The Case For Keeping This Torch Alive & Other Thoughts About Giant Bomb's Next Steps

When a new month falls upon us next week, Giant Bomb and this community will embark on a new chapter and phase unlike any we have ever seen before. For those unaware, Giant Bomb will be transitioning to a new website, built from the ground up. With this transition, many of the features we have come to associate with Giant Bomb's site will change fundamentally. MediaWiki will serve as the wiki's scaffold, forums will no longer be formatted as they are now, and personal user page features such as private image galleries will no longer exist. The primary reason is to reduce the financial burden this site currently imposes on the small team that now owns and operates Giant Bomb, but it also reflects a broader change we have all seen on the internet. Web 2.0 isn't dead, but its luster is definitely gone. While user-created content is still encouraged and promoted as a way to drive SEO and website traffic, it's no longer the primary driver of website creation, as it once was. And if we are being sincere, Giant Bomb's user features, which I still love from the bottom of my heart, were designed and implemented during the site's early days when Web 2.0 was all the rage, and sometimes it shows more than you'd like.

The good news is that most of what we enjoyed here will be joining us, even if some of these tools will be locked behind a premium subscription. Massive props to Chuck for finding a way to make sure most of what you and I have created on Giant Bomb will rejoin us on the new site. It's not going to be everything, and as someone who has been here since the very beginning, there are parts of my posting and content creation on this site that I'd rather be lost to time forever. But the heart of what made this site and community so special in the past will still be with us, and that's a miracle. I'm not sure if you have looked at how things are panning out in the gaming industry and games press, but there aren't a ton of places for us to go to anymore. I know I said that when it seemed like Giant Bomb was done for at the start of the year, but that statement is unfortunately more true today than when I first said it. Sure, you can find enthusiast sites that cover games and publish reviews like the 2010s, but do they welcome their users to pen essays or share comments in threads that leave a mark or paper trail on the World Wide Web? No, it's all in chats, Discords, or social media threads that barely leave a blip once things are over, and the fact that Giant Bomb has subverted that trend in its next phase leaves me optimistic. Clearly, people above us care about this side of the community, and I don't know about you, but that means the world to me.

And to those still feeling maligned with what the future may bring, because it doesn't entirely conform to how the internet operated in the past or what Giant Bomb's original site did or attempted to do, I understand the concern, trust me, I do. However, you have to believe me when I say, and I get that this will come across as cruel, but there's no juice or blood in this stone. This current site has been held together with bubble gum and duct tape for almost a decade; the last proper site revision or attempt at one dates back to the CBS days. The tech debt is insane, and many of the things you've advocated for fixes in the past simply couldn't be resolved, not entirely due to a lack of care or interest. Many of your recurring issues had whole teams of professionals working on them, and solutions couldn't be found or implemented at a decent pace because the guts here are way worse than you could ever imagine. I have seen how the sausage is made, and it's gnarly. The article editor hiccups, randomly gobbles up whole compositions, and can't even embed videos anymore. Bluesky posts don't display correctly because the code can't handle social media platforms beyond Facebook and Twitter. The search engine stopped working years ago, and over ten people worked on it around the clock for months. This migration needs to happen, and while it sucks that not everything will join us as we transition into a new phase of Giant Bomb, at the end of the day, this has to be done.

I haven't even brought up the spam issue that has only gotten worse as bots continue to move from comments and threads to lists and reviews. Nor have I discussed how some parts of the site, such as the wiki, need to be redesigned to reflect the industry's evolving landscape. What the current Giant Bomb wiki allows to be archived as a game release reeks of dated sentimentalities from the site's launch in 2008. Much like Marino, whenever I look at a game like Destiny 2, PUBG, or Fortnite, I realize that we just are not equipped to cover large swaths of the industry unless something fundamentally changes. The way the wiki covers DLC has been maddening and unsatisfying for years, but we worked with those quirks. But what's worth recognizing is that we were able to work through those quirks and live with them because there was a massive corporate engineering team plugging holes and putting scotch tape on fissures. Giant Bomb doesn't have that anymore, and it would be wrong to expect the current squad to commit to such a herculean effort.

So, this migration needs to happen. Period. Now, with that behind me, I want to make it clear that I expect those of you reading this right now to show the fuck up. You're not going to like everything about the new site, but the fact that it exists is still a blessing. There was a recurring joke among Dave Snider and the mod team back in the day that no one in Giant Bomb's history had ever launched a site revision or update that satisfied everyone. With that in mind, and given that we all basically understand there will still be a "home" for us, I expect every one of you to use the features you have advocated for and felt have come to define this community over these many years, and prove they were worth protecting. We may never reach the heights of the past, but that shouldn't stop us from making a lot of noise and keeping a torch lit in the increasingly dark network of misinformation that permeates the internet. I think it's safe to say that most of you are not robots, and the interactions we have had around these parts have been authentic. Depressingly, that's becoming a rarity these days, at least on the internet, and that's worth preserving and cherishing as well.

But again, you're asses better show up. I'm coming back and will likely have a version of the Community Spotlight when the dust finally settles on the new site. And I want to put your cool shit on a front-page article, as I have been doing for over a decade. I'm not using the site transition as an excuse to finally step away from what I have been doing for years and ride into the sunset. Naw, fuck that shit. I've been putting Giant Bomb and this community in front of my face for almost twenty years. I ain't fucking quitting. I'm in too deep to stop, and that means some way, somehow, you'll still see me plugging away, posting about Final Fantasy, which I honestly regret not covering more in 2025, moaning about the state of Xbox, or talking yang about the worst multimedia edutainment horseshit imaginable from the 1990s. And you want to know why? While Giant Bomb might be getting a new coat of paint and then some, it's still probably the best and safest way to talk about all those things on the internet. Because I trust you all, I trust "this" right here right now, and I trust the people calling the shots. This community is fantastic, and it's going to stay that way.

So, I really hope to see you. Yes, you, reading this blog right now. Honest, I want to see you popping your head in at least once or twice when all this goes live. Let's promise to talk shop, make threads, review some games, and get creative with user initiatives. Let's cook and hopefully, sooner rather than later.