Jess and Jason have been laid off (Updated)

I don’t have too much to add to this that hasn’t already been said. I’ll just say that the way that this played out just shows that, like many other corporations out there, the higher ups at Fandom are the worst kind of cowards. There are many unfortunate aspects to this, but one of them is that wanting to continue to support the people making the content at this site also means supporting these fuckheads that own it.

Hey Fandom. You wanna save money? How about you lay your CEO off, that might save you a cool 80 fucking million dollars. To everyone implicit in these layoffs, a hearty "fuck you" and I hope you all eat nothing but dirt for the rest of your miserable lives.

:(

I hope they can find something solid soon. and best wishes the the remaining team, the feeling will also suck

Deeply sorry for Jess and Jason, who live in a country with insurance based healthcare :(

I wish Jess could have been on the Bombcast more before this happened.

Since I've only listened to the pod for a long time, this site has felt weirdly small. Dan is never on the pod, Jess and Jason sporadically, Lucy/Tam almost never (I guess it's not part of their splitting duties job I dunno).

For me GB has dwindled enough since 2019-ish that it feels like there isn't much to mourn anymore but it's still sad. I like listening to Jan/Jeff/Jeff on the pod still so I'm rooting for them

Jeez, every time I leave the website for a little while and come back, something bad goes down. I wish I could say I'm surprised, but I'm not. I'm sure many others aren't either by this point. But we keep getting told, "don't speculate" about what is happening to Giant Bomb when the writing is so clearly on the wall. Like I said in the past, I wouldn't be surprised if this website is gone in 5 years, but the way things are going it might be a lot sooner. Or at least it will go under a different name. I especially feel bad for Jason. Jess is still young and will bounce back, but Jason has been loyal to GB since he came aboard. Many times he could have left, but stayed true and this is how he is treated. Given that the man also has to deal with medical issues, and its real shame.

I would say more, but what's the point. Either you see it now, or you never will until the day comes clicking on GB leads to a 404 page. SMDH... Let me watch some PIT, that might cheer me up.

Been here since day one. Cancelled my subscription now, Best of luck to the duders still with the site ill keep listening to the pod but Im done supporting the corporate future of the site.

Sigh, sorry to see this happen. I left late in the RV era just before Gerstmann was fired but saw this news as I follow Alex on twitter. GB to me now is one of Vinnie's Kerbal Space Program capsules stranded in space in a decaying orbit destined to fall into the sun due to lack of fuel and the ability to adjust course. How do you expand the audience with layoffs like this? I don't see it happening so as subs cancel in reaction to this news there won't be an influx to replace them. I guess Fandom will squeeze the last drops of money out of GB before pulling the plug but I do hope I'm wrong in the end.

You're not alone in this, that's for sure. I wish Giant Bomb could Giant Bomb itself out of their current shackles. I'll keep tuning in for the people who are still here, but I'm disheartened to say the least. Jason and Jess weren't just cogs in a machine. This place was a special. And it had a promising outlook, despite a lot of awful things that have gone down in fairly recent history. I want them to keep this thread running, but under its current ownership it's hard to be optimistic.

I try to remind myself with this stuff that there are definitely horror stories of employees going ape-shit when they're laid off, and that it can lead to nasty situations. But yeah, I can't help but feel like when a company doesn't give someone they're laying off any notice, and has a security guard stand in front of their desk when they clean it out, etc., and generally treats them like they're about to fly off the handle, it simply becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you want people to take it better, treat them better. You know, like an actual adult human being.

Anyway, obviously this all sucks. It really does feel more and more like a sinking ship.

I emailed my brother about all this. He's as much into games as I am, but doesn't really follow GB much, and mostly knows about it through me. Upon hearing Jess had been laid off, here's what he wrote back:

"Didn’t they basically just hire her, and wasn’t she their only female editorial staff, and wasn’t she, ya know… pretty good?"

To which I of course replied: "Yes, yes, and yes."

Damn, the Jess and Jan dynamic brought the best kind of younger gen energy : (

I don't understand why you pay money for something like GB when you plan on just gutting it later. And also, this actively pushes away the audience and makes your current employees worry about their futures - if you're still working at GB, how confident would you be that you'll still have a job in the near future? Don't they start looking for work elsewhere?

I'm no businessperson, but it seems like Fandom fundamentally misunderstands what they have, which makes me wonder why they bothered in the first place.

I have to admit that I don't really connect with any of the current GB team like I did the previous, but this still sucks. I liked Jason and Jess and didn't see this coming. It has been a slow downward slide for years though, and unfortunately it doesn't appear that things are going to get any better.

Why would you want money when you could have more money? That's the motive,

I mean if you even glance at the engagement the content gets its clear the site is dead. even this post only has 160 replies after 9 hours and its by far the biggest thing thats happened here since Jeff got fired

I run an I.T. department, and even in situations where it's an amicable departure, we pull as much access as possible, and we turn it all of as soon as we can. I'm trying to protect everybody - us AND them.

If somebody gets laid off, and then a key system goes down, the person who got laid off immediately becomes a suspect. If I can tell people "No, they couldn't have done anything, we pulled their access and somebody was with them at every moment", it protects good people who had the misfortune of being laid off from being accused of anything, and it protects people who are emotionally distraught (and rightfully so) from being laid off from doing something they might regret for the rest of their lives.

No clue what Fandom's security systems are, what type of access people may have had, etc. But it's standard procedure for a reason. I've known people who I thought would take things reasonably attempt to break furniture on the way out, and I've known people who I thought would set the whole place on fire who quietly walked out the door with their stuff after saying goodbye. You never know how you're going to take it, until you have to take it.

Being laid off sucks. Being laid off when there doesn't appear to be a good reason for it really sucks. Being laid off for a bad reason, and then accused of sabotage because a database server died within 6 hours of you walking out the door even though it was pure coincidence - that really REALLY sucks.

The real damning thing to me are reports that some managers didn't know this was going down. That implies that, however long execs knew about this, they didn't give the people in the trenches time to argue their case, or, in the worst case scenario, get ready and prepared. They didn't trust even their middle mangers with this information. That's a sign of a pretty dysfunctional company.

Good luck to all the people laid off.

@fargofallout: Corporate sharks buy a company, sabotage it, then sell it for a profit all the time. I believe this was the plan from day one. If I was the remaining staff, I'd be looking for a backup plan. I hope they're not buying into their own "don't speculate, everything is fine", nonsense. Tam and Lucy have Gamespot, they will be fine. And Dan is Dan, he will find a way.

He certainly will, but I wouldn't be shocked if he finds a way on his own terms sooner than later.

Giant Bomb is officially on borrowed time. How can we feel any other way?

Not surprising. Given the departure of almost all of the core outward-facing staff within a span of a couple of years (2020-2022), the changes in the structure and character of the content, the difficulty the site has had in finding a coherent and focused new direction, various new "shows" going on long hiatuses or just fizzling out etc. I assume they has been constantly hemorrhaging subscribers and losing non-subscribed viewers for the past few years, which means investments in new staff and freelancers have not paid off financially.

No corporation wants to bleed money and none of Giant Bomb's owners have been charities. At some point it's better to cut your losses rather than continue to sink money into a project whose revenue is shrinking over time in spite of costly attempts to change that trend. I wouldn't be surprised if the site doesn't exist within a few years, or even at the end of this one.

Regardless of anyone's personal opinion on the talent of the new staff and the quality of the content they've been putting out, it's pretty clear that the site has been slowly dying for years now.

Why dont they just start a new site like Jeff G did when he created Giant Bomb? Time to restart the cycle and go independent again

@ydross: I hope they do. Or find existing ones and join on as staff and contributors to their fledgling companies. Nextlander, Gerstmann has said he wanted to eventually find more people for his thing. Minnmax etc...

Sucks for all involved, hope those guys land on their feet and find something new soon.

As many have said this does feel like the end is coming though. I just don't think remote works for a dedicated site like this since there's nothing to differentiate you from a twitch collective at that point (to the broader market at least, i.e. people not participating in forum posts).

Can't fault any of the people involved as it's obvious they've been trying their asses off but the site hasn't been the same since the COVID shutdown and I can't see how the trend reverses at this point. I think the market is still there for the old style of GB where everyone was in the same place making shows and doing reviews but whether or not someone like Fandom has any interest in stumping up cash for that is another story.

@ydross: I’d say the issue there is money. Jeff and Ryan had Shelby, the money behind Whiskey Media, who was looking to make a culture-based series of websites and had the cash to make a startup happen. The crew we know, and the crew we don’t, aren’t rich. The all quit on mass and they have even less money. Plenty have kids and mortgages spouses, meaning taking risks is a different thing than where the original whiskey media crew was at in their late 20s and early 30s with relatively little to lose. And their health, and the costs of being uninsured. And websites are not the profitable venture they were 13 years ago either.

Best case scenario would be a Nextlander sort of thing or individually they can get a collection of patrons/audience to support a streamer/podcast job. But those aren’t guarentees either. More likely I see that the current crew holds on a while longer while they job hunt elsewhere, and start dropping out until there isn’t much left.

Not great news to wake up to. My bought-in-advance sub is finally expiring in June and this doesn’t make me feel like continuing it. Might finally have to actually start downloading some of my favourite premium videos to archive away.

All the best to both Jason & Jess.

@ydross: It's a much different climate now than it was when Giant Bomb started. Starting a new site in the same vain as GB likely isn't financially viable at this point in time. Sure, people could get together and go the Patreon route like Jeff, Nextlander, etc. but even that feels like a saturated market. I think when this site is gone it will be gone, and there will never be another community like it.

I just don't understand this. I mean, I do, because corporations are gonna do what they do, but still. Jason had become the senior-most staff member and has always been an invaluable asset to the site. Love that duder to death and he doesn't deserve to be let go of like that. Jess also became one of the top contributors of the site since she joined and has been a part of most of the running series.

This is truly the death knell of Giant Bomb. I've remained optimistic through all of the major changes of the last few years but this is really the beginning of the end. Fuck Fandumb. Add me to the list of people unsubscribing from premium. I've had premium since it first launched and the other day, my payment got rejected because it was on a card I recently changed. I'm just gonna let it lapse.

Good luck to Jess and Jason and Justin. You deserve way better than this.

Axing an entire chunk of the small handful of personalities that even remain on the personality-based content creation website, in order to try and balance the cash flow, is the dumbest fucking blood-from-a-stone I've seen in a good while.

I know these decisions aren't made on vibes like the ones I operate on but I followed the new lineup of GB members with genuine, legitimate excitement at the new energy that was being brought in, and having a whole portion of that energy just uncermoniously axed like that is just plain rotten.

I guess I'll keep my sub for now but boy did I have a long and hard think about it this morning.

For whatever consolation it’s worth, Jess and Jason had their names in Variety. One upon a time, even bad articles mentioning someone’s name there would make careers. Obviously not the same thing nor the ideal circumstances, but hey, I’ll take a single sugar sprinkle on this crap sandwich.

This is looking like one of Fandoms least popular moves ever. Being part of why more people hate the rich is not helpful personally, but is a very thin silver lining. Not that the rich people need to care yet, but it’s another log on the fire towards the correct and proper hate of corporate dipshitery.

I just wish my premium hadn’t already lapsed and also I could afford to actually get enough hard drives to store all the quick looks, endurance runs, happy hours, unprofessional Fridays, Thursday night throw downs, bombcasts, beastcasts, albummer, very online shows, and other things to store and maybe share for as long as I could. I am contemplating dropping $50 that will go to the wrong people to have a year to download what I can before the lights go out.

I think I’ve checked in on this site every day for over a decade. For all the talk of parasocial relationships it may represent, I don’t care. Judge it all poorly, I still won’t care. This place had people that kept me company through over a quarter of my life so far. I tried the keep the faith for the past few years but this…late to the alarm bell as I may be…this is where I think it’s correctly seen to be the end of things. It’s time to grab what we can because rich morons (rich = moron) will not care about preservation.

On the flip side, Jess now has twice the amount of patreons compared to yesterday...

This is very sad.

We’ve all been through a lot here over the years, but I’d guess I’m probably not alone in feeling a whole different type of awful after this one.

Just a truly unfortunate turning point.

I'd like to see Jess and Jan look into doing a Nextlander. Create a new endeavor with friends/former colleagues that's supported by the people and has no corporate overlords to answer to.

This punch in the gut is painful and brings uncertainty, no doubt, but they're smart and talented people, and should be fine in the long run.

The current business arrangement GB finds itself in isn't good, and I hope the rest of the crew starts planning for the worst.

Remote working really killed this site.

1. CBS sell up citing cost cutting during the pandemic.
2. Red Ventures pick it up. Studio space is gone. No real vision but there seems to be a focus on collaborative content.
3. Fandom step in and haven't really stamped any vision on it either. Borrowing Tam and Lucy from Gamespot (and hosting Friday Night Forking) seems to further the collaborative stuff.

It'll be sold again before the end of the year. Or fold altogether. Nobody knows what to do with a Hot Potato about video games.

It’s clearly curtains call, the remaining team need to leave with their dignity and start a Patreon or something. The chemistry of these folk is too good to let go to waste.

Latest in a long string of bad decisions, no way my subscription gets renewed.

I've been hovering over the cancellation button for a good while now. I'm holding off for the moment, as I want to see what is said about all of this. But I'll definitely be backing up all of the content I love, lest it be lost forever.

Love Jess and Jason. This is a terrible idea, Fandom.

my guess is of 2 things , 1 they just happened to be part of the package , or 2 the wiki possibly being a competitor they could put use of since they own all those wikias or kill it if they didn't find real use for it ... my best guess is honestly they just happened to be part of a package that they didn't need all parts of , and with only grub jan dan n technically rorie left of GB proper since bakalar is last i knew head of both gb and gamespot i can't imagine a world where gb doesn't just get shuttered and rolled into gamespot if kept at all. i love the remaining crew but its hard to not imagine how easy it would be for a corp to just can 3-4 ppl and save money on website operating costs ( meaning the website itself not just the staff) ... it sucks

Man, this fucking cursed site. I swear. I mostly checked out when the NL guys took off, then checked all the way out when Jeff departed, and then recently started to slowly come back to the site. And now this horseshit. So pissed for everybody at GB and Gamespot. Working their asses off constantly and this is what they get. Sure, GB may have pivoted away from what I came here for, but I love Jason and Jess and ultimately only wanted the best for everybody even if the content was no longer for me. But fuck this.

I would support the GB staff with a lot of Patreon money if everyone left en masse and did the baller thing, starting their own patreon. At least I'd know they're actually getting my subscription money.

RIP.

I haven't watched GB content in a long time but i feel bad for Jason, i hope someone gives him a home.

IMO, remote working bought the site a couple of years more life. Who would ever have bought the site if it had required paying for office and studio spaces in two among the most expensive cities on Earth, and everything that came with it?

This sucks, and watching the site circle the drain is a bummer. However, it is really funny that in one thread we have "in masse", "on masse" and finally, "en masse". English is a garbage language.

It's not a garbage language. People are just garbage at using it.

@therealturk: En masse isn't even a native English phrase. It's borrowed from French. Maybe we can focus on what a bummer it is that Jess and Jason got laid off and let them know (if they read this) that we all support them and wish the best for them and the remaining staff instead of arguing about proper usage of French loaner phrases.

@antime: That's just the thing -- We don't know what the overhead looks like. It's easy to be critical but we are in the dark.

To those cancelling your subs: You do you, but know that will only harm the remaining staff.

That's the hard part. We've been led to believe that the subs went to support the staff, but this really really feels like it flies in the face of that. My sub is paid up through the year already, but I did hit the cancel to prevent the auto-renew for the time being. Something I have never done since I subbed during the very first Big Live Live Show: Live.

@dooz: Hopefully if those were the issues there will be some kind of explanation from the site or some kind of official communication and explanation as to what to expect.

Part of why this hits so hard is how we found out (many of us from a forum thread) and the lack of explanation details. And for people paying for premium (mine is canceled but still active) we deserve an explanation as to why the product we are paying for is getting worse. A lot of people in this thread said they paid because they were fans of Jess or Jason and now they are locked into year long subscriptions not providing the content they wanted and expected.

Giant Bomb has a long history of interacting with the community in certain ways but keeping that same community in the dark about other things. They've gotten better about scheduling and some other stuff recently but this came out of nowhere. Note that I am not blaming @rorie (who is usually among the best communicators) or other front facing staff here because it seems like both Jason and Jess were blindsided too, which really sucks and speaks poorly of upper management.

There's no need to make up possible excuses for this for Fandom. If they have a good reason they need to communicate it clearly. Otherwise there's no reason to give benefit of the doubt.

If everyone cancels their subs today, this site will be gone tomorrow, make no mistake about that. Doesn't matter if you're subbed until 2028, you aren't getting refunded for it. Honestly if your subscriptions isn't renewing for a long time you might keep it on as a goodwill gesture towards the site. Boycotts and name-callings aren't going to bring the people back and the next step is almost certainly a full shutdown.

Go look at the Gerstmann thread. Hundreds of people at least threatening to cancel. I'm not trying to tell people how to spend their money but if you didn't realize that it was directly going to lead to more layoffs then I don't know what to tell you. And not it's the same thing repeating yet people will still act surprised if and when the site shuts down permanently.

I don't think there is really anything to communicate about a layoff. We all know what it is and words aren't going to make it feel any better.

I'm an ESL and EFL teacher, so I find our (mis)usage of French endlessly entertaining and part of why our nightmare language is so challenging. I didn't think I was taking away from the sympathy and empathy being extended to Jess and Jason, but if so, and especially if they took it that way, it was not my intention.

@apewins: Honestly, I think Jess and especially Jason were the last people with heart who were fired from the site. Some of the remaining are on something else imo. And like I said earlier, most of the remaining will also land on their feet. Tam and Lucy will be fine. They were really Gamespot anyway. Dan will hustle another job, which will likely be even better. Jeff B knows a lot of people and will get the hook up. Jan, well, he knows how please. And Jeff Grubb was the news man way before GB, he will land somewhere else. So I disagree with the notion that people should just accept this, otherwise GB ends and everyone else is screwed. In case you haven't realized. That is already happening.

@apewins: "Keep paying for a service even if it gets worse with no guarantees or even vague promises that it won't keep getting worse" is certainly one approach to being a consumer. I'm sure CEOs love those types of customers.

There actually are better and worse ways to conduct layoffs. And when a service gets worse giving some kind of explanation as to why and some guidance as to what to expect going forward actually can help consumers feel better even if it still sucks (giving more advance notice to those being laid off is, of course, much more important and common human decency.)

Consumers absolutely have a right to speak with their wallets and companies should be appreciative when they explain why because that gives the company the opportunity to win back those customers. If the company isn't interested in winning them back then oh well, that company probably wasn't very interested in meeting their needs in the first place.