, let's get together, let's make something about our hobby and our job and whatever.

14:05And the in-between part can be giant bomb. Yeah, I think there's very much room for both. Because I remember when Polygon was starting in probably like the 2013, 2014, whenever that was. And they were very much banging the drum of like, we are doing serious games journalism and telling human stories. And it's going to be this emotional, deep stuff. And I remember looking at that and being like, I don't know how the fuck to do that. But I can tell you if Never Dead is any good. But I think there's room for both. because someone like me broke in because I wanted to work with a bunch of dorks and talk about video games and now make videos about video games.

14:38But then there are important stories to tell. And I think, you know, to give Grubb some credit here, I think Grubb might be the best I've ever seen at balancing both. Like he does the daily news show on GiantBomb.com and will cover the serious stuff and layoffs and just kind of issues facing the industry. But then he'll also, you know, dress up like Bubsy and play Bubsy 3D for Blight Club, you know? So I do think Grubb is uniquely qualified to do both ends of that. Yeah, and I enjoy them both. I definitely remember growing up in like reading EGM or game players and being like, man, the people who are in this magazine, they have a lot of personality and they clearly fill every page with that.

15:14And I like know these people by name now. I kind of know what they're what they're into. And I built a real connection with them. And then, you know, that would actually lead me into some of their real reporting on stuff that mattered to them, especially in EGM and like Next Gen Magazine later. And I just remember like really enjoying both sides of that a lot of games are silly and stupid. And wouldn't it be fun if we took that seriously? And I really enjoy that aspect of my job. Yeah. And CVG used to have this kind of yellow. It was, I don't know if you ever physically read an issue of Computer Video Games Magazine.

15:47It's British and all, but they had this middle section that was in like, almost like Yellow Pages style. And it was just rambling shit. It was beautiful. for it's like games genuinely like i i was a loser up until like two years ago and like games were the one thing that i could bond with people over because it didn't require you to be anyone like i played a shit ton of everquest i was i think it was one of the first mmo like real mmo reporters in england ollie welsh as well legend sure yeah shots ollie but it's like and one of the leftover polygon people it's just what pisses me off about all this as well is it doesn't seem that hard to run a games journalism outlet well you just don't hire so many people and make them do 11 stories a day i mean the the real sad thing with polygon is they didn't make any of those mistakes i when people saw the layoffs they're like oh that's a lot of people it's like they were successful and profitable and could have kept growing but they had a very sort of like moderate take on okay yeah we could but let's just keep all this sustainable and a lot of that goes down to the leadership of Chris Plant, who I just admire so much.

16:53Plant rocks. He's got such a good head on his shoulders, and it just filtered all the way down through Polygon. So it's like they were doing it right, and even Vox was letting them do it right. It's just like even when that happens, there's that buzzsaw that's going to show up and be like, we're going to rip this thing apart and find a way to make more money from it, so here's some money. It's fucking Vox. I didn't know they were profitable. That is so infuriating. It was a successful business, I think is how I would phrase it.

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20:22It's so fucking stupid because I feel like these outlets could on some level, maybe not a ton, print money. Like they, there are tons of gamers who love reading stuff. Sure. Like it sounds like Polygon hadn't a sustainable operation. IGN is insane. I don't know how many people work at IGN. IGN breaks on my phone. I don't know if you've tried to look at an IGN guide. Sometimes if you scroll too fast, it just goes, nah, sorry, mate. I think there's so many sites now. It could be a recipe for - You're going to have to play Ragnarok on your own. Yeah, yeah. It just goes to the top or pops up a thing and you accidentally click the wrong thing.

20:58Yeah, I hate that shit. Yeah, the internet sucks now. It really does. This is not an IGN problem as much as it is - Someone should do a show about that. A lot of those sites are not – it's tough to really say that they all have agency in a way that you want, right? And I think everything becomes this Frankensteinian creation of like sort of meshing it with other properties that sit alongside as sister companies. And you're just never going to have that organic feeling. I do think you're right. I think the Polygon example is good because it was sort of like this semblance of like, oh, this does feel sort of vacuum sealed off in a way that works.

21:41And everyone there, you know, really doing a tremendous job. But for the most part, whenever you see a lot of these massive behemoth legacy media sites, they are just this, you know, a Voltron creation that doesn't really allow for that amount of agency that, you know, I think the spirit of all those sites wants to be. Yeah. And I think that, like I've said earlier, they're kind of the obvious victim of any kind of acquisition partner because it's just, you can turn them into a slop shop and then immediately kill them. Immediately kill them. Right, and that's what the internet's allowed for, right?

22:17And I know that's what I read what you say. You always have it spot on, Ed. We are just sort of willfully watching the death of everything and calling it out and just being like, yeah, that's the next ship that came into the harbor filled with ghosts. And we're just going to watch it continue on its way down to its next port of call. And that's it. It's just this parade of dead websites and dead internet. Ed, you're familiar with the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games, right? Of course. So I was watching, I was trying to read a story on Kotaku the other day. I can't remember what it was about. But it took me to a video instead.

22:56And there was a man talking over the video. And he kept calling it THPS. THPS. And I'm like, I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that before. And then it's like, oh, I'm listening to an AI voice. Of course I am. Of course I am. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yes, because you did it every time in the same time. THPS. THPS. Yeah, no one says that. No one says that. So I'm just like, that's, of course, that's, they all think they're going to be able to do that. That's the story we're going to have to keep telling over and over about what's happening with all these websites and these equity firms coming in here.

23:25And I mean, of course, I get turned off. I think most of the audience probably does get turned off when they experience that, right? Because the one thing about games and Stephen Spahn, who is an accessibility expert in the space, he used to tell me, like, why do we, why do I want to play video games? He's like, it's a currency. It's a social currency where I play something and I get to talk to someone else about it. and we get to share something we have a connection i mean you said the one thing you could bond over with people video games it's i think we all get that at the very fundamental level and so these corporations trying to find a way to take that out of there so they could save some money is obviously just going to blow up in their faces they just don't know it yet yeah and i actually think it could go the other way though which is as we get more independent gaming outlets i think that there could be real success there because yes i think that that's what people want to like Like there is a definitely a degree of hunger for when is a game coming out in the same way that people Google when the Superbowl is coming.

24:18Of course. When the Superbowl is coming out. When the Superbowl is happening. There we go. I do watch sports. I did a Superbowl episode. But I think no one actually reads these outlets just to learn that. They want a gamer who has played a shit ton of games who has a good voice to say, I like this or I'm worried about this. And I think the worst of games journalism has been when that's been dragged out of it. and even when like we were doing it was very early days of the website for cbg when we'd have to write shit and just be like this game's coming out it's going to be like this and i wouldn't say we weren't allowed to have character but it definitely wasn't encouraged which is strange because the cbg mag was always so rude it was it was utility you were doing utility work right as opposed to personality work that's kind of how it worked with like the old preview system with magazines is because like Like you weren't supposed to, since the game wasn't out yet, you know, it always turned around.

25:11But I remember I went to like a Xbox One pre-launch event thing and I played Rise, Son of Rome. And I remember just thinking it was like, I think the headline I used was like, oh, it's as fun as dialing a phone number because it's just like waiting for something to turn red. Then you press the red button and it just sucks. They're calling it Microsoft Snack. Yeah, yeah. And so I wrote that and it was like, it had a negative tone and the game was about to come out in like three weeks. And it's like, and I kind of said like, this seems like it might suck in the preview. And I remember like both like comments and stuff and people at work being like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

25:41We can't have this much like opinion in a preview. It's like, I think I can. This is going to kind of suck. You know, there's no, no rules there. I remember when, uh, uh, Mark McDonald over at EGM, uh, said he played too human and said, it's going to be terrible. And Dennis Dyack like, like insisted on coming on their podcast and talking to him about it and like scolded him for doing that. You're going to regret everything you said when you play the final version. We'll rue the day that you insulted two humans. I don't think he rued anything. There was no ruling. Jesus Christ. But this is even this conversation is what is fun about games journalism because even a shit game you have the kind of horse trading like shit.

26:21Do you remember that terrible preview? I do genuinely miss this about games journalism. Like it's the one it's probably I miss it more than the writing about the games because back at PC Zone we had like Loggs, Steve Hogarty, Will Porter um we had all sorts of like fun other people like ryan all the people from the mag who just yell at you and i think the and actually i'm curious your thoughts about this i think what this industry also needs to do is rebuild the solidarity because it was quite there was quite a lot of it in 2008 feels like it's kind of drifted and i feel like that's it's something in tech media i want to do too i want people to come back together and realize it really is us versus them then yes well i'm curious to hear where you think like the friction primarily lies i think what it is is the so many people have been hired fired hired fired so many people have left games journalism gone into pr and then the people that own these companies have stopped even being the classic like fortune as fortune future or dennis publishing it's the people so you've always This head IGN is this kind of thing over here, this juggernaut.