Affiliate links go against everything GB stood for

The defence force can deny it all they want, but if you check your GB history you'd know this bomb was built by Ryan and Jeff in opposition to all the shady shit and bad looks from affiliate sponsored content. Kane and Lynch y'all.

After unceremoniously firing the founder of this site mere weeks before he was going to leave anyway, and not allowing him to say goodbye to HIS audience or even naming him the corporate speak article announcing his departure, we've now come full circle.

Knowing what GB stands for and how it was created, adding affiliate links to the Sonic Frontiers QL leaves an extremely bad taste in the mouth and it's a terrible look on the remaining current staff.

How has this been approved? Why even use the GB name at this point if this is the way you're going to treat it?

Thoughts?

they're just links, bud.

very common in the product review and/or editorial space. i read a lot of music journalism and reviews, and they frequently have a link to click to buy the record in review. it's fine.

at the end of the day you either trust the opinions you consume as authentic, or you don't, and that's ok. no need to grandstand about it though.

also gerstmannn is still doing his thing, so i'm sure 'HIS audience' is fine?

I don't think that connection stands here. The Kane & Lynch debacle was centred around the criticism Jeff levelled at the game whilst it was being heavily advertised on the site. This is just an affiliate link for money off a game staff sort of seem to like?

It's fine until it starts encroaching on a critic's ability to critique but having links being provided by Fanatical (also owned by Fandom) brings up some potential for problems down the line. Ish.

A quick glance at op’s forum post history suggests that a productive discussion is not their goal here. I haven’t watched the Sonic Frontiers video yet, so I haven’t formed my own opinion of the link, but I felt this was relevant context for this thread.

OP asks for "thoughts" but it's extremely evident that this was not started to discuss, more to berate. There is nothing constructive or useful in this opening post, so I don't see the need to attempt to be constructive or thoughtful in my response.

Every single time any part of this site has been in any way monetised, people have come out of the woodwork to say that this doesn't match their idea of GB, despite the alternative being no GB at all. Whatever, OP.

It's really not that big a deal.

I find it funny how people are acting so outraged by this. Did they truly believe that business dealings don't change how a business is run? GB is now the property of Fandom, and they're going to do whatever they believe will make them the most money out of the asset they purchased, which is GB. Look at what is happening to Twitter right now, when a new boss owns it, changes are made, some for the better or for the worse, but things don't stay the same. The old school days of GB being the place that goes against the video game corporate machine has been over for years now. GB is now part of that industry, for better or for worse. If it took Jan posting an ad trying to get you to buy Sonic Frontiers to get some bonus content for you to finally understand what has become of GB, that is on you for not paying attention, not them.

Eh, I don't think it's a big deal. Like if they're on everything, it's almost like they're on nothing. They probably aren't restricting the editorial team from speaking their minds. That said, Giant Bomb has been legit editorial for years now - it's an entertainment product.

For what it's worth if GB reviewed boner pills, I'd also have a problem with them having affiliate links for boner pills. Optics matter you know. You're selling Sonic while doing a presumably honest and critical QL of Sonic. I don't expect the fanboys to understand but at least the professional staff should know why that's a problem. Surely the entire current office can't be that dense. Or they really don't care - I don't know which one should be cause for greater concern.

Affiliate links are just ads (things GB has done forever). Nothing more, nothing less. Until there is news about giving Frontiers favorable coverage because of Fandom decree (what actually happened with K&L) then this is very much a nothing topic. No need for the defense force.

Yes, internet marketing is terrible and largely designed to make us destitute dopamine addicts, but it's 2022. You either have to know what you're getting into or just stay off the whole thing if you're going to be outraged at the existence of affiliate marketing.

This site has always run ads for non-premium members. Affiliate links don't cost you anything, and can help support the site you're clearly passionate about.

If seeing affiliate links mean you can't trust the staff to do their thing, that's your call.

Jeff G seems to be thriving at the moment. It sounds like you're more upset about this than he probably would be.

If ads are this much of a line then I have terrible news about basically every outlet reviewing anything.

This was almost certainly a choice that they had no say in making and you have no real clue about how the staff feel about it. Regardless, what do you expect them to do? Quit their jobs over affiliate links that 99% of people won't even see? Stop being weird.

@drgonzo456: It'd be more quitting the career or starting a Patreon (and I'm almost positive they all likely have non competes in their contracts). Either way it is preposterous, and hilarious that the word fanboy was used because it just completes a very specific picture of this style of poster.

There's a code for a discount in the video description of the Quick Look for The Entropy Centre. They don't exactly heap high praise on that game while they play it.

Look, there's a very obvious barometer for whether or not affiliate links have truly infected the critical voice of the site. If the next Sam Barlow game gets an affiliate link and Jess praises its use of language and depiction of women, we'll know that they got her.

the truth is out there, brother.

This is the funniest shit I've ever read. Thank you for this, on this day. RIP me.

@heatdrive88: Another thread of utter hysterics ending up unintentionally hilarious. This website rules.

I'll just say it again...

Early Giant Bomb was not a sustainable business. They had backing from Shelby, then launched premium and got all sorts of shit for it (if we're talking about "checking history"). The Whiskey sites needed to be sold to survive, and they all had their own fates after that. It's not an indie thing and they have been part of a larger entity for a decade, which means they have targets to hit. If they aren't sufficiently profitable, they will be dissolved or cuts will happen. Is that what you want because they added an affiliate link to a game Grubb described in that same video as a 3 out of 5?

It's not 2008 anymore, and there are hundreds if not thousands of other outlets/channels competing for attention. They need new avenues for revenue and those potential opportunities seem to change every year. There are more people than just the original core 4. Cost of living is higher. It's not intrusive and it's super easy to ignore. etc. etc.

Really, what else is there to say? Do they need to run their business ideas past every user for approval? Anger over this is bizarre to me, and holding on to your own idea of what Giant Bomb is allowed to be as a business is such a waste of energy. I've been here since the early days and get really annoyed by this sort of entitlement.

I watched a man feud with Bubsy for two hours yesterday. They are doing whatever the hell they want with content and it's been fantastic since The Ritual. As long as they can do that and are allowed to have their own opinions and creative ideas, then we have zero reason to talk about the business side of things.

I don't even need to see the affiliate links. I already know Giant Bomb is in the pocket of Big Boner Pills.

I didn't know they were actually in a pocket, I am so upset after all the reviews of pockets they never did.

*stares off into the distance, taking a long drag from my definitely-not-marijuana cigarette*

I was there, man. I was there the day that the very seriously named website, Giant Bomb, posted an affiliate link. I had survived the Polygon Wars and the IGN Desolation and the Kinda Funny Collapse, but this was a bomb too far.

"This site is a cult of personality around someone who isn't here anymore and anyone who doesn't conform to my personal idea of what that person believed is a shill." Sure dude. I'm sorry the economics of game sites don't support multiple adults with families the same way the sub model supported like 5 single dudes in their 20s/30s. Sites and revenue streams need to grow and expand to keep a site afloat. I wish the sub model was enough, but every Patreon based outfit you follow doesn't make enough money to support a staff and infrastructure the size GB has right now. Let alone if the site actually grew.

Furthermore, we have already seen Quick Looks with actual dev and PR team members involved in the look. If you think Adam Boyes and his team getting plastered with GB staff in the Age of Booty QL didn't impact coverage, I don't know what to tell you.

When Jeff Gerstmann and Greg Kasavin were EICs at GameSpot the site entered a strategic partnership with GameStop to display the retail price of every game in their database alongside the scores of the games. This included "recommended" used game prices far below the standard MSRP.

One of the things they could do is completely destory the Wiki to free up some cost, but nobody wants that. I don't think the staff even wants that. So if you ask me to choose between getting rid of the Wiki or accepting the Ad links, I'll choose the Ads every time.

@poppa_large: wait, I'd completely missed this. Is there somewhere I could learn about what's been going on with a lot of the staff leaving/being fired?

@thecartographer: Nope. Such a thing does not exist.

A lot of very interesting points you’ve made here; fortunately, none of them are a problem for people with basic critical thinking skills

Finally, Giant Bomb is a religion.

@bisonhero: To me, video games are a religion and [Giant Bomb] is the shit.

I always think it's extremely disrespectful whenever people bring up Ryan to try to make an argument about how Giant Bomb should be. Have some class.

Does this qualify as the ad-free experience I should get with premium? can I get my money back?

I can understand being upset but boy am I tired of seeing "this isn't what GB stands for" wielded as some devout weapon.

GB's main trait has been to evolve and change. Subscriptions, podcast ads, premium streams, and chats. I think GB will continue to change and grow as best it can while maintaining that fun, independent spirit as best it can.

if this is a legitimate (as opposed to rhetorical) question, you should contact rorie instead of asking on a public forum. the guy makes things right whenever possible.

I'd still count that as ad-free. They're not interrupting quick looks with ad reads.

It's worth noting that Premium does remove banner ads on the site, so seemingly the idea is that ad-free removes audio ads during recordings, and visual ads around the site.

Regardless of whether you think the offer code is an ad or not, banner ads are usually giant and obtrusive. A small, text offer code is pretty easy to ignore by comparison.

I don't know why I keep going back these kinds of posts. It's almost as if my mind is expecting the OP to be like "You know, you're right. I overeacted and I was in a bad mind space at the time. The current team is doing great and I enjoy their content." But it never happens.

Personally, I'm with the majority of posters here that feel this is not a big a deal as some are making it out to be. I trust the staff here to be able to speak their honest opinions about a game without pressure about appeasing a company for an affiliate link or whatever.

Keep on keepin' on Giant Bomb.

If there's one thing I've learned from GB it is this: don't use the internet for boner pills. Go to the gas station.

on topic I think the links are lame (and I'll never click them anyway, heck I hardly even watch videos through the site anyway) but if the staff are on board then *that* is actually what GB always "stood for" IMHO

I can see not liking the links even if they don't bother me any, but complaining about "what the site stands for" and comparing it to ads is a bit of a stretch, and the connection to Gerstmann's exit is just nonsense, they aren't even owned by the same company that fired Jeff. New owner, new revenue strategies from people that probably aren't the ones you see in videos.

Le sigh

OP is being overdramatic and seems to be looking for a fight. But this sucks and is a terrible idea.

The defenses here are even worse. They're random and incoherent. And the core feature of them seems to be deliberately conflating "good vs bad" and "Commercial necessity vs unsustainability". And also deliberately ignoring the potential conflict in news coverage to focus on reviews "which Giantbomb 'doesn't do', but also they definitely aren't affected".

Worst of all is how the GB handled it. At the very least it should be obvious why this would be controversial. What we get though is the junior staff forced to deal with it, and dead silence from those in charge until a token "this is good actually" a few days later in what seems to be the single piece of premium-only content of 2022.

I don't have much skin in this game, as I've kind of been checked out of the site for a bit, but I'll keep weighing in until my premium sub actually expires. This affiliate link thing is a bad look for the site, straight up. I'm sure that none of this was the decision or desire of any of the on-screen crew, and it may be necessary for the site's survival, but the crew's complete lack of transparency about it until viewers "caught" them doing it is really horrible optics.

Say what you will about the previous Gamestop pricing plugin or whatever, this new system has the potential to be qualitatively different and to skew the site's coverage of games. If this were like the Gamestop thing where affiliate links were provided across the board for every single game, that would be fairly innocuous. However, it appears that these links will only be provided for some games, which naturally creates at least the appearance of a conflict of interest on the part of the staff that's supposed to be critically covering these games.

For the record, I don't doubt the integrity of any of the crew and I'm sure none of them would ever consciously violate their professional ethics. The problem is the subtle ways in which this incentivizes the site to give extra coverage (even if it's fairly critical) to games that have these links available. Even a somewhat unflattering video about Sonic draws eyes to the affiliate link, and a certain number of people's brains are broken in such a way that they'll buy it even though it looks terrible.

With how Fandom seems to be running things and how relatively precarious GB's situation seems to be, it also doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to think that the crew might also be almost unconsciously a little more forgiving with games that they know could bring in some extra revenue and help justify the site's continued existence. Again, none of this is on the crew; these decisions have almost assuredly been made at higher corporate levels, and if I were in the crew's position, I'd want to do everything possible to ensure the future of the site.

Granted, viewers have never known the lines of thought that have resulted in games getting the coverage they've gotten, but (except to lunatic console warriors who accuse people of taking money from Sony/Microsoft), it's never felt like there have been any outside forces putting their thumbs on the scales. It may still be that the crew is totally independently choosing what to cover based on their personal interests without any consideration of these links, but there's a lot of reasonable doubt around that now. At best it muddies the waters.

What is on the crew, however, is the lack of communication around this issue. Regardless of whether or not you're ok with these affiliate links (and there's an extremely pragmatic argument to be made for them if you're invested in the continued existence of the site), they constitute a very large change in how things are done. Yes, Jeff Gerstmann, Brad, Vinny, and Alex are gone, but it's incredibly dishonest to pretend that long-time viewers all assumed that their philosophy of professional ethics vacated the site with them. This site was founded on the idea that actual criticism often needs to refuse to play ball with the hands that feed it. Again, there's certainly an argument to be made that this is unsustainable; I think that, sadly, that's probably true. But when you're dealing with a well-established, decade-old community that coalesced around a critic who was willing to get fired rather than kowtow to marketing interests, you can't suddenly expect that everyone is going to be cool with this, especially with zero preamble.

Had Bakalar or Dan or Grubb introduced these links in the Bombcast ahead of time, I think people would have been much more understanding about the whole thing. Again, I'm personally against the links, but I understand that they're probably necessary to sustain the site. The way this all played out, though, really feels like the site got caught doing something shady, and now the crew's reactions to people being understandably put off by it come across as quite defensive. Jess's Twitter take really didn't help, either, and that probably intensified the weird "nothing is different; it's always been this way; everything is fine" vibe that's been given off around this issue. In Jess's defense, though, it shouldn't have been up to her to address people's concerns about this change. This is the sort of thing that the site's leadership should have been proactive about introducing and fielding questions about.

I get that videogame sites are an endangered species and they need to adapt and find new revenue streams to survive. I also get that I'm an old head, and that most consumers probably think about conflicts of interest differently than I do. That's fine. As a paying subscriber to this site for over a decade, though, I think that it's not unreasonable to have expected some notice and explanation about a pretty substantial change to editorial policy. I'm very uncomfortable with the direction the site is taking, and I don't think I'm alone in that. I wish the crew the best, but, sadly, I don't think Giant Bomb is for me anymore.

@notkcots: You may not have much skin in the game, but you've given the best response so far that covers all sides. Well done.

My thing as I've said when I clicked on the Sonic Frontiers QL and saw the angry comments, was that none of it surprises me. People don't seem to understand what it truly means when corporate takeovers happen. The once pure intentions of a business doesn't remain so. There are many major corporations that started out honest and doing right by the consumers, but once it fell on hard times and got sold off, it usually resulted in things getting worse not better for all involved expect the top brass cashing in.

Premium was and is still being sold as ad-free though.

@notkcots: that's a well reasoned take and that i think places things in their proper context which, to be fair, i don't think OP was doing in good faith. i think it is also fair to say the messaging could have gone differently which might have worked better for everyone. there's a history here that i frequently overlook because i've been following this gang since 2011- firmly after the Gamespot days. for me it was the podcast that drew me here nearly a decade ago (jesus what is time), so it's always been about the personalities/entertainment first. but i get it might be a different story for those who followed from Gamespot.

speaking personally- i've never expected journalism school levels of division-of-church-and-state from this editorial team- and frankly (as you allude to) i'm not sure they have the desire nor financial resources to achieve that. in a world where it seems like 90% of games media receives their games for free from publishers they have may or may not relationships with- i take more on good faith and reputation (and counterbalance that faith with a plurality of opinions) than a site's usually non-existent public ethics policy or statement.

it's a personal decision, but i'm ok with (and even find useful) sites like NYT's The WIrecutter. that's an inelegant comparison given the parent company and the fact that it's explicit purchasing advice (as opposed to what GB currently produces)- but in a way that only raises the stakes and i'm still ok with it because it's just a piece of my overall purchasing decision process.

but if you want the real tl;dr- i wouldn't even know the links exist if not for this discussion as i usually turn on a video and switch to another tab, or i'm full screening while doing something else. the text descriptions could be completely empty and it probably wouldn't change anything i'm absorbing.

or maybe they should just do what pitchfork or product review sites do and have some boilerplate like this on their descriptions:

FWIW, I‘m content with Jeff’s explanation for these ads from the Discord Q&A: that these links are less advertisements for the games mentioned in the QL and more advertisements for Fanatical, which of course is owned by Fandom. There is no direct link between the game publisher and GB in this, unlike the Kane and Lynch issue. And there’s no reason to think that Fanatical would benefit from GB bending its coverage in favor of a game, since the ads are just there to remind people that you can buy stuff through the site.

Is it a potentially bad look for the site? Sure, but you can’t account for every interpretation of an action that’s going to help keep the site afloat. And do I wish they didn’t have to do this? Absolutely. But this such a minor issue that can be resolved with just a little reflection on the industry and the actual impact of the links.

OK, setting aside my jokey posts above, an actual post about this topic.

Use your own judgement. Based on the opinions you see on the site, decide whether you think:

• ads people/Fanatical offers have no influence on GB editorial, and the two camps operate independently
• or, ads people/Fanatical offers have undue influence on GB editorial

That's it. This is not a new judgement call. Some lunatics are acting like if there are any game-related ads on a game website, it's a foregone conclusion that it will always compromise the editorial stance.

Do you think Game Informer has reviews giving their honest opinion, or they're just pumping up whatever games would make GameStop the most money? Do you think Kotaku has reviews giving their honest opinion, or they're just pumping up whatever games would make the most money off their weekly deals, sponsored post, whatever-the-fuck affiliate articles? Do you think EGM had reviews giving their honest opinion, or they were just pumping up whichever publisher paid for the most full-page ads in the magazine?

I don't see how Giant Bomb is different. Just make your own judgement call of whether you trust editorial to give you their straight opinion, or whether something else is happening because there isn't enough of a firewall around editorial.

With 2007-era GameSpot, there was a rare peek behind the curtain that a publisher's dissatisfaction-with-reviews-on-a-website-they-had-paid-ads-on found its way to the ad people which found its way to management, who ultimately terminated Gerstmann. Due to that event, it's possible that one or more founding GB staffers were active in discussions to keep game ads distanced/minimal from GB, as the community so strongly believes, though I don't have weeks to find how many times any GB staffer ever explicitly stated this stance.

But overall, it's pretty unusual for an enthusiast website to do this. Car magazines/websites have ads/offers for car shit. Fashion magazines/websites have ads/offers for fashion shit. Music magazines/websites have ads/offers for music shit. I understand that Gerstmann (and by parasocial association, a big chunk of the GameSpot/Giant Bomb community) had A Bad Experience with game ads going too far and getting an editor fired from GameSpot in 2007, but I'd call it naive to think that means you're just going to swear off game ads until the end of time.

They're just game ads. You be the judge of whether you think the outlet's editorial stance has become unduly influenced by the presence of them.

@notkcots: Thanks for your reasonable perspective. I understand your points even though I don't share some of them. But I agree that being upfront and transparent about the links would have been better. As someone that still enjoys GB, I think communication continues to be a major issue. The crew has been put in compromising positions by the management time after time. It's unfair and exhausting. So the concerns are warranted, but I hope they can continue to fight through it and eventually arrive at a stable point, if that's at all possible in the nightmare hellscape we are calling reality nowadays.