6 people. 6 people were laid off, and the game’s real director, who is Chinese and is in the update videos, is still working on the game. Thaddeus Sasser, who is the director that was let go from the Seattle office, said that the Chinese director was in charge of everything relating to the game itself, and that Thaddeus was basically only in charge of budget and hiring.
My understanding was that this little 6 man team did work on the game in an r&d role, testing stuff for levels, characters etc. So they weren’t a useless team, but I doubt they were as big a deal as the media is making out.
Most jobs provide some value, but I guarantee you the Chinese team already had double the amount of Chinese workers doing everything these 6 people did already. NetEase operates that way, its not unusual for them to have Chinese employees doing the same job as any of their small foreign offices, as it is cheaper for them to do so when they inevitably cut the more expensive, probably less productive team (be that due to language barriers or timezone differences, whatever the reason).
They’ve been owned by Fandom for a little while now, and they even made some good changes lately, but then someone a few rungs up the corporate ladder was replaced with someone who decided to make a pretty huge change to the company that basically compromises the entire point of Giant Bomb, if not also Gamespot.
See my other comment below, but the gist of it is that they were told to pause streaming for a while as everyone tries to figure out a path forward. They put out one Bombcast that rebelled against the new Fandom “values”, and you can find a link to it if you look through Bluesky or the Giant Bomb reddit. They’re still paused, and it’s been about a week now. It might be the end of Giant Bomb, in which case, Grubb, Mike, and Dan have sworn to keep doing Blight Club, and the others are probably preparing their parachutes too. It also might not be the end of Giant Bomb; nothing’s been decided yet, and everyone currently still has their jobs.
Aww geez. Thanks for the summary duder. Been at a conference in the bay so kinda detached from it all. Gonna be wild if Fandom is the shitdicks that kill GB.
If Episode 888 is the last Bombcast, it will leave the world with the integrity that created it in the first place. Give it a listen, when you get around to it.
Dan removed GB from his BSky bio, and Grubb posted that he’s no longer with GB.
To add more context, last night Dan was streaming on Twitch and said he expects episode 888 to be the last Bombcast. He said things that, if he stays employed, would make Fandom the most understanding employer ever. To use words he used: he’ll keep taking their money as long as they’ll give it to him, but he expects that won’t keep happening for very long. He’s very annoyed with working for giant corporations and wants to bet on himself.
Here we are, 17 years after a bunch of clueless suits fucked with GameSpot and led to the creation of Giant Bomb. Now it’s a whole new set of clueless suits fucking with Giant Bomb. It’s the circle of capitalism.
I was in deep for GB until the Nextlander split and slowly trailed off since then. I still have mad respect for that group and follow most of them in one way or another. This is a new level of dire for them.
It’s looking like GB is now dead. At the very least, I’m confident I’ll continue to get Blight Club and Jeff’s news show, even though they won’t be at a site called Giant Bomb. Hopefully everyone else found a place where they can land on their feet. Their personal brands are stronger than Fandom’s.
I left with Jeff, Vinny Brad n Alex, tried to come back a few times, but it just never hit the same.
Lucy & Tamoor were great since their Gamespot days, Dan came back and Bakalar/Grubb are solid. I’m sure there are others that joined after the fact, but it just didn’t feel like GB without the core group. (Sidenote: hope jason is doing well with all the health stuff).
At one point I think Jan was downplaying Jeffs importance, and that may have been the last time I gave them my time.
I feel like the writing was on the wall since the last acquisition. Respect for them, trying to keep it alive, for as long as they did.
Edit: side shout-out to PackBenPack, Abby 'from ‘Brooklyn’ & Not That Will Smith. Ben has showed up on The Gerstmann Podcast, Abby & Will are regulars on Nextlander. Also miss Drew n Alexis. Rest in power Ryan Davis, China Truly Don’t Care.
I have no ill will toward Gerstmann, but there came a point where he became very unentertaining, so when I heard he was gone, it was a good signal for me to give them another try, and Grubb fit into that old Gerstmann interviewer role very well while also being a more positive guy and someone who might break some news. They had a really good group, and Blight Club was an all-timer Giant Bomb show.
Yeah, he did seem to get more negative near the end, most likely due to everything happening behind the scenes. And after Ben left, he didn’t really connect with anyone left over. Him & Ben played off each-other quite well, was reminiscent of Ryan, in a way.
No, not at all, generally not a good sign whatsoever (unless you’re wall st apparently). I guess there’s the chance it was particularly inefficiently staffed, but then Vox seem like they should have known what they were doing, so that doesn’t seem likely.
The new owner seems to have a few gaming brands already, Game Rant being the only one I’ve heard of though. Perhaps they’re planning a consolidation and this is the redundancy from that?
Not necessarily saying there’s a silver lining, just trying to rationalise
The new owner seems to have a few gaming brands already, Game Rant
Isn’t GameRant, like, 90% AI-generated clickbait content nowadays? Can’t talk about what they were about a few years ago, but every time I find a GR article when looking for something, it’s clickbait AI slop. Like “When will the sequel to X release? Everything you need to know” (scroll down to read post) “there’s no confirmation about a sequel”.
There’s also a complete rehash of the Wikipedia article about the game, its release and reception, and maybe even a slideshow of memes before you get to the “No confirmation” part. And then a list of all the times the developers have said, “yeah, if they want to do another one, we’d take their money.”
Looking through their portfolio, I honestly don’t know how XDA and Android Police maintain their quality levels. Everything else is Taboola-level click farming junk.
Aftermath is the only gaming site I really pay attention to anymore. I still have Kotaku and PCGamer in my RSS reader, but I don’t really read any of their articles.
That very same page: click-bair links after paragraph 1, paragraph 2, a top-anchored video link after paragraph 3, and an endless list of links at the bottom of the page. And that’s with DNS ad-blocking and ublock. I’m curious what it looks like without, but I don’t want to get tech-cancer.
Don’t throw shit if you are also covered in it, Kotaku. I never really liked the site but I don’t remember it being in this sad of a state…
I gotta admit, I was pretty amazed when they built Polygon out of scratch. It was just passionate game writers who is wanted to share the content they like reading. The first year was full of great writing. Then it kinda faded into the background, which isnt a problem.
Seeing how that happened gives me hope that a new website filled with passionate game writers will sprout up.
This is a big hit to gaming. Polygon was a reliable source and employed a lot of knowledgeable and passionate writers and creators. It had its critics because it didn’t cater to gamergate, but for most of us that was a good thing.
Valnet has blown up many sites before to make unreliable content farms. They practically invented the business.
I hope the laid off writers at Polygon are able to make something like 404media.
kotaku.com
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