Giant Bomb goes independent
At the beginning of the month, things weren’t looking good for gaming site Giant Bomb after its content was put on hold amid reports of editorial interference from its parent company, Fandom. Today, some feel-good news: Giant Bomb announced it is now an independent, employee-owned entity.
“Giant Bomb lives! Fandom has sold the site to us,” the outlet wrote on Bluesky yesterday evening. In a post on its website about the new development, the Giant Bomb says it’s “not serving an algorithm or executives,” and that it aims “to lean into what’s always made Giant Bomb special, and that’s the people you see and hear on our content, and our extremely passionate community.”
The site also announced a new subscription model, which it says “will go directly towards maintaining and growing Giant Bomb and paying the fine folks that you see on our programming week after week.”
Games media has changed dramatically since Giant Bomb launched in 2008, and our new model aims to evolve with the times. We want people to be able to see our content whether they’re able to support us monetarily or not, so the large majority of what we put out will be available for free. That’s how Fortnite works, right? The kids love Fortnite. Dan Ryckert skin coming soon!
Giant Bomb sums up its new monthly ($9.99 per month) and annual ($99.99 per year) subscriptions:
If you sign up today, you’ll get ad-free RSS feeds for all of our podcasts and access to premium-only Discord channels (like behind-the-scenes, Town Hall Q&As, and more). We are going to launch very simple and we will grow and adjust from there. This all finally came together literally hours ago, and we couldn’t even update the language on the sign up page yet. The perks are a little different from what’s listed there, so If you have any questions, reach out on social and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. For example, our Discord verification process might be slow, so bear with us for now!
The news feels like a pleasant combo-breaker after the May 1st one-two punch news of Giant Bomb’s content pause and Verge parent company Vox Media’s sale of gaming site Polygon to Valnet, a media company that’s suing TheWrap over its damning report of accusations of “almost sweatshop-level” working conditions.