Just a couple weeks ago, it seemed like Fandom was on the verge of blowing up Giant Bomb, a website known for its personality-driven persistence in the face of multiple ill-suited corporate overlords. But then, at PAX East, the GB crew took the stage to announce that they’d pulled off the impossible in the year 2025: a happy ending to a tale of digital-media-related woe. On the latest Aftermath Hours, we ask newly minted Giant Bomb co-owner Jeff Grubb how Giant Bomb gained its freedom.
We discuss how Jeff and the rest of the Giant Bomb crew managed to buy their freedom and what the future holds now that the shackles are off. Jeff says to expect a lot more, as he puts it, “bullshit” that a corporation wouldn’t view as profitable or brand safe. We also dig into questions to which there are not necessarily concrete answers yet. What would it look like for this version of Giant Bomb to bring on more people? More pressingly, how does the site put together one of its beloved “Couch” events for Summer Game Fest in a few weeks, sans Fandom’s resources?
Then we move on to recent Switch 2 news and talk about very specific games we’ve been playing (RoadCraft, a truck sicko sandbox, and The Hundred Line, aka Fire Emblem for freaks). Finally, we reach into the depths of the mailbag and pull out the Scrappy Doo of video games, as well as an extended digression about Chris’ wild yet undeniably alluring Norwegian chair.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can begin staging our own rival Couch events, leading to cross-site pro wrestling showdowns that will easily steal the spotlight from Geoff Keighley (he can also wrestle, if he wants).
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Nathan: What was happening at Giant Bomb that made things feel, to viewers at least, like they were off – that made you guys feel constrained in a way that independence now allows you to be free of?
Jeff: Let me think about how I can talk about this: Mostly, it is the wider issue of making a games media business make sense in a corporation in the first place. I think we’ve seen that run into a wall across the board. Everyone’s kind of looking for answers, and a lot of people have ideas about what that can look like, and a bunch of stuff gets tried. Sometimes multiple things get tried at the same time, and they sort of clash.
But the reality is, we don’t know how to make something like Giant Bomb work inside a corporation, and I think other people on that [corporate] side also trying to figure that out was always going to be a challenge. If it wasn’t this moment [that we reached an impasse], it would have been something else. We were heading here no matter what.
But in terms of things going down, it was just a matter of, we were trying this livestreaming thing where we were gonna be live for most of the day, and that just had so many other issues with the two brands – Giant Bomb and GameSpot – coming together and mixing those things. What should the tone be? We just missed a couple times. We were aware of that and trying to figure that out, and then some new leadership came in and were like “Let’s pause some stuff,” and that caused things to spiral out in the public. Reality was, we were figuring some things out, but it just kept getting worse, in some ways. That is when separating became a really good idea – right there in that moment when it was time to pause the streaming. We could start talking about that.
Nathan: What was the sequence of events? How did it go from you being out of a job to announcing at PAX that you partially owned the thing? Seems like it was a rollercoaster.
Jeff: I can only talk vaguely about this stuff, but in general it seemed like this was an idea that Fandom was actually working on for quite some time before they presented it to us. The idea was ready to go.
Nathan: So they came to you with the idea, as opposed to you coming to them?
Jeff: Yes, I think this doesn’t work unless they think it’s their idea and they’re doing the right thing, and I agree. There was never a moment where I was questionable about them offering it, but [I wasn’t sure] that was something we could make sense of – like, that we could pull off. So that was vaguely in that same time as I was leaving. There was a day or two where I just didn’t believe [buying the site from Fandom] was gonna be possible; it’s just something the company says to make things cool in the moment.
But then as I looked back on it, I was like “What if we did just try?” Then we went full bore on it, and I realized I had some options. I had my personal Patreon, and I could sort of fall back on that if none of this worked. Or maybe we could’ve started something new. But in this moment, if we could – and that’s the way I was looking at it – save Giant Bomb, we should definitely take that on as a responsibility. So it was kind of this weird black hole of me wondering what was going on and getting this offer at the same time, as I was leaving the company.
Nathan: I recall now that when people were still wondering what was going on at Giant Bomb, fans noticed that you all followed the same Instagram account. Was that a possible next project if things with Giant Bomb didn’t work out?
Jeff: Yeah, basically. Not much more to say about that, but yeah, we were definitely talking about a bunch of ideas. That stuff was very nascent – putting some placeholders there in case the worst happened or we had to make a quick exit. We talked about a bunch of things, but that was definitely one of them.
There’s a show we do called “Blight Club” where we just play bad games; we play them to completion, we take turns. We really like doing that show. It’s been a lot of fun for us. Right now Mike [Minotti] is playing Rascal for PS1, which as a character designed by Jim Henson’s workshop. We make the person playing dress up as a character from the game as well. And so in my mind it was like, “We’re gonna do Blight Club no matter what.” Maybe we’d do it off on our own, and then we could sort of build stuff up around that.
And so the fact that we can just keep that going, and it’s still being built up around Giant Bomb, is awesome. Now we can reinvest in all these things and get back to changing the incentive of how we view what we should be making. For a while it was like “This should probably serve GameSpot’s algorithm on YouTube. We should be worried about that. We want to help out. We want to be part of the team.” But now it’s like, I installed the FlippyDrive on the Gamecube. If I want to do a whole stream just messing around with that thing, I can do it and sort of justify it as “The community wants the bullshit. Let’s get into the bullshit.”
