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Giant Bomb #8 | It's a Hit!

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I think my biggest issue with this year's shows was too many guests and maybe the people paired together weren't perfect. Overall I loved the coverage and think Patrick did a great job, so dont take these comments as me being down on the coverage or anything. I think smaller groups with more similar people together, (like how we got the developer group on Thursday night) might be better. The crazy mix up guests that are opposed to each other was great when you had a host like Ryan, but with Jeff I think keeping similar types of guests grouped together might work better.

Also maybe don't let Greg Miller drink next year... I thought Greg was funny, but I was looking forward to Abbie, Cannata & Garnett being on and I feel like they kind of got... umm... overshadowed...

I thought getting Shu & Phil was great, also Ed Boone should get his own segment every year.

Overall I would give this year 5 out of 5 Yarn Yoshi Eggs....
 
Also maybe don't let Greg Miller drink next year... I thought Greg was funny, but I was looking forward to Abbie, Cannata & Garnett being on and I feel like they kind of got... umm... overshadowed...

I like him when he is doing his own stuff but please don't invite Jeff "Please check out my podcast, DLC" Cannata back.
 
Those tweets from that person are silly and Patrick giving such a thoughtful response is silly.

I think going the checkbox route is probably the worst thing you could do.

Aisha Tyler

BOOM.

He got stuck with the Chicago Second City repo players though. lol


Yeah. I guess the other thing is that, apparently, Japanese devs are notoriously bad with interviews and purely stick on topic... but you never know.

I think this was the first E3 where I was a bit bored by the same topics being covered by the guests. It probably doesn't help that GDC was only a couple of months ago and we basically got similar conversations back then.

As always, language is going to be a problem with Japanese/European developers/journalists. In my dreams, I'd like to imagine that Famitsu has a crazy daily podcast with dozens of Japanese devs shooting the shit with each other, Perhaps Miyamoto and Miyazaki have some weird relationship where they constantly shit on each other about making the same games over and over again. lol

"Oh, a Star Fox game? How fucking original."
"Says the asshole making yet another Souls game."

Broshida was stuntin' on them early in. He held his own extremely well for someone learning ropes culturally/language-wise against that crowd.

Also, a solid number of Japanese developers give interesting interviews, but that obstacle course of language -> culture -> "I've never heard of his game cuz it's not FF/MGS/Nintendo" -> what GB watchers want would be brutal.

Spelunky guy

GB should have got Itagaki on as a guest. He knows how to party

He's a sexual harrasser and there's been no death threats his way for it. No dice.
 
Lang and Johnny going off at the same time that Shu was there kinda sucked, really. I felt that Phil Spencer had a good showing but Shu got completely overshadowed by that street menace known as david lang.

Now, if you had lang, johnny, greg miller and the mcelroy bros on at the same time i think the world would implode in a gruesome fashion. So do it, please.
 
Aisha Tyler

BOOM.

Broshida was stuntin' on them early in. He held his own extremely well for someone learning ropes culturally/language-wise against that crowd.

Also, a solid number of Japanese developers give interesting interviews, but that obstacle course of language -> culture -> "I've never heard of his game cuz it's not FF/MGS/Nintendo" -> what GB watchers want would be brutal.

He's a sexual harrasser and there's been no death threats his way for it. No dice.
Yeah, I know that language and culture is a barrier - but that is also why it would be interesting.

I don't think having women on during the panels would be interesting if they're just going to do the same "I've been at e3 for 5 years and it's always so hard going to these appointments" or "working on indie games is really hard" topics over and over again.

They've done all female-panels before, at an old GDC I think, and that was okay... but there's also not much to add because at least last time the panelists they had weren't interested in talking about being women in the industry.

All things being equal, I'd be perfectly happy with 9 hours of Dave and Johnny flirting with each other though. That gimmick is still fresh enough for me. lol


Lang and Johnny going off at the same time that Shu was there kinda sucked, really. I felt that Phil Spencer had a good showing but Shu got completely overshadowed by that street menace known as david lang.

Now, if you had lang, johnny, greg miller and the mcelroy bros on at the same time i think the world would implode in a gruesome fashion. So do it, please.
Something about keeping all the misfits on in one segment is exciting because it sounds like it could be the greatest shit show ever. lol
 
If Patrick can convince women and minorities who work on games that are actually relevant to GB's coverage (e.g. AAA down to medium indie's) to come on the show, even if it means begging permission from PR and shit, then that would be amazing.

But if we end up with more Zoe's - people on the absolutely fringe of development with very little work of interest - or even more journo's, I'll be massively disappointed. It's a waste of E3/GDC time getting people on who are otherwise easily available and accessible to the public. It's like a recent women in gaming GDC panel I watched not so long ago and realising most of the panellists were press and pundits.

Trade shows are great because these extremely busy and overworked developers are all in the one place, however when they make the time to come on, they can be drowned out by people who are much easier to get hold of (e.g.press). More journo's and fringe will exacerbate the problem and trade shows could become a wasted opportunity (as great as this E3 was, I'd say it was slightly wasted).

tl;dr - more (relevant) women/minorities and more Rami's/Dino's/Cowboy's. Be very selective with press people.
 
Patrick made a blog post talking about booking the E3 panels and the lack of diversity.

http://patrickklepek.tumblr.com/post/89165256269/my-rolodex

I'm glad Patrick also thought the panels were over crowded. I though Cara Ellison, Zoe Quinn and Alexa were all great.

Ugh, so refreshing to read something that isn't filled with rage - not to say Patrick's stuff usually is like that, it just feels like a lot of articles lately have just been pointing fingers and criticism. Introspection and responding to the criticism at hand is really great to see and while I disagree with the tweet, I do think there are areas to improve upon. Panels are already so difficult to manage, I don't think he needs to purposely go out of his way to have a 50/50 gender split or something.

Anyway, I think a big take away from this year's panels is that having a place so close to the convention center is extremely useful in booking and keeping guests. I doubt it was a coincidence that both Shu and Phil made it this year compared to what was beginning to be a staple circle of guests from the past few years.
 
I have to agree that the guest were not paired well nor was there a lot of guest to guest talk as much as host to guest.
So many journalists but that was expected. The Kotaku girl and the Polygon guy (The non McElroys) were the least interesting. Give us some international journalist.
On the lines of journalist, some of the most interesting people to talk to at E3 or GDC are often the producers or video editors.

As for gender distribution, I think pairing personalities is more important. (Blow/Cliffy B)
(Chen/Barnett). No Man Sky Guys with Drake would have been good. Jonathon Blow is always good. Wished Abbie and Cannata got more time.
 
Yeah, the problem is that devs are so tied by PR that it probably makes it impossible to get someone like that Metro guy to come on and talk about smuggling computers into Kiev so that they can make their game while their country falls apart.

The thing with press is that they're always visible and all have podcasts, so other than seeing them interact with each other (Greg Miller showing off his nipples to everyone) then it's all a bit samey.
 
It's true, every time I watch E3 shows I wonder if there are any black people in California, ha. It's a little depressing that I can only come up with a couple of black public figures in the industry, N'gai is one even if his role is behind the scenes now, and....well.
 
Ugh, so refreshing to read something that isn't filled with rage - not to say Patrick's stuff usually is like that, it just feels like a lot of articles lately have just been pointing fingers and criticism. Introspection and responding to the criticism at hand is really great to see and while I disagree with the tweet, I do think there are areas to improve upon. Panels are already so difficult to manage, I don't think he needs to purposely go out of his way to have a 50/50 gender split or something.

Anyway, I think a big take away from this year's panels is that having a place so close to the convention center is extremely useful in booking and keeping guests. I doubt it was a coincidence that both Shu and Phil made it this year compared to what was beginning to be a staple circle of guests from the past few years.

Yeah, the Shining Room (Giant Bomb Vuitton? I dunno) musta helped immediately. The free beer couldn't have hurt!

Yeah, the problem is that devs are so tied by PR that it probably makes it impossible to get someone like that Metro guy to come on and talk about smuggling computers into Kiev so that they can make their game while their country falls apart.

The thing with press is that they're always visible and all have podcasts, so other than seeing them interact with each other (Greg Miller showing off his nipples to everyone) then it's all a bit samey.

Then have more interesting independants then. Keeps the "E3 is tough" talk down too.
 
It's true, every time I watch E3 shows I wonder if there are any black people in California, ha. It's a little depressing that I can only come up with a couple of black public figures in the industry, N'gai is one even if his role is behind the scenes now, and....well.
The problem with trying to open up demographically is that you place people in the very awkward position of speaking for an entire group of people. And depending on the situation and the person involved, they may not want to speak about their position in their industry or have nothing interesting to say about their position.

Like, remember that woman who was sexually harassed by that guy who ran that indie news site? Surely she would make for an interesting female guest to talk about what it's like being a woman in an industry that is dominated by men. But how likely are you going to get someone like that at an E3 or GDC?

For as much as I think Andrea Renee is basically a female Geoff Keighley (unable to express any opinions, always positive. If Geoff is the face of the developers, Andrea is now literally the face of Gamestop and the retailers), she does - at least when she was on Weekend Confirmed - bring up some points about being a woman that most people, even the women that find themselves on GB, don't really talk about.

It's a very strange position, because you want someone for their unique perspective, but they also want to just be treated "normally" so they don't really want to express their perspective. Like, Kevin Van Ord and Carolyn Petit very rarely bring up their personal situations on the Gamespot podcast, but you know that they have perspectives that other people at GB/GS simply don't have.

It's why I think "foreign" guests would be more interesting, because asking someone from Japan what it's like being in LA at a blaring trade show is an interesting question that someone from Japan is likely happy to answer without feeling uncomfortable. Even better if you can get some mid-tier Japanese devs like the people working on the next Harvest Moon or whatever that simply don't merit any attention normally. Heck, even having someone from CD Projeckt tell their Poland story would be an interesting and new perspective because there's a dichotomy there.
 
Woah, John Drake graduated from Harvard. He apparently held the position of "Fun Czar" at one point.
If anyone wants to know more about drake I would HIGHLY recommend listen to this audio interview.

Did you guys know he has a masters from Harvard?

http://justtalkingpodcast.info/post/56889822824/featuring-john-drake-director-of-communications
That is why I posted this, EVERYONE SHOULD give it a listen best audio interview with drake out there.
Talks about Harvard etc
 
I like him when he is doing his own stuff but please don't invite Jeff "Please check out my podcast, DLC" Cannata back.

Yeah I agree. Jeff is actually a cool dude and his podcast is good. Not sure why he came off the way he did... but it was definitely weird.

I dont think he has much contact with the GB guys. He definitely didnt know how their E3 shows typically go, which is chaos and little to nothing about actual games. Im sure he will have a different attitude about it next year if he is on the cast.
 
Yeah I agree. Jeff is actually a cool dude and his podcast is good. Not sure why he came off the way he did... but it was definitely weird.

I dont think he has much contact with the GB guys. He definitely didnt know how their E3 shows typically go, which is chaos and little to nothing about actual games. Im sure he will have a different attitude about it next year if he is on the cast.

I thought Jeff was great personally. I appreciated a bit of the focused, game talk, and he was fluent and well spoken about the stuff he saw at the show.

Jeff is not strictly a Games Jurnalizst by trade...he's really an actor. An actor from LA...so self-promotion is in his blood.
 
Just watched the Thursday evening show.

Fuck all the haters on Greg Miller. Dude was a champ and funny as shit.

I dont get the whining about 'not enough developers speak'.

All the guests are exhausted, all they want to do is relax and have a beer and I doubt they've agreed to a Giantbomb live show request to spend 45 minutes dissecting their online database code.

Honest question: What are you expectations from Giantbomb? Because they cant be everything for everyone.

Personally, I go to them for humorous banter based on videogames. Not for informative insight into game development.
 
Just watched the Thursday evening show.

Fuck all the haters on Greg Miller. Dude was a champ and funny as shit.

I dont get the whining about 'not enough developers speak'.

All the guests are exhausted, all they want to do is relax and have a beer and I doubt they've agreed to a Giantbomb live show request to spend 45 minutes dissecting their online database code.

Honest question: What are you expectations from Giantbomb? Because they cant be everything for everyone.

Personally, I go to them for humorous banter based on videogames. Not for informative insight into game development.

You get that the other 51 weeks of the year. During E3 and sometimes the GDC streams the conversation can turn surprisingly insightful and candid about stuff you don't really hear about otherwise. That and/or the really nitty gritty technical inside-baseball (Cowboy's explanation of how Uncharted 3's boat sequence works still sticks out to me as a highlight). There's lots of opportunity for fascinating talk.

I didn't have any issue with the discussions this year, but I can see where some may be coming from.
 
You get that the other 51 weeks of the year.

Exactly. E3 is a chance for me to experience that multiplied by ten and ratcheted up with multiple other personalities that add to the bombastic nature.

You guys are looking at this all wrong. Miller, Drake, JV, etc. all add to the cast and dont take away.

During E3 and sometimes the GDC streams the conversation can turn surprisingly insightful and candid about stuff you don't really hear about otherwise

Im not sure what you mean by this? If you're looking for inside baseball talk there are far better places to read/hear that than GiantBomb. For all their penchant for guests they themselves are not particularly versed (nor interested) in discussing the finer points of videogame design.

Pick up a copy of EDGE and read their post-moterms.

Fuck, just bookmark Gamasutra and get that stuff in spades every day.
 
If Patrick can convince women and minorities who work on games that are actually relevant to GB's coverage (e.g. AAA down to medium indie's) to come on the show, even if it means begging permission from PR and shit, then that would be amazing.

But if we end up with more Zoe's - people on the absolutely fringe of development with very little work of interest - or even more journo's, I'll be massively disappointed. It's a waste of E3/GDC time getting people on who are otherwise easily available and accessible to the public. It's like a recent women in gaming GDC panel I watched not so long ago and realising most of the panellists were press and pundits.

Trade shows are great because these extremely busy and overworked developers are all in the one place, however when they make the time to come on, they can be drowned out by people who are much easier to get hold of (e.g.press). More journo's and fringe will exacerbate the problem and trade shows could become a wasted opportunity (as great as this E3 was, I'd say it was slightly wasted).

tl;dr - more (relevant) women/minorities and more Rami's/Dino's/Cowboy's. Be very selective with press people.

I agree. I'm not sure how we've gotten to a point where the value of our "perspective" is strictly defined by our race and gender -- I find that incredibly demeaning.

I could understand a lot of the outrage behind this if GB was talking politics, governing world policy, or even just spending a lot of time talking about these things. Instead, these are just people talking about videogames and their excitement for E3. Sex/race just doesn't weigh in hugely unless the discussion itself is strictly about those things and videogames. Palmer Lucky and Jeff Gerstman might both be white men but their perspectives on videogames appear to be night and day. I just watched Kevin Van Ord talking about Witcher 3, I don't expect there is anything characteristic to homosexuality that alters his excitement over the game compared with Patrick.
 
Exactly. E3 is a chance for me to experience that multiplied by ten and ratcheted up with multiple other personalities that add to the bombastic nature.

You guys are looking at this all wrong. Miller, Drake, JV, etc. all add to the cast and dont take away.

Nobody is saying that (or at least I wasn't). I don't know if you understood my post as such but it really isn't and doesn't have to be a one or the other situation.

Im not sure what you mean by this? If you're looking for inside baseball talk there are far better places to read/hear that than GiantBomb. For all their penchant for guests they themselves are not particularly versed (nor interested) in discussing the finer points of videogame design.

Pick up a copy of EDGE and read their post-moterms.

Fuck, just bookmark Gamasutra and get that stuff in spades every day.

I didn't mean to imply I expect a comprehensive painfully detailed insight into the industry. All I meant was the GB live show's biggest hook, mixing different devs and industry people together. Cool shit comes out of that, and to me some of the more interesting of it comes from talking about their work with each other. It's happened in the past, I wasn't vouching for a hypothetical scenario. On top of everything GB's laid back sensibility makes those discussions even better when they come around, not to mention Jeff being a genuinely good interviewer. It's the best of both worlds really.

Again I had no problem with this year, I can appreciate both points of view.
 
The problem with trying to open up demographically is that you place people in the very awkward position of speaking for an entire group of people. And depending on the situation and the person involved, they may not want to speak about their position in their industry or have nothing interesting to say about their position.

Like, remember that woman who was sexually harassed by that guy who ran that indie news site? Surely she would make for an interesting female guest to talk about what it's like being a woman in an industry that is dominated by men. But how likely are you going to get someone like that at an E3 or GDC?

For as much as I think Andrea Renee is basically a female Geoff Keighley (unable to express any opinions, always positive. If Geoff is the face of the developers, Andrea is now literally the face of Gamestop and the retailers), she does - at least when she was on Weekend Confirmed - bring up some points about being a woman that most people, even the women that find themselves on GB, don't really talk about.

It's a very strange position, because you want someone for their unique perspective, but they also want to just be treated "normally" so they don't really want to express their perspective. Like, Kevin Van Ord and Carolyn Petit very rarely bring up their personal situations on the Gamespot podcast, but you know that they have perspectives that other people at GB/GS simply don't have.

It's why I think "foreign" guests would be more interesting, because asking someone from Japan what it's like being in LA at a blaring trade show is an interesting question that someone from Japan is likely happy to answer without feeling uncomfortable. Even better if you can get some mid-tier Japanese devs like the people working on the next Harvest Moon or whatever that simply don't merit any attention normally. Heck, even having someone from CD Projeckt tell their Poland story would be an interesting and new perspective because there's a dichotomy there.

Don't you ever slander him like that again.

Back on subject, maybe Swery? He's got contacts with the Bombcrew, been on the show and everything.
 
Aisha Tyler

BOOM.

scarhjly8.gif
 
Lang and Johnny going off at the same time that Shu was there kinda sucked, really. I felt that Phil Spencer had a good showing but Shu got completely overshadowed by that street menace known as david lang.

Now, if you had lang, johnny, greg miller and the mcelroy bros on at the same time i think the world would implode in a gruesome fashion. So do it, please.

To be honest I don't think that Lang and Johnny got in the way of Yoshida, he's just a bad fit for the format because he's too corporate. He was given time to answer some questions and every time it felt like a response from PR. With that said I do think it's a good idea to keep some of the developer and journalist/GB bro segments seperate and it would be awesome if they got Spencer and Boyes on the same time.

To be honest I felt the worst bookings for me this year were the Gearbox guy and the Joystique guy/LOTR girl who ended up eating away all of Green and Sawyer's time whilst managing to say nothing more than "LOTR" and "Gamescon". Green and Sawyer together should had been perfect guests for a segment.
 
Her points aren't bad or anything, and I get that she's frustrated, but man I wish Elizabeth Simins would put more effort into her tweets about all of this, especially compared to the post Patrick wrote up.
 
Her points aren't bad or anything, but man I wish Elizabeth Simins would put more effort into her tweets about all of this, especially compared to the post Patrick wrote up.

Yeah. She is still tweeting about them. I get it. Diversity is important and we are nowhere near where we need to be when it comes to equality. People need to speak up in all communities.

But then again, I don't think she goes about it in the best way but she probably feels she has to be this way and hell, maybe she does have to be brash. I don't know shit and I'm definitely not smart enough to solve all of the problems.
 
Her points aren't bad or anything, and I get that she's frustrated, but man I wish Elizabeth Simins would put more effort into her tweets about all of this, especially compared to the post Patrick wrote up.

I will just be the jerk that says her points are indeed bad, and I think the way she - and Patrick through is response - frames the issues is utter nonsense. It's really fucking disheartening to me that issues so important are being addressed in this way by her, and now she is being rewarded for it.
 
After watching Patrick and Brad play it, I thought I might give 1001 Spike a go on my PS4

It's not there (Europe). I cannot believe region lockouts with downloadable games :/
 
After watching Patrick and Brad play it, I thought I might give 1001 Spike a go on my PS4

It's not there (Europe). I cannot believe region lockouts with downloadable games :/

I thought the delay was on 3DS/Wii U only and was inclined to blame NoE.

Turns out Nicalis is still the worst. We'll be lucky if we get it before 2016.

Pretty sure it's not a region lockout, just a localisation delay.
 
Her points aren't bad or anything, and I get that she's frustrated, but man I wish Elizabeth Simins would put more effort into her tweets about all of this, especially compared to the post Patrick wrote up.

No, her points are bad. The English speaking part of the games industry is mainly composed of white males and that was reflected in Giant Bomb's lineup.
 
I thought the delay was on 3DS/Wii U only and was inclined to blame NoE.

Turns out Nicalis is still the worst. We'll be lucky if we get it before 2016.

Pretty sure it's not a region lockout, just a localisation delay.

Done a bit of digging, and...

YJ2uwN5.png


Well that explains it, They should have been more on the ball, and got stuff like this sorted long ago though. It is not a problem for most other companies.
 
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