Jeff Gerstmann, one of the co-founders of video game website Giant Bomb, has revealed on his podcast that his seemingly-mutual departure from the website he helped start 14 years ago was a lot murkier than audiences previously assumed.
In a short segment towards the end of his podcast The Jeff Gerstmann Show, which he started on June 8th (the day after Giant Bomb’s announcement that he would be leaving the website), Gerstmann begins to talk about the less squeaky-clean side of his departure.
“So the thing that happened, in broad strokes, is that I got fired 3 weeks before I was going to quit,” Gerstmann says. “That’s why a lot of this has been very murky for the last several months, because that stuff’s been really weird.”
He continues by saying, “I was trying to find a reason to stay at my current position, and at some point they just basically said like, ‘How about instead, you wrap it the fuck up?’, and I was like, oh word? Okay. Alright.”
Gerstmann also mentions that at the time, he had been given an ‘offer’ by another company (which he did not disclose), but had ultimately decided that it would ‘not be the right move’. It is our understanding from the wording of Gerstmann’s statement that this all occurred during his preparation for Summer Game Fest.
“I was planning to get to the other side of the E3 stuff and be like ‘Okay cool, I’m gonna wrap it up. I’m gonna go do my own thing and not do this anymore because I don’t want to do this here.’,” Gerstmann says, “When I say I was planning to go to Keighley’s thing as a part of my old job, I was getting ready to start making appointments and then suddenly was like, ‘Oh, I guess I’m not going to respond to any of those emails ever again.’”
Gerstmann concludes this segment by stating, “There are other aspects of that I will be very angry about for a very long time… At the end of the day, it was just a bad fucking fit. I gave it time to try and make it work and it didn’t. Like I said, this was all a few weeks before I was planning to just go anyway.”
This statement in general seemingly casts a somewhat murky light on the aftermath of Gerstmann’s departure from Giant Bomb, which included an episode of the Bombcast discussing the departure and plans for the future without Gerstmann present for it.
It also makes a lot of sense of the elaboration he made on his Patreon page post-departure about his growing dissatisfaction with working under a corporation:
“The problem is that doing a lot of this work for someone else means that a chunk of your behind-the-scenes time is taken up with meetings and staring at traffic numbers and various types of hand-wringing. This aspect of the business seems like it’s only getting worse as the years go on. So it’s time for me to do something about that and reclaim that time for more useful endeavours.”
It seems like his issue isn’t with the staff, who Gerstmann had ‘wished the best’ for in his first solo livestream, but rather with the executives at Red Ventures, who formally owned Giant Bomb before selling the website to Fandom this year.
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