Giant Bomb, Metacritic, and GameSpot have new owners

Giant Bomb, Metacritic, and GameSpot have new owners

gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-09-14-viacomcbs-sells-cnet-media-group-to-digital-marketing-company-red-ventures

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Yikes. A 1.8 billion deal reduced to 500 million. There very well may be some fat trimming -- and niche outlet like GB might be first on the block.

Regardless seeing as how Red Ventures serves as an advertiser as well it will be interesting to see how this impacts the consumer narrative that will be pushed. I wonder if thinks will operate as normally or if there's going to be some knee bending.

This is the death of Giant Bomb. The new owners aren’t going to keep split offices. Vinny is gone.

What's going on with Vinny? I haven't been paying attention, but I saw the last Beastcast was Abby and three women.

Believe he’s on vacation. But the streaming from home thing is destroying his soul.

They acquired IGN and Beast is sharing rental space with IGN.

If it's office space this a non-issue. Now maintaining a "side project" like Beast/Bomb when they do the same shit as IGN? That'd raise my brow unless they are actually self-sustaining.

>tfw around. 2013-2014 my dream job was working at Giant Bomb and having fun making great content with everyone
>tfw Abby and Ben turned them into full on leftist garbage (though they had been heading that way for years) and took away all the funny
>tfw COVID turned them into a shitty D-grade YouTube channel watched by a fraction of their former audience

It hurts to watch, lads

I feel bad a company wasted their money on these shits

>Implying Abby and Ben turned them into libshits

Alex, Austin, and Klepek were all kicking around in the early days. Drew to a lesser extent - he's more obviously lib but neutral.

There’s no way they’ll keep Giantbomb. They SHOULDNT keep it.

Laziest gaming outlet out there right now for real. They haven’t had any fire in their bellies since whiskey media.

Who acquired IGN? Red Ventures doesn't own IGN

Corona revealed these people for the tired old men they are.
Their YouTube videos get like 3k views maybe. Anything with Abby is downvoted into the ground because she legit sucks. Not even because she’s a woman but it doesn’t help.
Don’t know how they’ve made it this long.

I don't care

>Jeff does quicklooks alone now

Can't stand your co-workers, huh?

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Statement from Jeff.

>can’t even attend the meetings about your site being sold AGAIN because of “family reasons”

Lmao forever lazy.

Also don’t know what untapped potential Giantbomb could possibly have. Imagine supporting essentially a pay walled twitch stream that rakes in 1000k views a night

Woops forgot

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>1000k views a night
I'll take it.

Abby doesn't play video games. I'd have loved to be in her interview. I don't want to believe it was a diversity hire, but seeing as how that swapped in 3 diversity hires ("bisexual" woman, asian, terminally ill gigantoid) makes you wonder.

She may buy and play games, but she never seems to make it more than 30-60 minutes into anything. Her GOTY talks are proof.

between the zero effort GOTY videos, dan and mahardy quitting and abby starting a (failed) youtube channel, something like this was obviously coming.

Only reason she got the gig was because she’s mutual friend’s with Casey Malone. He recommended her for assistant video producer so vinny could be in front of the camera more

Jokes on them when they realized she doesn’t know shit about video production

Bombcast has been unlistenable for a long time but the past year has been extra bad

>corona is crazy bro
>BLM haha
>40 minutes of “my town is on fire woah”

DONT CARE
DIDNT ASK
MOVE OUT OF CALIFORNIA AND TALK ABOUT GAMES AAAAAHHHHHH

There is literally no way East could justify itself purely off financials. I cant honestly believe Giantbomb itself is financially sound. They have to pay the salaries of a number of people to live in the most economically fucked city in the country and maybe the world.

It's felt like something done out of obligation more than any genuine enthusiasm and they've been losing all their good people for years. GB West has sucked ever since Drew left. GB East was really good for a while until Dan left. Ben and Alex are the worst and completely suck the energy out of anything they're in.

It will be interesting to see what direction this goes.

I can't imagine any of the staff other than Jeff and Vinny are well paid so it's probably not a financial drain. The question is can Red Ventures implement tools that can monetize and advertise GB well enough to keep them around.

Seeing as how most of their personalities are apathetic, negative, or unknowledgable, and their content is below your average youtuber.. I'm not so sure.

They hire content writers for their other ventures so I wonder if they might force more written content.

Yeah california sounds like a third-world hell hole that's trying to kill anything living on its soil.
Why would anyone want to live there anymore?

Noooooo, just when they finally settled into the new office!

>and niche outlet like GB might be first on the block.
I don't see why it would? The subscriber base pays for operations cost. It's not like they need to live off of ad & sponsor revenue like other sites.

I’m a bit confused as to what Red Ventures actually does. They seem to be one of these vague corporate entities with no discernible business.

They’re just some sort of brand marketing company?...
What would they want with unprofitable game websites other than the names

I’d love to see the sub numbers. They’re constantly slashing the price of premium.

>Salaries

I think you're overestimating pay. I'm betting Abby and Ben aren't making over 40k, Jan prob isn't making over 45, Jason, Rorie, Alex, ad Brad probably aren't breaking 50k.

I love they don’t have any excuses to be lazy.

They can’t be getting ready for E3 or winding down from it. There’s no E3!

There’s no office!

The typical excuses just don’t work. They’re just lazy as fuck coasting on their sycophant userbase of San Francisco style soi nerds

They even have rolling blackouts like Ghana now. Crazy stuff.

Something like this happened to the company I work for last summer. Almost quit back then because of how uncertain everything was, so let's hope at least some of more useless members like Jason, Abby and Ben quit.

>I love they don’t have any excuses to be lazy.
Preparing for GOTY

You realize they couldn't even exist in the SF vicinity with that kind of income right? 60k is poverty in that city and salaries tend to much the area you live in.

Patrick confirmed he was making $65k when he left and never got a raise so I assume all the low level positions (Abby, Ben) are at least 60k. Brad and Alex are most likely a tad bit higher due to seniority. Jeff and Vinny for sure make 6 figures.

Watch them go “on assignment” frequently in order to use up any banked PTO before getting canned, assuming they can’t cash it out.

I can see Jeff still has some fire left in him when I watch his streams but he's just not passionate about the company anymore.

They have always said this and I just don't see how it's true.
A rule of thumb with twitch streams is streamers hover around (it varies a lot) 2x their average views in monthly subs.

Let's assume GB holds to the same rule except their subs are yearly. They literally struggle to clear 1000 viewers all the time. That's MAYBE 2000 subs. $100k to pay for what 8 staff? And they can't even collectively match the output of one mid tier youtuber or twitch streamer?

They have always been full of shit on this. The viewer numbers just don't add up.
I bet fucking Dan with his solo twitch streams is clearing the same amount as GB as a whole right now.

What happens to East coast? Their office space is owned by CBS. Will this new company pay to prop up a redundant off-shoot in one of the most expensive cities on earth?

Jeff has always said the site is profitable. I don’t think he’s lying.

You're way underestimating. You literally cannot survive on salaries that low in SF/NY.

>I bust my ass in a small business for 46k a year with little off time or vacation but Abby literally just woman’s her way into a 60k position to talk out her ass about toys

Bro this world ain’t fair

None of them do live in San Fran. They all have hour+ commute.

I checked their site and they have offices in both SF and NY. Now whether these are content producing offices I don’t know.

Abby has taken... I think 4 weeks of PTO this year (always after she makes a dumb insane comment on the podcast), so she must be expecting to be let go any minute now.

It's just reparations for all the injustice men have done against women.

It's 60k in NYC man. It would be like making 20k pretty much anywhere else, don't be too jealous.
Abby probably pays 2k/month to rent a closet.

If it makes you feel any better her career is incredibly unfulfilling and she most likely spends more than half her salary on rent and living expenses.

I've watched giant bomb since 2009, I'll always love them

Not hard to be profitable when you have literally 0 overhead expenses

anything on those subjects is less time talked about than they talk about fast food brands
worry about your political faction's failures later

they have mental disease and thing everything outside of liberal hellholes are full of kkk lynch mobs ready to round up anyone left of a baptist preacher

(I also live in New York)

Apparently, there was a big controversy in the Giant Bomb community over last Friday's "all-women" Beastcast episode. The problem was that Merritt K, the tranny on the bottom-right who works as an editor for a website called Fanbyte, has a history of being "biphobic" and being opposed to the the writing output of another tranny. The other tranny? Ana Valens, exhibitionist sex writer for the Daily Dot and possibly the biggest example you can find of a dude who wants to be a women for degenerate, fetishistic reasons.

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>He still watches GB since Vinny left the west
why do that to your self