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breakingarrows · 10 months

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Games Media in Review: Nextlander

The first Giant Bomb spin-off project was Drew Scanlon leaving in March of 2017 to begin a Patreon called Cloth Map, “exploring the people, places, and cultures of the world through the lens of games, and making sweet videos about it.” Due to Covid-19’s outbreak in early 2020, Drew could no longer travel and shut down the Patreon in July of that year. Drew would go on to join Digital Eclipse Entertainment Partners Co., developers of Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration and Mega Man: Legacy Collection. This would not be the last spin-off of Giant Bomb, itself a spin off of GameSpot following Jeff Gerstmann’s firing in 2007.

In September of 2020, Viacom CBS would sell CNET Media Group (GameSpot, CNET, Giant Bomb, Metacritic, GameFAQs) to Red Ventures. In May of 2021 Brad Shoemaker, Vinny Caravella, and Alex Navarro would announce that they would be leaving Giant Bomb. Brad and Vinny had been with the website since its beginnings in 2008 and Alex had joined in 2010 after a stint on the development/PR side of the industry with Harmonix. The name of their new venture was Nextlander, and they launched their Patreon for it on June 7, 2021, quickly accruing over 10,000 patrons. Their departure left Jeff Gerstmann as the only remaining founding member at Giant Bomb, and he would be fired in lieu of seeing through his two week notice one year later in June 2022.

Nextlander have retained a stable base of around 10,000 patrons since launch, giving them a solid foundation of income for the past two years. Speaking to Ben Hanson of MinnMax shortly after their Patreon’s launch, Vinny would share, “You know, it's very, we talked about this a lot when we were part of bigger companies. It's a bit of a bubble and you're not sure what the actual response is going to be from everything. I mean, we were, we were all in there for a decade, right? Like inside kind of a, a kind of a bubble for lack of a better word and you know you have you don't know what your self-worth is you don't know you know there are a lot of people you get messages and stuff you also get a lot of criticism obviously and you it's you know your kind of futures are dictated by other people.” They go on to discuss the newfound freedom in being able to make decisions without any management position above them second guessing their decisions, no longer, “being in a corporate machine for that long, which is nothing but hierarchy.” Whiskey Media, the original owner of Giant Bomb, was small enough that they shared a room with the people making the business decisions. They were then absorbed into the giant machine that is CBS after a sale in 2012. After another sale to Red Ventures, Vinny, Brad, and Alex were all contemplating that transition being, “my off-ramp to kind of investigate other things.”

On YouTube Nextlander regularly uploads their Twitch streams, pretty consistently two hours of playing a game and talking over it amongst themselves. The lack of being in the same physical space is something I’ve mentioned before but I need to repeat here, it really takes away from the energy. Sharing a space with someone and talking/joking with them cannot be replicated over a Skype-equivalent. There is something about the dynamic between these three specifically that lacks the energy and enthusiasm I had for them under Giant Bomb. Brad and Vinny trying to remember their Astroneer status after a new update, the three of them just talking amongst themselves and repeating “I’m down” while playing Remnant II cooperatively, and the frequent troubleshooting and just uninteresting conversations during any video was so bland I ended up watching less of their output than even the current Giant Bomb.

Nextlander’s podcast is what you would expect from a gaming podcast: what they’ve been playing, news, and letters. There isn’t anything here that you can’t find anywhere else, and it really becomes a question of, “How much do you like listening to Vinny, Brad, and Alex?” One standout element that does set them apart from every other YouTube channel is that comments are off on all of their uploads. I actually really like this choice as comments are generally not something I recommend reading once you’ve reached a certain mass audience, and this pushes those who do wish to participate to join the Discord via a Patreon subscription, funneling more people, and engagement, to a place that they can better control than the untamed landscape of YouTube comments.

Given that you can watch anybody play and talk over a game it really is on the back of personalities that people pick gaming channels nowadays, so why is Nextlander so lacking? Each person have become such caricatures over the course of a decade of talking into a camera for an audience that a lot of the time their output reads more like fulfilling an expectation in terms of performing these characters than actually being themselves. How many times does someone have to reference how Alex is a grumpy old man and wait for him to perform that bit? During their game streams non-players passively watch and ask questions nobody knows the answer to. More time is spent talking about the bit than doing a bit. Watching them play games isn’t entertaining, it isn’t informative, it isn’t insightful, it just exists as background noise even when actively watching.

Due to my history with Giant Bomb it is really disappointing to have constantly approached Nextlander over its brief lifetime only to be turned away by how unengaging it was. They still collaborate with former coworkers, most frequently Abby Russell, which should help offset this feeling. Abby was at her best when behind the wheel however, and there is only so much energy she can bring to a Zoom call as a guest for one-off shows, even if her presence is greatly appreciated.

When writing about Kinda Funny and Kinda Funny Games I did not get into the perks people receive for supporting via Patreon. At this time, Kinda Funny and Kinda Funny Games have a $25.00 tier in which six series of exclusive “short-form video bonus shows” are published. $10.00 supporters will receive these shows as well, just a month afterwards. Two of the six series were not part of their published content in the past 30 days, but I also found enough enjoyable content in their regular upload schedule that I didn’t feel the need to take a one time dip to see what’s up. With Nextlander their regular schedule is so familiar, and so dull, that I felt the need to see what was behind the wall.

I joined their Patreon at $10.00 a month to see if these exclusive podcasts are any different from their free content. When thinking about Kinda Funny, I really enjoyed their content well into the late 2010s due to their vibe harkening back to earlier IGN days, when the website's podcasts were a series of people just shooting the shit and not taking the content very seriously. As the website aged and its podcasts got more popular, spreading to YouTube, it took on a much more “on topic” air about it, which really killed the fun. Kinda Funny was a return to the “conversational” podcasts where getting off topic was encouraged in the name of entertaining listeners. Nextlander’s regular output of content is more of the “on-topic” approach, whereas the Patreon exclusives are more shoot-the-shit. Never Been a Better Podcast and the Ramblecast are pretty much free range discussions about anything and everything and are much more entertaining because of it.

The Watchcast allows them to talk about television and movies at length and usually on one specific piece of media everyone has seen, leading to stronger discussions of the subject compared to the scattershot talk about whatever game someone happens to be playing. This issue was apparently something they sought to address in the beginning of Nextlander, with every member playing the same game in order to generate better conversations as everyone would be informed on it. Instead they fell back into one person poorly explaining the game to the others who have no experience and likely little interest in trying it out themselves. As film and television episodes require significantly less time and energy it means they can all participate and episodes are stronger due to this. Their Planaroma podcast is fairly boring, merely being a read through of the month of releases, and it makes me ponder how necessary keeping up with the latest releases is to their bottom line. Is this something they do because the audience wants it, they want to, or because it has been The Thing they have been doing as a career for over a decade?

Online personalities, or those who make careers out of talking into a camera for a video posted or streamed to the internet, has eroded the barrier between personal life and professional life. For people such as these, their personal life partly becomes the content, creating what has become known as a parasocial relationship between themselves and their audience, where people who have done nothing other than simply watch and listen to individuals such as those at Giant Bomb feel that these people are their friends and begin to talk amongst themselves about the personal lives of those they watch. This phenomenon is best explained, and made popular, by Shannon Strucci’s series of YouTube videos: Fake Friends. Kinda Funny exacerbates this with their naming of the audience, “Best friends,” seemingly encouraging the creation of this one way relationship, usually as a way to draw in financial support via Patreon subscriptions. Even when it isn’t actively encouraged, in an extreme case such as RedLetterMedia, who are openly antagonistic to their fans, sections of the fandom inevitably fall into the phenomenon.

When looking into the current Giant Bomb I mentioned that a Premium subscription no longer offered exclusive content and instead offered Discord access. This has become a standard Patreons subscription perk, Nextlander included. Unlike a group such as, I don’t know, Superculture (which you can support here) the engagement by the Nextlander hosts is less comparatively. Some of this is explained by audience size. Nextlander’s Discord is 10,716 members as of this writing whereas Superculture is 242, a much more manageable number where you can have actual conversations instead of drowning in a sea of responses. Still, given that the YouTube comments are disabled and the Reddit is unofficial, Discord is the place to be if you want any online interaction with the hosts, though you’re lucky if you even get that there.

Instead, I think this lack of engagement is intentional. All this time at GameSpot, Giant Bomb, and now yet another venture centered around themselves, the individuals, as the product being sold, I imagine they have little interest in engaging with an audience who so often speculate and publicly post about intimate details not shared and not owed. How often is the lack of collaboration between Nextlander and Jeff Gerstmann after his solo career started going to be posted and lead to the same conversations regarding their personal lives and interpersonal relationships? I can’t imagine being held under such scrutiny by people I’ve never met, and it explains their overall lack of community engagement. However, due to their funding model, it can bring some tension due to the audience who is willing to give you money month after month is also partly the one most interested in every little detail about your life.

Their Patreon content is better than the regular stuff they put out, but is it worth paying $10.00 every month? I don’t think so. While I enjoyed the Ramblecast, Watchcast, and Never Been a Better Podcast, due to the regular output being so dull I don’t see myself giving them money beyond this one instance of investigating what exactly it was being paywalled. Listening to Jeff Bakalar rant about how dumb contestants on game shows are was funny, and hearing Vinny talk inside baseball regarding old corporate policies on money spending was the kind of stuff I like listening to, much more than the standard and expected opinions on the Latest Release, but it is not worth the monthly subscription and I only ever see myself doing it again simply for one month in order to play catch up.

Hosting video is expensive, something the Giant Bomb folks know firsthand having created their own video player in order to host their premium video content. A player which was then slowly passed over in favor of YouTube and now exists solely as a legacy way to view that old premium content. Video makers need a place to host their content, but they also expect to be compensated for the work behind that content, especially when it is bringing in lots of eyes to that host’s platform. YouTube wasn’t cutting it, but as the biggest platform around, creators didn’t have many alternative choices but to continue to publish there. Then, with Patreon, a new way to receive funding arrived. The main problem was converting your viewers who were used to watching for free into those who would contribute a small amount month after month.

Of the 58 channels I have tracked who primarily publish through YouTube, 45 see a less than 1% conversion rate from YouTube subscriber to patron. Two of the top three conversions are the relatively brand new channels Nextlander and Jeff Gerstmann, where they have yet to accrue inactive subscribers over the course of a decade plus of existence on the platform. The other is Last Stand Media with an 18.92% subscriber->patron conversion despite being 6 years old. Your potential audience is only so large, and 99% of them are unwilling or simply unable to give you funding. Large sites such as IGN, GameSpot, Polygon, Kotaku have built in audiences thanks to their lifetime spent adhering to the SEO. Internally they raise up (or grind up) individuals who then go off into either game development, leave the industry entirely, or launch their own venture, taking part of that audience with them and getting an even smaller portion to fund them directly. How many more times can this occur before Patreon, what was once the savior of independent games media, becomes unsustainable itself? Most recently we’ve seen Waypoint disintegrate into Remap (and successfully transition the subscriber base of Waypoint+), the launch of Aftermath (made up of former Kotaku, Motherboard, Verge, and Launcher staff), and a significant portion of The Escapist resign and reform as Second Wind to massive success. Will that base stay strong like Nextlander or will it become a slow decline like Easy Allies? I myself subscribe to multiple Patreons, but I can’t continue to divvy up my monthly income to more and more channels. Of the people who follow specific YouTube channels, there is such a small percentage of them who are willing to give their money to ensure it continues, and that money can’t be divided up infinitely.

It has been disappointing going back through all these websites, many of which I once had a real deep affection for, and finding myself uninterested and disappointed by their current activity. Ben Verschoor, when writing about Bill Watterson’s latest output, “The Mysteries,” reminded me of a quote from Watterson, “It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now ‘grieving’ for ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.” I don’t have any ill will towards folks like Nextlander, but with how mundane a majority of their output is, maybe it would be better if the Patreon pie was dominated less by their slice and left for fresher, livelier talent out there.

#Games Media in Review #Nextlander #Writing #Vidoe Games #Patreon

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