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Comment by sylens | Hacker News Reader

Giant Bomb is a bit of a tragic tale because they essentially pioneered the idea of personality driven game streaming at a time when most video game sites were still doing the templated 5 section review. The problem is that they were a bit too ahead of their time, so they had to rely on outside funding which caused them to be sold - first to CBS, then Red Ventures, and now Fandom. If they were launching today, it would be a patreon funded YouTube channel without the overhead of an in person office, rolling your own video streamer, etc

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I don't think they had issues making money, they had issues hitting unrealistic growth targets being set by their overlords. This was discussed on the most recent Nextlander podcast. Nextlander being 3 of the Giant Bomb OGs.

No issues making money once they were up and running, but they needed to bootstrap somehow and therefore weren’t just owned by Jeff G from the start

Jeff Gerstmann, one of the founders, also goes into details about this, Giantbomb was always making money, but had issues scaling up because corporate wouldn't invest in them. He says that it was very hard for them to monetize the podcast, which was one of the biggest podcasts before the boom, because they wouldn't allow him to sign a deal with a ad network, nor would they provide a sales team so they could get those ad deals.

CBS also owning Gamespot was a big issue, because it wasn't making money but it had the potential of bringing much more if they could fix it. It got even worse with the last 2 rounds of buyouts, because the buyers never wanted Giantbomb, it was a package deal.

While the monetary overhead of an office is a fact, that couch also built their show. The in-person dynamics of both the podcast and their other shows were a class above the remote-only version that was forced by the east/west split, and later COVID. I miss that couch.

They pioneered it, but they lost because "gig-economy" streaming is better at finding diamonds in the rough. Giant Bomb couldn't find more Vinny's or Dave's no matter how hard it tried (and it did try).

Youtube can pay okay when you hit those 6 figure subs, but it's still not quite enough to pay for a traditional office setup. Not even a small one. Sadly, geting 10 vinnies on one channel doesn't get you 10x Vinny income, it's better to do a setup like Channel Awesome (minus the whole harassment and rebellion of the clients) and manage 10 Vinnies if you had the choice.

I think they all lost a little something when Ryan suddenly died.

That was definitely the case in my opinion. I used to listen to the Bombcast religiously, and it just wasn't the same after Ryan died. I kept listening for a while, but eventually tuned out because he really did bring something irreplaceable to the table.

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