Kaboom - The Death of Giant Bomb, Fandom, and Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

 Did not think I’d be writing this piece this soon.


I made a joke on Bluesky about how Giant Bomb, a website about video games but actually about professional wrestling and chain restaurants, had “died” at least four times beforehand. Usually, to coincide with an acquisition or layoffs, but this time I mean it. Giant Bomb has died after years and years of fighting off the cancer that is corporate mismanagement and being oversaw by the dumbest fucking people on the planet.

For those who don’t know, Giant Bomb was one of the first truly indie games outlets in the late 2000s. They were essentially pirate punk radio, but for telling you which first-person shooter was worth paying for. It had a rebellious spirit that reminded me of something like N.W.A or Extreme Championship Wrestling; it had that swagger and anti-establishment that differentiated it from existing media, while also being fundamentally better than everyone else on the playing field. They were brash and vulgar but articulate and intelligent. For a long time, they were the only place where you knew what they were saying was coming from the heart, not the revenue spreadsheet.

Of course, with popularity and success comes the corporate interest vampires coming to suck the lifeblood out of anything they can make a dime on. So Giant Bomb was sold to CBS Interactive, who, to their credit (?), mostly left them alone. They keep trucking along making weird shit and sending people on rollercoasters with 3DSs but eventually someone had to notice. They got sold to Red Ventures, a company that fired one of the founders, Jeff Gerstmann, among other staff. After squeezing as much as they could out of that stone, they tossed the deflated balloon to the next vulture: Fandom.

Fandom is a fucking terrible company. It is a business based around milking people’s passions for money. Seriously, that’s it. They have a chokehold on the internet wikis for literally anything. You can’t look up anything about your favourite piece of media without getting directed to an advertisement diseased Fandom wiki. If you search for anything related to Star Wars, Marvel or Pokémon, you will almost certainly get a barely functional, often plagiarised Fandom wiki page. But that’s not enough because they often have their shitty wikis for even the smallest fan groups. Any obscure anime, indie game or growing show has a low-effort fandom wiki ready to go. The worst part of these wikis is that the people writing and providing content for these places are the hardest of the hardcore fans, doing it for free. The Toaru Majutsu no Index wiki is one of the best I’ve seen. Incredibly detailed with plenty of references and images to go along with it. But it’s on Fandom, which means it’s barely functional with a horrendous UI and littered with ads.

Fandom makes its money by exploiting people’s passions, and that is precisely what they did. Instead of letting Giant Bomb do their thing and cultivate the community they have been making for 15 years, they instead try to make it as profitable and as palatable for an audience that would never engage with them in the first place. I’m not going to pretend that the punk rock spirit of Giant Bomb hadn’t turned into Dad Rock over the years, but telling the people at Giant Bomb to focus on making “verticals and clipable moments” and converting to a PG-13 tone for the TikTok generation makes me think the corporate suits at Fandom actually have RFK Jr brain worms. But the thing that really makes me slap my forehead is that, of course, Giant Bomb reacted by mocking something so stupid. The Last Ever Bombcast, which Fandom tried to pull down, features the entire crew completely shitting on the idea for nearly 2 hours. Naturally, they did not like that, so they took the episode down, and now, two days later, three of the four people on the podcast are gone.

Here’s to Giant Bomb. Thanks for all the memories of watching 2:00 am E3 events in the cold, for exposing me to the brain rot that is the Persona series, and cultivating my passion for video games in interesting and fun ways that will live with me for the rest of my life.

To Jeff, Brad, Vinny, Dan, Jason, Drew, Abby, Austin, Jess, Jan, Ben, Mike, Grubb, Bakalar, Patrick, and Alex. You will always have my support.

To Ryan Davis, Rest in Peace, Duder. We all miss you.

To the Fanguardians and Leadership Team at Fandom. Fuck you all you miserable parasites.