Fandom Blows Up Giant Bomb
Giant Bomb's future is uncertain following a showdown with parent company Fandom, which also owns GameSpot, over editorial interference. Creative director Dan Ryckert announced on a recent livestream that he would no longer be appearing on the Giant Bombcast and co-host Jeff Grubb confirmed on social media on Thursday that he's no longer with the company. Giant Bomb content is currently on hold while Fandom engages in a 'strategic reset and realignment of our media brands,' it confirmed to Kotaku.
'Well, that was a dream come true. Knew it wouldn't last, though,' Grubb, who joined Giant Bomb in 2022 after a reshuffle that saw the departure of longtime host and cofounder Jeff Gerstman, wrote on Bluesky. 'Out of a job at the moment. But I'll always be doing Game Mess,' he added, referring to a podcast he cohosts with Games Beat reviews editor and Giant Bomb contributor Mike Minotti.
'Needless to say I will no longer be contributing to Giant Bomb,' Minotti wrote in a separate post. 'Nothing but love to all the wonderful people from there and GameSpot. Jeff was a workhorse and a hero for the way he shouldered so much responsibility there, and I am furious with the way execs treated him.'
The news follows an ominous 'pause' on Giant Bomb streams at the end of April and the takedown of an episode of the Giant Bombcast from YouTube this week after the hosts mocked apparent 'brand safety' concerns recently foisted upon them by management at Fandom. Then in a livestream on April 30, Ryckert, a member of Giant Bomb between 2014 and 2020 who returned in 2022, announced he would no longer be appearing on the show and had no interest in Fandom's vision for Giant Bomb's future.
'As you know, we've temporarily paused Giant Bomb live streaming and that content is currently available on demand for our audience,' a spokesperson for Fandom told Kotaku in an email. 'We understand this programming pause isn't ideal for our audience, but it's part of a strategic reset and realignment of our media brands. We have some creative ideas for the future of Giant Bomb that we're actively working on that we'll be able to communicate more about soon.'
The wiki company, whose business model of monetizing free contributor pages with auto-play video ads and other intrusive website practices has led many communities to depart its network, purchased Giant Bomb and GameSpot in 2022. Less than a year later it instituted cuts to both sites. Fandom's ad business faced scrutiny following a 2024 analytics report that questioned the brand safety of some of the content the company was running ads against across its user-generated wiki pages.
The rest of the latest incarnation of Giant Bomb currently includes senior producer Jan Ochoa, general manager Jeff Bakalar, and editors Tamoor Hussain and Lucy James. It's unclear how many will remain amid the current fallout or what the future of the website, which hosts a long-running forum and annual Game of the Year lists from personalities across the gaming industry, will be.
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