I’m stoked about this news! I don’t super care for the current Giant Bomb crew, but the current dudes are all good people, and I’ve loved all past iterations of the site. So it’s really exciting to see GB finally open a new chapter!
Fandom was the third company in a chain of companies that bought Giant Bomb. For some reason they were always “bundled” with CNET and GameSpot, so as those sites have been passed around, Giant Bomb was just along for the ride, I guess.
yeah i edited the headline because even that was kinda clickbaity for what essentially amounts to Nintendo saying “no”. But at least good to know Nintendo isn’t buying into the AI hypetrain?
i think the article specifies that this is a new forecast based upon the Trump admin solidifying the final shape of the tariffs. So it seems unlikely at this phase that they will fold the current numbers, but we all know how smooth and predictable the Trump admin is.
did you read the article? do you understand the state that the industry is in atm? Yes there are indie games and yes they are great, but it has become incredibly difficult to break into the industry. Most of the indie games that we celebrate these days are coming from devs that entered the indie scene over a decade ago, devs like Supergiant or Davey Wreden. We still have breakout debut hits like Balatro, but it’s becoming harder and harder. The Steam store is a nightmare for discovery. Gaming publications are flatlining left and right, so you can’t look to them for discovery anymore. 1000xResist was an indie title that was named GOTY 2024 by a few publications, but they only just crossed 100,000 copies sold about a week ago. Balatro broke big because of a lucky discovery by NorthernLion, but the reach of creators like NorthernLion is shrinking every day.
TikTok and its peers are the new normal, and as the article discusses, this eats up the exact recreation time that people have been putting into video games and other long-form media. The kids don’t care about indie games because Tiktok is more fun/addictive. If they play videogames at all, they only care about Fortnite and Roblox and maybe some gacha game on their phone. Some of them care about indie creations within Fortnite and Roblox, but obviously even those games are becoming long in the tooth.
So idk. Maybe Tiktok will become the new main discovery platform and this is how the industry will survive, but it remains to be seen if people will actually get off of Tiktok to go play the games in question, or if people will just stay glued to Tiktok itself.
I hit a wall recently with Star Wars Outlaws. The open world is cool until you realize that every enemy base has two or three possible entry points, complete with yellow-painted paths. There’s no room for creative infiltration - either you do it Ubisoft’s way, or it isn’t possible in the game. The NPCs in the open world just drive around aimlessly. It doesn’t feel like anyone in the world is trying to achieve anything besides you. It makes me realize how far we have come with modern open world games like the recent Zelda games. Without room for emergent gameplay, an open world feels like little more than a framing device for a game that is actually linear.
i would feel okay about it if the energy cost of AI wasn’t so astronomical. It would be a fun quirk to play an open-world game full of characters that can sort of hold a conversation with you like this. But if we have to boil oceans to do it (and we still do as of this writing), then it just seems beyond frivolous. I love video games, but nothing in a video game is important enough to justify that energy cost.