Podcast overload

All - Anyone else feel utterly overwhelmed by the sheer number of gaming Podcast hours in a week? Between Nextlander, the Bombcast, Jeff Gerstmann, and Fire Escape, I cannot keep up. Toss in an occasional Unlocked or Major Nelson podcast for old times sake and I am on total gaming overload. Plenty of other amazing gaming podcasts out there too... I just don't have the time to listen to more than an hour or two a week.

Mostly curious if anyone knows why some of these groups are not collaborating more. As I am way behind on listening to any podcast in its entirety, has Jeff or the Nextlander crew ever alluded to collaborating on an occasional project as a friend of the site/podcast? I get that Jeff will not be doing that any time soon with Giant Bomb but curious about him collaborating with Nextlander.

Completely fine if they are all doing their own thing, just curious on my end. Thanks duders!

I get that people feel a connection to all of these people and want to support everything that they're doing, but you really do just have to accept that there isn't enough time to follow it all. If you're feeling stressed about it and like you're doing it out of some obligation, it's probably time to prune your podcast, Twitch, Patreon, etc. subscriptions.

Nextlander basically only talked about Gerstmann when he left Giant Bomb. In terms of collaborative stuff, Nextlander has a tier that grants access to yet another podcast called Never Been a Better Podcast, which is basically a reunion of the Beastcast. They were rotating people out, although the last time they got everybody on one show (Vinny, Alex, Austin, Abby, Dan, Bakalar). It isn't video game related. It's just people talking about stuff like Dan's basement snake adventure, ghost stories, mecha, etc. One thing with that is it's only once a month. I think that works out in it's favor. If it were more recurring, people would probably just chat about their past week and rehash stuff they already talked about elsewhere. On the other hand, right now the topics are all over the place and more reflective or nostalgic. Aside from that, it's the one off streams like Splatoon, Neon White, and last year's Extra Life.

I ran into a similar issue once upon a time when I had a job where I could work by myself in silence for like 90-95% of my job. That's actually how I found Giant Bomb. I needed another podcast. My problem was a little different. There were too many podcasts and there was so much stuff to listen to I got fatigued at a certain point. Even though I was just listening to podcasts, I got tired from hearing people talk so much. It especially hit me when people would talk about the same games across all of those different podcasts.

At a certain point I accepted that I'm not going to listen to everything. Like to this day, I've never listened to Gerstmann's new show, despite listening to them for over a decade on the Bombcast. I would probably like the Fire Escape podcast, but I just don't have the time. All of my podcasting is divided up between Nextlander and GIant Bomb. In the rare event I try something else, I don't stick with it or play catch up with one of my main podcasts and just never go back to the new show.

This right here. I barely listen to videogame podcasts UNLESS there's something on them I'm actively interested in (Marvel Snap, GoW Ragnarok, Cult of the Lamb) and part of that is just that I'm getting older and, frankly, videogame "news" is so recursive and at times grim that I just don't feel the need to engage with it on the same level I used to.

I used to follow everything until I realized it was just becoming stressful. I have my weekly podcasts I always listen to (Bombcast, Nextlander, Vidjagame Apocalypse). And while I follow a bunch of other sites and channels, I don't force myself to listen to the rest, only if I have some quiet time at work or a long drive or something.

My recommendation is to either find a couple anchors or just listen to shows with a topic that interests you.

There were times when I watched every piece of GB content, or every Starcraft match in GSL, or tried to watch every video uploaded by every Youtuber I follow. And you just can't, it's not a good way to live so it's better to pick and choose rather than trying to collect everything in your brain.

yes.. i too have too many podcasts between gb , waypoint nextlander , fireescape n jeff's solo stuff. i usually only listen to them while gaming but i don't always play something thats suitable for listening to podcasts leading to a backlog of them . i haven't listened to jeff or fireescape in Probably 2 months? at this point. i'm a month behind on waypoint , and i'm a bit behind on nextlander stuff having caught up on a month's worth of gb stuff last week when vampire survivor hit 1.0 .. it reaslly is just too many podcast and i miss when everyone was sorta in 1 place or even 2. at this point i usually prioritize nextlander and waypoint stuff with gb next in line , issue with bombcast lately is so many guests of the site in it that it just doesn't feel as good as when it was steady regulars like it used to be. nothing against guest they're fine but not what i come here for, and the amount of staff just roating in n out each week doesn't do it for me as much as a steady crew week to week with thoughts does the same way. fire escape was always something i sorta listened to if i ran low on stuff (rare) but was never a big deal too since its just bi-weekly, and jeff's solo stuff is fine he thankfully Can hold his own solo very well but its missing the real discussions i liked before between ppl and is alot of rehash at the end of the day. at this point since i'm behind n low on money i've since unsubbed to him sadly

As a podcast, video game and improv comedy fan, I’ve hit podcast overload and often have to delete episodes because there just isn’t enough time in the week. Bombcast, all the nextlander podcast (need my vitamin Vinny), retrograde amnesia, HG101 top 47,000 best games of all time, and waypoint are the games ones, then comedy bang bang, bonanas for bonanza, judge John hodgman, WTF, the always sunny podcast, anything anywhere that has Paul F Tompkins (so all podcasts, essentially), get played (more a comedy pod than a games one, really), how did this get made, and actually more. It’s too much, so I’ve come to accept that I’m gonna miss episodes, skip plenty and just enjoy what I get to when I can.

A big determiner in what gets cut or frequently skipped is how many and what kind of ads pop up. I gave up Conan's podcast and Fire Escape because fire escape gave me horrible republican monsters political ads and I just goddamn can't with that, and conan is more ads than podcast.

edit: feel I should state that Fireescape is using an automatic ad thing and they are not reading horrible republican monsters polical ads themselves and I don't think would ever as mike, dan and mary are actually good people. I honestly think they just don't know that some sceevy ads are autoplaying.

I would say that there is a general "content overload." I find it easy enough to consume the podcasts that I care about (Bombcast, Nextlander, and Gerstmann) in chunks throughout the week. It also super helps that I can smuggle them in to work and listen to them there. There are, however, a ton of other podcasts, video game related and otherwise, that I'd love to listen to (like Albummer here) but it's just not something that I feel like taking on. When it comes to videos, I have long since given up even attempting to watch everything. I'll toss something on when I'm doing the dishes but if I have the free time to sit and watch someone play a game for 3 hour straight, odds are that I'd much rather play a game myself.

You really have to break yourself away from turning it into a damn job. Like, if I miss a Game Mess Morning, oh fucking well. Be okay with missing a week's episode, falling behind a bit on the news, and try to pick only the topics that actually interest you.

Podcasts are a waste of time. Why do anything else these days unless it's stable diffusion is the way things are going for me.

trying to keep up with everyone who has left the site over the years is too much. That's why I only listen to the podcasts from Giant Bomb Dot Com

Honestly, I don't really listen to many gaming podcasts because a lot of people don't have much of a historical perspective and it is hard to hear people talk about a subject that they don't have a deep perspective of. Giant Bomb is better than most at that but I haven't really found one that I like outside of that.

Also, a lot of gaming news is essentially free advertisement and talking about pre-release trailers that don't have any significance, so I see a lot of discourse to be somewhat pointless as well.

Outside of Giant Bomb, I listen to Knowledge Fight, The Dollop, and Behind the Bastards. I don't have time for any others or I'd have to cut back on hobbies.

@ultimaxe: general content overload is exactly right. and with media consolidation and dominant platforms fully embracing the gig worker model, it feels like it's only going to get worse.

this is why unrelated services like Netflix suddenly also do games- the attention economy is everything, and they're desperate to keep you in one spot.

but in terms of my personal coping mechanism- i've surrendered to that notion that my time is governed by 'moods' or 'seasons,' and ill cycle through content creators every 6 months or so. it's not premeditated - i just don't fight the drift anymore. it all comes back around.

funnily enough though- it's 'obsolete' features like this URL'd website and actual forums that keep me tethered here. the content is rad, and i love the gang- but i'm not sure i'd have been so long term committed if i found them on YouTube or twitch first.

I only listen to two relatively short podcasts at the moment, Gerstmann and Shift+F1, but i watch loads of streamers to the point where i'm only really playing passive games at the moment, i want to give all my attention to story games when i play them but it's taking me ages to get through them, i started Death Stranding a month ago and i'm only 9 hours in, compared to 34 hours of Flight Sim in the last 2 weeks.

I sympathize with this topic and I struggle with the same thing. I have a job that allows quite a bit of listening time while I work, so I have a wide range of podcasts that I listen to in order to fill the time - Bombcast, Nextlander, Gerstmann, Fire Escape, Completely Unnecessary, RetroRGB, Conan O'Brien, Dean Delray, Talk is Jericho - just to name a few!

The problem I have is that my mentality is such that I feel like I need to listen to every episode, in order, of every podcast on my list. Very rarely do I ever skip something that is on my list. In a typical week, I can usually get through most or all of my preferred podcasts, but all it takes is one atypical week to throw everything out of whack and start to compile a backlog. Add a few more atypical weeks and suddenly I'm behind multiple weeks on a dozen or more podcasts.

The answer seems simple, to focus on my absolute favorite shows and skip the rest when I don't have time, but for whatever reason that is easier said than done for me. At this point, I almost feel like I'm living vicariously through the hosts of many of these different shows, since I spend so much more time listening to people talking about gaming than I do gaming myself. At some point, I definitely think I need to flip that script and focus more on active participation in my interests while scaling back on who I'm following.

My two days in the office as as boring as they come. The Bombcast and the Gerstmann Show cover one of those days. I couldn't manage another one, though. Especially given how much they overlap.

I used to try and watch every piece of Giant Bomb content, back when it was the only content I consumed regularly and that was much more manageable. With everyone spread out now between Jeff's thing and Nextlander, I've given up on trying to catch everything, and only catch the things I'm interested in. I've decided to only listen to one podcast a week. Most of the times, it's the bombcast. Sometimes I'll listen to Jeff or Nextlander instead.

i feel like the value of a website can't be stated enough honestly . theres a reason why even tho i usually enjoy their video content i rarely if ever interact with stuff from jeff, nextlander, and waypoint , along with dan's solo stuff during his wwe time. obviously i skip ones i have zero interest in but more often than not i just flat out don't like dealing with scrolling youtube thumbnails and or twitch archives to finger out whats even played , and its even worse when its something with more than 1 game. at the same time for podcasts its alot easier to realize where i left off i'm i'm behind a bit cause either the site has a partly played bar ( vs the podcast app randomly restarting things i already listened to due to auto-queuing ) if not by good descriptors.

I have a job where I can listen to podcasts nearly full-time unless the phone rings. So I get around to Jeff's show, Nextlander, Fire Escape and Giant Bomb as well as Vidjagame Apocalypse and some other pop culture and news podcasts. I would very much like to see Jeff and the Nextlander crew team up in the future, but I haven't heard any hints from either that it's at all in the cards.

Somewhat, though I'm not afraid to skip something. My podcast is roster is huge, and I have heard most of the episodes of most of these podcasts.

The Bill Simmons Podcast, Effectively Wild, Chapo Trap House, The Rewatchables, The Ryen Russillo Podcast (but mostly just the life advice segment, especially during football season), Bodega Boys (RIP), The Lowe Post, The Jeff Gerstmann Show, The Daily, The Watch, The Ringer MLB Show (RIP), Plain English, NY Times Popcast, Hard Fork (formerly Sway, which I've also recently added Kara Swisher's other podcasts, On and Pivot, to make up for losing Sway), The Press Box, Post Reports, Triple Click, The Besties, Nextlander, The Big Picture and Get Played. And that's leaving out several serialized podcasts like Rabbit Hole, What Had Happened Was, Boom/Bust: HQ Trivia or, well, Serial from the past and present. I've also got a couple local industry podcasts, Restaurant Tales and Restaurant Hoppen, I listen to as often as I can.

Fire Escape, Giant Bombcast, WTF (I still really like the show, the pandemic and loss of the garage just changed it for me), The Mismatch, 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, Bandsplain (these two are awesome, but for whatever reason these Music & Talk podcasts Spotify produces aren't allowed to play over TVs or gaming consoles so I have to pick my spots with them since I have to listen to them on headphones), Game Mess Mornings, The Danny Brown Show, The Video Archives Podcast, Waypoint Radio, The Pitchfork Review, My Brother My Brother and Me, Unspooled, How Did This Get Made, The Ringer-Verse, Citations Needed, Noclip, The Prestige TV Podcast and The Ringer NBA Show's lineup then make up my "if I care about what they're talking about or have nothing else to listen to" roster. I'll say that while I enjoyed Fire Escape a lot, never had the ad issue others did for whatever reason and listened to the first 20 or so episodes without a problem, their descriptions have gotten more and more vague for a 3 hour podcast and I realized they don't actually play many games I have any interest in so I haven't listened in a few months.

I'll say one nice thing about the Giant Bomb fracturing is that now almost none of the video content is about games I'm all that interested in other than the Quick Look esque stuff and Nextlander's FMV features - I already never watched the craft game stuff like Minecraft, Astroneer, Valheim etc. anyway - so that frees up a lot of audio time now that I'm pretty much never watching video. But otherwise, yea, as others said, you just can't be afraid to say no. I skip a lot of Bill Simmons episodes during the NFL season because I stopped caring about the NFL nearly a decade ago, and Effectively Wild posts 3 episodes every week between 1 to 2 hours long about current baseball topics so if I fall behind I just accept that and pick up where I feel most appropriate. And in my case, I think specifically in terms of the gaming pods listed here - Bombcast, Nextlander, Gerstmann, Fire Escape, Besties, Triple Click - you can usually assume if you've heard one of them you've heard everyone else's take if you can't get to them, with Waypoint and Get Played offering the greatest opportunity for surprise (but like Fire Escape they almost never talk about games I care about, so I mostly tune in if the news rundown looks interesting).

:/

But yes, I currently have four gaming "podcasts" (Gerstmann, Nextlander, Bombcast and GB Dumptruck) and it's a lot to get through!

I’d also like to add that the one and absolutely only hilarious thing about me is that I can’t wait to stop listening to actual, real life friends describe the new podcast they love yet I’ll always be first in line to fill a forum reply with podcast title gibberish. I will drop cut blood relatives off from describing a podcast to me in person so I can focus on describing another podcast I, the important one, actually listen to to an absolute stranger on the internet.

Sometimes I miss when all I knew sounds of the world to emanate from was radio stations and CDs; I can sometimes feel like a right wing kook what found video games and Marxism rather than Limbaugh and local sports talk.

Agreed on having a central website like GB which will always be king for me. But for the most part I just scrub through "everyone's" podcasts to try to hear what they all have to say about a particular thing.

I listen to the Bombcast/Dump Truck, Fire Escape, Jeff's show and all the Nextlander ones. Seeing how I often work alone at my job, it's not that big of a problem for me to listen to a lot of them five days a week. That said, sometimes they pile up, like when I happen to be a on a week's vacation since I don't really listen to podcasts then, or at least as much. I usually skip on Jeff in that case, because as much as I like him, it's a lot to listen to several episodes in a row, especially if he doesn't have any guests.

Agreed I sometimes listen to podcasts for 30 seconds and if the energy isn’t there or some hosts are gone, they are the low hanging fruit to skip for the week.

Reevaluate what you actually enjoy and find what you actually enjoy and worthy of your time.

I think folks may be reading into this too much as a anxiety inducing dilemma of some sorts… just simply an observation that as things continue to splinter it’s harder to find one podcast that checks a majority of the boxes, so I’ve just stopped listening all together. It’s a shame but I’m not worked up about it in the slightest. Just curious if listeners are dwindling or if I’m the exception and not the norm.

Edit: I get why my initial post suggested I may be really anxious/upset over this… just using bombastic language to stir conversation. Appreciate all the thoughts that have been contributed.

The podcast is the thing I am absolutely the least interested in from all these people. It doesn't help that each one is so long. Jeff's Podcasts are like 3 hours long... who the hell has time for that?