Jeff Bakalar is the current general manager of Giant Bomb, and the former editor at large of CNET. He is an avid ice hockey fan, custom mechanical keyboard enjoyer, and might own more pinball machines than is appropriate. Bakalar founded the longest running podcast on CNET, The 404 Show, and was also a member of the Giant Beastcast. You can catch him on the Giant Bombcast, The Voicemail Dump Truck, and on various Giant Bomb videos.
MW: I’ve heard you talk before about building keyboards for people and I was wondering why you think a mechanical keyboard makes the perfect gift for somebody.
Jeff Bakalar: I think it’s one of those things that you are so out of the loop about until you’ve actually experienced it that it is I’m not gonna say it’s life-changing-
MW: You can say that to me.
Bakalar: I mean, yeah, I feel good saying it to you Johnny, but for my wife for our 10th anniversary I built her a keyboard.
MW: That’s a thoughtful gift!
Bakalar: It’s so thoughtful! It took me almost a month to secure all the parts. But here’s the thing, it’s our anniversary, and she’s like, “Oh we don’t need to get each other anything,” I’m like, alright, I won’t, but the back of my head I’m like, oh just you wait. Just wait, I’m about to blow your socks off with a mechanical keyboard from your nerd-ass husband. And you know, I gave it to her and she’s like, “Oh, this is very sweet,” and I could tell right away like she was thinking, “What the fuck is this guy doing?” we agreed not to do gifts and you’re giving me this thing?” It’s Alice in Wonderland themed, and she starts using it and it’s not three days before she’s just like, “I gotta walk back my whole reaction, this is amazing thank you so much.”
MW: Oh my God, I get it.
Bakalar: You get it now. Right, that’s what it is. I say this all the time, but there are only very few things that you use constantly, right?
MW: Why not have the best version of that as possible?
Bakalar: Exactly, and you know I also have sympathy for people who are like, “I understand your point, but I also don’t want to make it take over my life.”
MW: I’m not a disgusting freak.
Bakalar: Right, and that’s where I come in because you can outsource the freakness me, and I’ll do it for you and you’ll be set. That’s how a lot of my relationships with keyboards and people have worked. I’ve just built it for them. I’ll give them a key tester and I’ll ask, “Which one of these feels good to you?” And then I’m off and running. It’s easy.
MW: So you went from a rotating chair(on the Beastcast) to one of the main voices at Giant Bomb after all the founding members departed. Can you talk about that time period and how it felt taking the helm? How does that period compare to other times in your career in this business?
Bakalar: It’s complicated, right? I guess it all started at the end of 2020, and a lot of things were in motion. I don’t like saying “Oh, you know with the backdrop of covid,” but that certainly shaped a lot of the thinking for all the players and all the stakeholders, right?
MW: “What is the future of this thing?”
Bakalar: Totally, and the reason I bring up Covid is because everyone is consolidating, there’s all this acquisitional traffic that’s happening and when everyone was working from home it was just really tough to get a finger on the pulse of what’s actually happening. And I’m you know, I’m not one of these freaks who’s like “Get back in the office!”, right? What I am saying is things without a doubt get lost.
MW: A refrain I’ve heard from fellow Giant Bomb fans is “I miss the couch,” and I get that, but there are also the realities of the business and the realities of an ever evolving and shifting media landscape, right? Do you think Covid plus acquisitional drama expedited the departure of some of those people?
Bakalar: Yeah, and if you want to add another car into that massive accident, add the fact that Giant Bomb’s business model is something that was revolutionary in 2010. It was basically a Patreon model before there was a Patreon.
MW: Yeah, it’s just free money.
Bakalar: “How do we scale that?”, right? It’s a very difficult conversation to have with someone who is not in the trenches, and from the outside looking in they just see this number that’s awesome. I think the thing with Giant Bomb’s ownership is that it’s changed a lot in the last five years, but everyone appreciates what it is. It’s figuring out “How does this work for us?”, and that also means Giant Bomb has to change too, and that was the thing that when I took over it was like, how do we figure out a pivot in terms of the revenue and maybe meshing well with the ownership where this can go on because you have an audience and a fan base that has this very specific expectation that is antiquated in its own right. You can’t just expect a thing to just be a thing when it is corporately owned and just do the thing you want it to do. It’s completely unrealistic.
MW: The business changes, but also the people within the business change and get older in their lives change, and the things that you once wanted maybe you don’t want that anymore.
Bakalar: Yeah, I don’t like any Green Day albums anymore. I don’t. I really liked American Idiot and that was sort of it. It happens. It changes. It’s very difficult to stay the same. Not just from content, from the business, from everything else. Especially on the internet where media and content production has a shelf life that’s almost invisible, right?
MW: Was it integral to get someone like Dan to come back on board so that people had a familiar face that they could look to? Rather than all of these new faces that they may know from other websites, but they’re not Giant Bomb or at least the Giant Bomb that they have gotten accustomed to. So how conscious are you of trying to set yourself apart from what has come before while respecting the legacy of this website that is beloved by so many people?
Bakalar: I think the great thing about Giant Bomb is the cache and authority and reputational equity that it has, and I think that’s obviously very important, And I think to that end there is a balance and an expectation that you have to meet in terms of maintaining that credibility and that sort of vibe, right? Without a doubt that’s important and that’s something that we are all very conscious of as we continue to make stuff and make decisions. I think at the same time Giant Bomb is all about the people at Giant Bomb. And it’s the personalities, right? I think that eclipses the name in itself. It is the people. You follow personalities. You follow that thing that you want to see, and that’s the thing that I think we’ve been able to meet with people like Grubb, like Dan as you said. And with Dan I’ve known him for forever, and we’ve really become pretty close. And in the situation that we were finding ourselves in it had to work. Thankfully for him his situation was changing too and all the stars kind of lined up there.
MW: Is Dan really like that?
Bakalar: You know, it’s funny because I get frustrated with Dan a lot too personally.
MW: As a fellow Midwestern boy; he was someone I could latch onto. I understand this guy.
Bakalar: He’s incredibly sweet and he’s an incredibly good person, and he is like that.
MW: That was a rhetorical question. He’s a smart dude.
Bakalar: You said that not me.
MW: In his own very special Dan Ryckert way.
Bakalar: I will say this about Dan. I’ve never met anyone like him and I never will meet anyone like him. He is the most unique person I’ve ever come across in my entire life, and that’s what makes Dan, Dan and that’s why he’s great.
MW: How much joy did you derive from sending him to Fargo, North Dakota?
Bakalar: I thought I was putting him in a bad way. I thought I was screwing him.
MW: And he had a fantastic time.
Bakalar: Of course he did because that’s what Dan does. Dan looks at a dumpster and is like, “I could probably fix this place up, move in, and live here,” I was fully expecting that he would turn lemons into lemonade, right? I fully expected that to happen with him. That’s the best part about him. He will always find the silver lining in a thing, and the reliability you have with him is unbelievable. He’s a treasure.
MW: I mean, he’s getting ready to play Superman 64 and wear a full Nic Cage Superman outfit. So he’s committed to the bit.
Bakalar: Yes, absolutely.
MW: How’s the pinball collection doing?
Bakalar: It’s doing okay. I gotta really take a step back here with the pinballs. Not that I don’t want to own many, many pinball machines.
MW: Examine your life choices?
Bakalar: No, it’s not a life choice thing. Everything weighs a person down, we have all these anchors in life, right? Your family, your job, and the things you like too, because that stuff takes time and pinball machines are heavy, man. Metaphorically and literally.
MW: I worked as a mover when I was a much younger man. And at one time I had to move some pinball machines. That was a terrifying experience.
Bakalar: Once you know what you’re doing with them that is much less intimidating I think, and I’ve moved probably like 20 at this point now where I can do it pretty quickly. I think it’s more that they’re taking over a room in the house. And people come over and they’re like “That’s awesome! You have a pinball room. That is very cool,” and I’m like, yes, it is cool, but should it be only a pinball room? Maybe you can get rid of one or two of those machines.
MW: Maybe get a cocktail cabinet.
Bakalar: That’s what I’m talking about, man. So yeah, I love pinball. I have a really good relationship with Stern that hooks me up and lets me be their weird little pinball buddy, and that’s that’s great. I love that.
MW: So you worked at CNET for a long time, and I was just curious how disappointed you are that you didn’t get to cover CES the year that AI took over everything, and get look at AI powered refrigerators. Was it painful for you to miss out on that?
Bakalar: I’ve not been shy about my thoughts about CES, and Las Vegas in general. I think for the comedy that comes out of CES, and what would have come out with an AI-powered CES, I miss that for sure. I miss the people at CES. For the most part everyone I worked with at CNET was very very cool, and CES was the one time of year where everyone would get together, and you would go out and and and collectively enjoy yourselves.
MW: Almost like E3 was for people in the games coverage business.
Bakalar: Yes, exactly. Which, I think we’re scratching that itch with SGF(Summer Games Fest) and The Game Awards for sure. But yeah, it’s a disaster. I would come home from CES and I would be depressed. You know, I would be like, what was that? What are we doing? So I have no regrets about missing the AI-powered CES.
MW: You touched on it a little bit there but like the state of the industry now, it just seems like the promises that were made aren’t being kept, and everything just kind of sucks right now with tech. What’s your take on it? Do you feel like we’re in a valley right now and we’re gonna get out of it, or is the plane just crashing into the ocean?
Bakalar: I don’t know what’s gonna happen because this stuff changes relatively quickly, but I do think the suffering that is happening now is because you just have fragmentation as a result of everyone wanting to be the winning company that does the thing, right?
MW: Yeah, everyone wants to be Steve Jobs. Everyone wants to make the iPhone.
Bakalar: Exactly and what you get is just a sea of incompatibility, and there’s no like universality about anything. So what you’re left with are all of these interfaces and all these languages that can’t communicate to one another. And they do so with like third party workarounds and all this DIY bullshit, and you’re just left with like a future where there’s a bunch of robots bumping into each other and it sucks. I realize you know, the thing I’m not saying out loud is “ Oh, it’s just capitalism’s fault,” and it is without a doubt. Or at least American capitalism. And that’s what sucks and you know, I don’t think we are gonna have really anything nice until there is some sort of, you know, universality to move forward. Everyone’s like, “Oh well capitalism breeds innovations,” no it fucking doesn’t. It just breeds people locking each other out of things. And gatekeeping and doing all this Walled Garden bullshit, and that’s not the future.
MW: Before there were universal protocols, other machines couldn’t talk to each other because someone was maybe using DHCP or someone was using some other protocol and then they realized actually it’s better if we can all communicate and share all this information. And now everything is siloed off. Want to watch this show? It’s six bucks a month here. It’s seven bucks a month here, and they’re just reinventing cable.
Bakalar: That’s it. They’re just going through that cycle again, and another just sort of a detrimental byproduct of that kind of mentality is basically the fact that you can’t you you can’t escape the marketing pitch before the actual tech, right? So everything is designed to generate consumer interest and hype, and a prime example is 5G, right? 5G is dog shit. It doesn’t work. It’s always something that’s thrusted upon people that preys on people who are horny to early adopt, and it’s just it’s all marketing nonsense. Nothing makes sense with how that stuff is actually functional, right? It just is bad and then that feels like a decade’s worth of work, right? It feels like it took so long to get that stuff finally to where it needed to be, and it’s just dead on arrival.
MW: And it’s not even that good.
Bakalar: Yeah, you know I like there’s a scene in Spaceballs that always comes up in my mind. It’s at the end of the movie where they’re trying to find the button that turns off the self-destruct and that button is out of order. Okay, and then Rick Moranis says “Fuck, even in the future nothing works,” and that is the mantra for us forever.
MW: That’s that was very prescient of Mel Brooks
Bakalar: It’s the future, nothing works in the future. And I know it’s depressing and I try not to be overly pessimistic about it.
MW: Do you think there’s been a more volatile time in the games industry in the time that you’ve been covering this industry? There’s been layoffs and Studios have shut down. That’s a never-ending story for the games industry, right? Specifically you see companies post record profits and then have thousands of layoffs. And that math ain’t mathin’ to me, but I’m not a businessman, right? I’m not making those decisions, but it just feels like there’s no such thing as good enough. You can’t just turn a profit. You have to be the next Fortnite. You have to be the next Roblox or whatever. WB had the best selling game last year(Hogwarts Legacy), then Suicide Squad just came out, which is a catastrophic failure, and they’re saying that games as a service is the future.
Bakalar: We were talking a lot about this lately on the podcast. I think Jeff Grubb has a really good generalized take on the whole thing that I more or less subscribe to as well. There’s so much there right? Obviously, it’s gross and inexplicable that you could sell fifteen million units of a game and then somehow not meet the corporate growth expectations, and then as a consequence lay off a percentage of a team. That’s that’s insane, and that that happens because they can do that, right? It happens because there’s no protection and no sort of guardrails or barrier preventing a company doing that. So it happens because it can happen. And because we allow these things to be wildly unregulated, they happen. I think you know first and foremost obviously labor empowerment needs to be at the forefront for all this stuff, but you’re still gonna have this friction, right? The bone on bone never-ending battle of the creatives and the ownership. I don’t know how that gets much better. I think the pendulum swing of, oh live service is the way to go, oh no single player is the way to go. That stuff swings quicker than the average development cycle of a game. So how can you make a realistic decision about stuff like that? And the answer is that you can’t. Everyone’s just trying to be as risk averse as possible, and protect themselves and the shareholders that they report to, and it just makes for the worst possible working environment, consumer environment, and it’s a lose-lose situation and quite honestly I just don’t know how it gets better. I think you have to have a generation of much more compassionate and smarter people being empowered and slowly changing the culture, but that’s so much easier said than done, right? There are plenty people from our generation who cannot wait to fuck people over. So I don’t know how that gets walked back.
MW: We’ve been hearing for years that the AAA games model is unsustainable. Because it takes so many years and so much money. And then you put the product out and then you hope that it sells enough. But how much of what we’re seeing now, is it being unsustainable and just shitty decision making by executives who face no consequences for their said shitty decisions and instead they pass the consequences of their mistakes down to the people that work for them? Do you think it’s both? Do you think it’s more one than the other?
Bakalar: I don’t know. I think it’s very easy to make sweeping declarations about a company’s inner workings, and the mechanisms in play there. I do still think there is a bit of an antiquated point of view from a lot of these places that is still not in sync with a contemporary gaming landscape. And I think as a consequence of that incongruity you get these big misses and wild sweeping statements about where this company needs to go and whatnot. But again, most of that is just speculation. I don’t really know. I don’t have that direct sort of insight. We have all these connections and we have all these relationships with people in the business. Even with that there are still these sort of unknowns and I think there is a lot of stuff that is unspoken, and it’s just a result of how of how this rapidly changing industry gets impacted by consumer behavior and trends on where we see people focusing their energy with games, so you know a bit of it feels whack-a-moley, right? A bit of it does certainly feel like that but you know, I think it’s tough to lay all the blame on one specific thing.
MW: It’s many moving parts.
Bakalar: Yeah, but again to go back to what we said earlier, there is certainly a mentality that the people at the bottom will suffer the most, and that’s not cool.
MW: Do you feel like your kid being able to say “My dad works for a video game website,” is a rung or two below “My uncle works at Nintendo,”? Only it’s true in this case. Does he have any clout with the kids on the playground? Or does he even give a shit?
Bakalar: No, he gives the biggest of shits. He’s still young and he understands what I do, but he doesn’t understand the moment to moment.
MW: He doesn’t know how the sausage is made.
Bakalar: Like he thinks my job is you know podcasting and streaming. I want to say around age six or seven he really started to exercise that clout with his friends. He would have a friend over and they would run past the pinball machines, and come right up into my office and my kid would be like, “Look at what my dad’s doing!” It all comes from a good place, and it’s very flattering, and it’s very precious that he is so passionate and psyched about me and what I do, and that feels good. I think we are veering into territory where he just doesn’t appreciate like you said, how the sausage is made, and all the other stuff that comes with that.
MW: Because it’s still a job at the end of the day.
Bakalar: It’s still a job without a doubt. I think it’s about striking a balance with his expectations, and I think what has poisoned his brain a little bit and what will be fixed with age and just maturity. Is that like, oh, this is just what you do. You go to school for however long, and then when you’re done you just start streaming and you make money, and buy a house and it’s like, mm-hmm my man.
MW: We’ll talk later.
Bakalar: We’ll talk much later, but right now he’s in this very sweet zone, and we’re having fun with it.
MW: Anything else you want to close out the interview with? Go to giantbomb.com?
Bakalar: Go do that. Go listen to some podcasts.
