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Technology

Giant Bomb And GameSpot Face Layoffs Months After Fandom Sale

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Image: Fandom

Two of the biggest outlets in games media are the latest to face layoffs. A number of editorial staff across both Giant Bomb and GameSpot revealed they’d been let go on Thursday, just months after the sites were purchased by the Fandom wiki network.

The layoffs were announced during a surprise all-hands meeting with Fandom CEO Perkins Miller, according to two sources familiar with the event. Roughly 40 to 50 employees were affected across the company, with at least some managers caught completely off guard by the cuts to their teams. Miller told staff that the Fandom network remained profitable despite the cuts, but declined to answer any questions, sources said.

Previously owned by Viacom CBS, Giant Bomb and GameSpot were both sold to Red Ventures in 2020, which then turned around and sold them again to Fandom last October, along with Metacritic, TV Guide, and other sites. “We’re thrilled to add these powerful, authoritative brands into the Fandom platform, which will expand our business capabilities and provide immersive content for our partners, advertisers and fans,” Miller said at the time. Fandom, whose business model revolves around plastering ads over free, user-generated content, is itself owned by private equity firm TPG Capital.

Fandom declined to comment.

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Giant Bomb in particular has faced a number of shakeups recently. Co-founder Jeff Gerstmann left last summer to start a solo Patreon-funded podcast and former co-host Dan Ryckert returned to take his spot. Since then, the show has expanded its roster and included more crossover with GameSpot talent. Jess “Voidburger” O’Brien, who became a full-time Giant Bomb member in 2021, and Jason Oestreicher, who began back in 2014, were two of the people laid off today.

The latest gaming media cuts come just a month after IGN faced its own surprise layoffs as its team was preparing to cover the 2022 Game Awards. Before that, Comcast shutdown its recently revived gaming network G4, Tencent gutted the staff at Fanbyte, and other sites like Game Informer, Polygon, and TechRadar cut staff numbers, too.

While the layoffs come at a time when companies from Microsoft to Amazon are reducing staff and advertisers are slashing budgets ahead of a recession manufactured by the Federal Reserve, not everyone is feeling pain. The CEO of IGN’s parent company, Vivek Shah, made roughly $16 million in 2021. TPG CEO Jon Winkelried, meanwhile, earned over $80 million that same year, in addition to the hundreds of millions he raked in during his decades long career at Goldman Sachs.

Update 1/19/23 5:01 p.m. ET: Added more information about the extent of the cuts and the all-hands where there were announced.

         

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Technology

Final Google Stadia Game, Released Today, Is A Piece Of History

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Image: Google

If you haven’t heard, Google Stadia is shutting down and closing shop next week. But before the never-quite-successful game streaming service dies, it has provided one neat (and free) little gift you can only play for a few days before it all goes offline.

Launched back in 2019, Google Stadia was a costly and massive investment from Google into the world of video games. Powered by the cloud aka a bunch of servers and off-site computers, Stadia’s big promise was instantaneous gaming on the go. No more updates or expensive consoles. And while it sometimes worked, the high cost of games, lack of features, small library, and internet costs ended up dooming the service. Sure, some superfans logged thousands of hours into it, but for most, it just wasn’t what they wanted or needed from a video game platform.

So it wasn’t surprising that in September of last year, Google announced the end of Stadia. In five days, on January 18, the video game streaming service will shut down. With the end so near, it seemed unlikely that Stadia would receive any new game releases. Yet, Google has published one final game. But don’t expect some big open-world RPG or remake. Instead, the final Stadia game is Worm Game, an internally developed title used to test Stadia long before it became a public service.

We probably were never meant to see or play this Snake-like test game as it sports fairly rudimentary graphics and kinda ugly menus. But in the final days of Stadia, it appears the devs working on the project were able to provide its community one final treat. Even better, anyone can play Worm Game as it’s free. (Which makes sense considering the Stadia store stopped working already.)

The game’s store page features this nice and touching description of the game and what it was used for:

Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world. “Worm Game” is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022. It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it, and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing, and for everything.

Is Worm Game some incredibly important or amazing thing? Not really. However, it’s still really cool to get a peek behind the scenes, and thanks to videos of Worm Game, this little piece of test software will be somewhat preserved for folks to look back at years from now.

In other cool End Of Stadia news, Google has confirmed that starting next week, it will start allowing players to unlock the Bluetooth functionally of its Stadia controller.

This is a nice way to make the controller—which has one of my favorite modern D-pads on it—more useful and easier to hook up to more devices. I doubt the devs who worked on Stadia for years were planning for the controller to be the only thing left of Stadia in 2023, but here we are.



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Entertainment

Streamer Who Broke Back At TwitchCon Shows Off Surgery Scar

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Screenshot: Twitch

Adriana Chechik, who made headlines earlier this month after she broke her back in two places at TwitchCon, has returned to streaming with some updates—and a close look—at how her recovery has been going.

If you haven’t seen the incident, Chechik broke her back at TwitchCon after jumping into a foam pit, a seemingly-innocuous move that, thanks to the reported shallowness of the pit, resulted in her smashing her tailbone on the floor so hard that her “bones completely crushed”, fusing multiple verterbrae together and suffering “nerve damage to [her] bladder”.

Her recovery process has been rough. Here’s what she wrote on October 13 after a physical therapy session:

Tried sitting up today in PT, I would rather die than do that again. I hate this my whole body hates it. I don’t want to be tough. I don’t want to be brave I cried for a hour and the pain is so immense through all the meds im on. Idk if I can do this. I can’t explain this pain.

Chechik, now home after multiple surgeries—one which lasted for over five hours—returned to Twitch over the weekend to give further updates on the injury, its consequences and how she’s doing weeks after the accident.

In this clip, Chechik mentions how she is still out of breath doing even the simplest daily tasks, before showing off a huge scar that runs down the centre of her back:

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Later while playing she says that tests conducted on her while in hospital revealed that she had been unknowingly pregnant at the time of the injury, but then lost the baby due to the surgery required on her spine:

In the wake of this and other injuries suffered at the event, neither Twitch (organisers of TwitchCon) or Kairos Media (the creative agency actually running the booth) have commented publicly.

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Entertainment

Streamer Amouranth Says She Is Being Abused By Her Husband

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Streamer and content creator Kaitlyn Siragusa, aka Amouranth, has said on camera earlier today that she has been the subject of abuse, with her husband accused of making a series of manipulative threats against her.

Content warning: abuse

In a video streamed earlier today, Amouranth is seen speaking on the phone with a man she says is her husband, who can be heard initially denying Amouranth’s claims that he has made threats to kill her dogs. The man later claims to have control over Amouranth’s bank accounts.

Amouranth says her husband has been forcing her to stream at times against her wishes, and later shows a series of text messages where she is called a “dumb fuck” among other abusive threats like dumping her luggage off a hotel balcony and deleting her social media presence. The messages also show threats to “blow” $500,000 of Amouranth’s money by donating it to a bird sanctuary.

Her husband is also accused of coercing her to broadcast content, like telling her to “commit to the grind because it was a good financial opportunity” and continue posting a high number of “hot tub” videos even when she didn’t want to, or driving her to engage in events like lengthy streams because he had made threats against her.

Despite having been a prominent public figure for years now, this is the first time Amouranth has publicly discussed her marriage; she said earlier today that this was because of what her husband said were commercial reasons, as he felt that were she to reveal that she was married, it would “ruin the business model”.

“You want me to tell them I’m single”, she says at one point, “it’s about to be true, you piece of shit”.

Amouranth also says in the video that her husband has seen a therapist for his behaviour, which was labelled “a form of psychological abuse”, and that she has been living in what is essentially a “fancy prison”.

While the footage is not available on Amouranth’s Twitch page, this Twitter thread by @HUN2R, which spans four videos, covers most of the allegations:

The man’s identity is never disclosed in the video. We have contacted Twitch for comment and will update if we hear back.

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Technology

YouTube Reviewer Videogamedunkey Wants To Sell Games, Too

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The biggest critic in gaming is getting into publishing. Jason “videogamedunkey” Gastrow announced in his latest YouTube video that he and his wife, Leah Gastrow, will run a new indie label called Bigmode dedicated to discovering and evangelizing the best games that haven’t even been made yet. “I’m sick of sitting on the sidelines waiting for great games to appear,” the YouTuber said. “Now I want to get in there and help make it happen.”

Gastrow is far and away the most dominant YouTuber when it comes to game reviews, with polished videos featuring a mix of running gags and unvarnished opinions consistently garnering millions of views. He now says he wants to take his years of tastemaking and funnel it toward helping new indie projects stand out in the current “sea of mediocrity.” As examples of what he’s looking for, he cites some of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed indie games in recent years like Enter the Gungeon, Celeste, and Hades.

So what exactly will having Gastrow publish your game entail? The YouTuber doesn’t go into many specifics, but claims Bigmode’s contracts will be the most developer friendly out there and won’t limit creative freedom. “I am not looking for creative control over your games but I do want to be involved,” he said. The announcement video ends with a call for developers and studios to go to Bigmode’s website and share their projects and portfolios.

It’s not uncommon for big gaming personalities to collaborate on individual games or even have ones made as part of the overall promotion of their brand. Comedy gaming channel Game Grumps previously made the move into development with the release of dating sim Dream Daddy in 2017. But launching an entire publishing business is no side-hustle, and the space is already full of other established players as the indie gaming scene exploded over the past decade.

Typically, publishers help fund the development of a game and pay for its distribution, marketing, and other logistical necessities in return for a cut of any revenue it makes. It’s often not until those initial costs are paid for in game sales that the original developers begin to see any profit, which can take days, weeks, or years depending on how successful the game is.

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One thing Gastrow is promising is that the financial incentives around his new business venture won’t skew or dilute the opinions on his gaming channel. Reviewers on YouTube have long promoted themselves as fearless and uncompromised voices who aren’t beholden to anyone but their audience. The subtext is that the opinions they share are authentic, while everyone else is a shill. That’s certainly one of the messages in Gastrow’s announcement video.

“For gamers that actually play and care about video games, my channel is where they come to find out what’s actually worth playing, and I want all of the real deal gamers out there to know that I would never risk the legitimacy of my channel to push some junk-ass video games I don’t believe in,” he said. Of course, figuring out which game will be the next Cuphead and which will be just another trash imposter during the early phases of development is very different from pointing out that the latest blockbuster sequel is broken and boring.

Gastrow goes on to say that his videos will remain mostly funny and lighthearted, while also serious and heavy-hitting when necessary, and that Bigmod will be a “harmonious” continuation of that ethos. We’ll see how that ambition pains out when the label’s first game releases.



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Technology

Meta Scraps App for Couples

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The couple-based app was quietly released in April 2020.
Image: Drew Angerer (Getty Images)

Hey all you sexy young couples, I have bad news. Meta’s relationship-focused communication app Tuned is officially being shut down on September 19. Or, if you’re like me and 1) are single and/or 2) have never heard of this app, September 19 will just be another Monday.

Tuned is a Meta product that was released during the very beginning of the covid-19 pandemic in April 2020, when staying in touch with someone you love was either really easy if you were quarantined with them, or really difficult if you were quarantined without them. While the app’s release towards the beginning of the pandemic is likely coincidence (apps take time to develop), its structure of getting couples to communicate over quirky prompts and a kitschy interface could not have come at a better time. But now, just over two years later, the app is shutting down on September 19.

Meta’s New Product Experimentation communication team told us in an email that, “Tuned is an experimental app from NPE. In the spirit of experimentation and similarly to previous apps, we try a lot of things, learn, and if our tests aren’t sticking, shut it down.”

I tried to experiment with Tuned to write this article, but upon entering my phone number to sign up, I was greeted with an error message. Perhaps Tuned is no longer accepting new users as it begins winding down its services, and Meta did not immediately address my request for clarification on that. According to Gadget360, the app is “a private space where you and your significant other can just be yourselves. With Tuned, you can be as mushy, quirky, and silly as you are together in person, even when you’re apart.”

Meta appears to be going through a bit of a tough time, and it’s possible that axing Tuned is a part of a wider effort for the company save money and pivot away from social media. Meta has endured recent chatter of a hiring slowdown and impending layoffs: Leaked documents from executives instructed managers to cut underperforming employees under the guise that “they are not who we need,” and Meta employees are now reportedly concerned about a rumored layoff of up to 10% the company’s workforce.

Meta is also making a clear effort to distance itself from its “Facebook” days of social media amidst regulatory pressure and public scrutiny with a hair-brained scheme to rebrand itself into a VR juggernaut. But we all know how the Metaverse is going.

Tuned shutting down is likely a bummer for the handful of couples that are still using the gimmicky app two years after it launched, but it could also be a symptom of a larger, internal company restructuring.

Update July 26, 3:40 p.m. ET: This article was updated to include additional comment from Meta’s New Product Experimentation team.

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Technology

Jeff Gertsmann Leaving Giant Bomb After 14 Years

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Screenshot: Giant Bomb

Today, Giant Bomb announced that the website’s co-founder, Jeff Gerstmann, was leaving the popular video game website after nearly 15 years. In a blog post announcing the departure, it was explained that “Giant Bomb and Jeff Gerstmann have agreed to go our separate ways.”

In a lengthy blog post shared on Giant Bomb’s website, staff explained that they were going to be “transparent” about Gerstmann’s departure, calling it “heavy-hitting news” and a “big moment” for the site and its future.

“Jeff has shaped Giant Bomb in profound ways and he’s also been a key part of bringing on board the voices that have defined the site through its different eras. To this day, Giant Bomb’s influence on the way video games are covered on the internet is still as pervasive as ever, and Jeff remains inseparably attached to that legacy.

But things change: life unfolds; priorities shift, and people come and go. And the same goes for Giant Bomb.

As for why he was leaving today, neither Giant Bomb nor Gerstmann shared any specific details, only stating that an agreement had been reached between the parties to “go our separate ways.”

The former GameSpot editorial director confirmed the news via his own personal Twitter announcing that today, June 6, was his last day with the company. He also hinted at more details and info coming tomorrow via a stream on his own Twitch channel.

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In the blog post announcing the news, Giant Bomb also talked about the future of the site following his exit, stating that this departure won’t lead to a “Giant Bomb 2.o” and that it still planned to be a “weird and welcoming corner of the internet.”

Change can be difficult to adjust to. But we are still building the bomb, and you’ll get a much more detailed announcement about how on June 7th’s Bombcast, so be sure to tune in. Starting tomorrow, there will be a renewed focus on a core group of nine Giant Bomb crew members, and we’ll be giving updates regarding future content, the plan for Premium and hopefully addressing most of the questions you might have, and maybe even a few you didn’t know you had yet.

We are more excited about what’s to come than ever and we hope you will be too.

There is no 2.0. There is just Giant Bomb. See you tomorrow.

Gerstmann’s sudden exit today continues a trend of older staff leaving the popular video game site.

Last year in May, three of the legacy members of the site, Vinny Caravella, Alex Navarro, and Brad Shoemaker left. They went off and started their own thing called Nextlander.

These departures all came after the news in September 2020 that the former parent company of GameSpot and Giant Bomb —ViacomCBS— had sold the sites to digital marketing company Red Ventures. While Caravella tried to squash rumors that it was this new owner that had led to an exodus of employees, rumors among fans and longtime viewers of the site still persist.



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Technology

12 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do on YouTube

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There are more stats available, if you want them.
Screenshot: YouTube

If you’re really into video encoding and streaming, then YouTube can give you much more technical information about clips when you’re watching them in the mobile apps. Tap your profile picture on the Home tab (top right), then choose Settings and General and turn on the Enable stats for nerds (Android) or Stats for nerds (iOS) toggle switch.

To see said stats for nerds, tap on a video, tap the three dots in the corner, and then choose Stats for nerds to bring up the overlay while the clip plays underneath. The information displayed on screen in real time includes the resolution of the clip, the audio and video codecs used, and the amount of bandwidth you’re using up by streaming it.

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Technology

LiveJournal, Grooveshark, and 12 More of the Best Internet Relics We Left Behind

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Photo: Sharaf Maksumov (Shutterstock)

Figuring out the age of the Internet is like figuring out the age of the universe: We could date it back to the 1960s and ARPANET, or the introduction of the TCP/IP protocol in 1983, or the launch of America Online in 1985, or the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, or maybe the creation of the Netscape browser in 1994.

However you date the inception of the Internet, two things are inarguably true: The technology has changed modern life in fundamental ways, and the modern Internet is absolutely rotten with abandonware. Not only is it chock-a-block with dead links and missing data, but many of the tools that we once used enthusiastically are either completely dead or exist today as ghostly, barely-functioning time capsules. Heck, Google alone has killed dozens of tools that it launched with great fanfare and then almost immediately abandoned.

Sometimes this is due to changing technologies—there were dozens of search engines prior to Google’s total domination of the space, after all—and sometimes it’s due to good old-fashioned capitalist competition. Whatever the reason, there are a lot of old Internet relics we left behind, and folks of a certain age might be forgiven for having a lingering affection for them. Or a lingering morbid curiosity, because sometimes there’s a definite WTF element to the old tools we used to rely on. Here are some of the Internet relics we left behind as we rocket relentlessly into the future.

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Technology

Popular Streamer Ludwig Ahgren leaves Twitch For YouTube Gaming

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Screenshot: Twitch

Twitch streamer Ludwig Ahgren, who in April set a world record for the highest number of subscribers—at over 270,000—has left the platform and will now be streaming exclusively at YouTube Gaming.

Ludwig achieved the feat at the conclusion of a marathon 31-day streaming event, which began on March 14 and ran for too damn long. In the process, he beat the previous record, held by Tyler “Ninja” Blevins.

The move was announced earlier today by Ryan Wyatt, head of YouTube Gaming, who wrote:

I’m excited to announce @LudwigAhgren will now be streaming exclusively on @YouTubeGaming.

Our focus is building a world class VOD, short form, and live platform.

And I have to reiterate; we still aren’t done yet! Welcome to the family, Ludwig!

Ludwigs own announcement was a little less diplomatic, posting a video where the purple car (Twitch) he’s driving explodes, and he jumps in a red car (YouTube) to get home again, talking some shit about music streaming rights as the clip draws to a close.

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Harsh, perhaps, given he built his entire thing on Twitch, but given the platform’s recent woes—especially when it comes to copyright—also understandable.

He probably wouldn’t make the jump out of charity; YouTube has long thrown serious money at creators to sign them to exclusivity deals, hoping that by drawing big names they can chip away at Twitch’s dominance in the streaming space. Indeed it was only a few months ago that two other huge streaming stars, DrLupo and TimTheTatman, made the same move:

Lupo told The Washington Post this week that, as a result of his deal with YouTube, he’s now “secure for life.” He also said the deal will give him more flexibility to spend time with his family. Betar, meanwhile, didn’t explicitly comment on specific financials, but noted in an interview with Insider that streaming on YouTube will allow him, like Lupo, to spend more time with family.

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