So the best, least biased reviews you can find are going to be 2-3 days post release, and not from someone who is large enough to get free review codes. I never trust pre-release reviews.

They seem to care very little about the opinions and taste of the people producing content for sites like IGN.

> one streamer doesn't have nearly enough time to review all the games that come out. Not even just the AAA titles!

They usually specialize in a genre, and a lot of gamers are interested in a fairly narrow range of genres.

But also, you don't have to know about every game available. "The perfect is the enemy of the good", also with respect to information. The goal is really just to find enough games worth the time/money to keep oneself entertained. Life's too short to worry about whether you might have enjoyed something else more than the game you actually played. (If you can even justify spending time on video games at all....)

> how are gamers making their decisions about what to play next

Metacritic, Steam reviews, the aforementioned streamers, word of mouth in their own communities... probably other ways....

I think most people have some specific things they like, and end up following community opinion, like Reddit or Discord for a game genre, and following a different personalities on YouTube or Twitch.

Personally I’m mostly playing mostly (indie) Metroidvania games which are not well covered by IGN, I hear buzz about new releases on Reddit or from Cannot be Tamed on YouTube. Beyond that I sometimes see cool stuff on Twitter, I picked up Clair Obscure after seeing a few tweets mention its great writing and music. I also end up seeing the front page of the Steam store, which has reasonably good recommendation profile for me given 90% of my game purchases are through there and I’m playing on Steam Deck which focuses the recommendations on titles well supported by Linux and the hardware.

Judging by online reactions, what gamers want is their own opinion reflected back at them. Anything else brings frothing rage and vitriol.

For some extremely-online types who have made “gamer” their identity, the purpose of gaming media is primarily to have that identity confirmed, not to gather information.

They want reviews that the can trust to predict their experience, and trust in the games media for that is (for a variety of reasons) very low.

> Sure, as you mentioned, there are individual YouTubers or Twitch streamers... but one streamer doesn't have nearly enough time to review all the games that come out.

So? No one has time to read/watch reviews of every game that comes out, either, or to play all the games that come out; if they can find a stable of trusted streamers that combined give reliable and timely impressions of games so that they can find a sufficient number worth playing and mostly avoid wasting money on duds, they don't need reviews of every game that comes out, and they especially don’t need that at the expense of reliability.

Check the TikTok numbers for example, and don't forget they still have the website.

IGN doesn't need YouTube

They also hold wikis hostage by not allowing them to move to another platform and redirect/get rid of their Fandom wiki. This means that if any wiki tries to move to be independent, the Fandom wiki will keep existing, and usually will still be the first result on Google for a long while, maybe forever, because of Fandom’s SEO. Of course the entire community of editors will have moved on, so this heavily outdated Fandom wiki full of ads and other elements trying to catch your attention and keep you on the site, will rank above the independent ad-free and active wiki with up-to-date information on Google search.

- Autoplaying barely related videos at the top as someone told them video content has better CPM

- "Have you tried looking at this page on another wiki?"

- So many ads

- Others like you viewed

- Would you like to join the discord?

- Fan Central?

The worst part is that it wasn't always like that. When it started of as wikicities and then wikia, it was pretty good, very Wikipedia-like, which is to be expected considering its history. But it enshittified quickly as it became Fandom, all while making it hard to move the existing communities out of the platform.

He has also an encyclopedic knowledge of weird esoteric games.

Add to this a series of people he had great chemistry with and people that were not familiar with some franchises and introduced by other members lead to funny moments.

Their coverage of E3 was legendary.

It depends how deep people are within subcultures but giant bomb did offer a lot of entertainment (even for free I never paid for the premium stuff) and honest game reviews. I can't speak for the current state because I was watching before the core team left and stopped watching after.

You have to understand as well that Giant Bomb was the first of its kind in a lot of ways, this was an era where video game journalism began to loosen up from the corporate, PR-friendly, very stiff and consumer-focused era it had been in during the dominance of print media, and Giant Bomb was this novel thing where people who had been deeply involved in that era began to find their own voices. If you followed video games at the time online, Giant Bomb was this total breath of fresh air.

For me, watching other people play games on the internet is basically an extension of that but with the addition that I can also watch some of the best gamers in the world if I want to.

I think that's specifically what made GiantBomb so different in the first place - people were tuning in for the personalities, more so than the game news. There were already a lot of places you could just go for game news and updates (like IGN and Gamespot), but GB had decades of industry stories that were worth tuning in for. All sorts of 'behind the scenes' stories and faces would show up, Jeff finding out about the Dreamcast being cancelled in a conference call while on the toilet with food poisoning, Drew going to a Starcraft tournament in South Korea when they were still fairly new, the crew getting blind drunk at a birthday where they duct taped whisky bottles to their hands, stories of the sheer nightmare of lugging equipment and setting up for E3 every year with Drew and Vinnys video diaries. It was a peek behind the curtain into how the industry works with a group of very likeable people that made it different - more than just a place to go and watch people play games.

No :)

In a third of the time you spend watching one "content creator" "goofing around" you can go through 3-4 text reviews and figure out if the game is for you already.

There's a sub-subculture in this of video game journalists. There's a further subculture inside this of people who want to be writing for a video game review website (or a sports blog etc) but only ever actually write about their half-baked opinions about American politics.

This is one of my personal favourites, just for all the background it reveals about how the game was made.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0058A651EB882B48

You must have missed all of professional sports, pay per view, etc.

Wait till you find out about American Football, or Soccer, or any of the racing events.

But seriously, we talk about programming. And people pay to talk about programming. Why wouldn’t people interested in gaming or other things do the same?

Hold up what? I didn't know that. It seems insane to fire the man from the organization he co-founded.

As an aside, Vimeo isn't a meaningfully social site anymore. They pivoted to commercial video hosting long ago - there's still some commenting features on videos but it's not a significant part of what they do.

Fandom is a pit of the internet that you never want to find yourself in. Giantbomb probably should have never happened, it never hit the heights of Gamespot.