Jeff Grubb is the News Editor for Giant Bomb, a prominent games industry insider, and former inmate of Nintendo Jail. He worked at VentureBeat as their GamesBeat Editor from 2012 until leaving in 2022 to join Giant Bomb full time. Grubb joined Minus World to discuss his role in the gaming industry, how he reacts when there are rumors incorrectly attributed to him, the AAA gaming bubble, and much more. Grubb can be found at giantbomb.com, where he hosts “Game Mess Mornings” and is featured on many of the site’s podcasts and other shows. He also hosts “Last of the Nintendogs,” and “Game Mess Decides” with his friend Mike Minotti on Grubb’s YouTube channel Jeff Grubb’s Game Mess.
Minus World: Hi, Jeff. Thanks for joining me here today. I consider myself a Jeff Grubb fan, and I wanted to start the interview out with a tough question that will require a lot of thought and consideration: I’ve heard you talk about “Colorado Nights”, but what would an “Ohio Night” entail?
Jeff Grubb: Well, first, thanks for the kind words. I appreciate it. I think an Ohio Night would entail a 12 pack of Michelob or maybe Pabst Blue Ribbon if we’re feeling fancy. And then some Cincinnati chili. Get some of that brown water chili, and just throw it on some meats and just really fuck your stomach up.
MW: I’m not going to recover from the phrase brown water chili.
Grubb: That’s what it is. It’s delicious, too. So what can you do about it?
MW: You get cited a lot whenever there are video game rumors that begin circulating online, sometimes for things that you’ve never even said, or things taken way out of context. How do you deal with those situations on a personal level? And how do you let people know, “Hey, I didn’t say this.” Is it just a matter of putting a tweet out there to correct the record?
Grubb: It’s always annoying, but it’s also something that’s pretty easy to put out of mind cause these people online will always sort of make stuff up based on what they need to believe. And I’ve realized over time it’s not something I can fully control in any real way. When it is something especially egregious, or I can tell there’s going to be blowback on me if people start actually believing it, I have a couple of places to go. Putting out a tweet does help. The gaming leaks and rumors Subreddit does a pretty good job of keeping track of these things. If I talk to them, I explain to a mod, “Hey, I didn’t say this. Can you just put a tag on there?” They almost always correct things, so that’s helpful. But most times it gets out of my control and I just leave the internet and go do something else. And then it’s like it doesn’t exist anymore.
MW: Just watch from afar.
Grubb: Yeah. Don’t even watch it all. It could disappear in an instant if you just look away.
MW: Why do you think such a big stink has been made about the microtransactions in Dragon Dogma 2, as opposed to the myriad of other Capcom games that release with basically the same type of microtransactions? Why is Dragon’s Dogma 2 any different? Do you think it’s because it has technical issues as well? Or what is it?
Grubb: It’s always going to be a number of factors. It’s always multifaceted, and no one person has any one reason that you could apply to the group as a whole. But if I were to get a little bit messy about it, I get the hunch that some of that comes from people who are a bit in their feelings, who worry that this game is going to distract from the games that they think are good. So I think there’s some From (FromSoftware) fans who are very quick to defend From games and they’re like, “Well, yeah, look at this game everyone said was going to come along and eat FromSoftware’s lunch.” And no one ever said that was going to happen. But some people get pretty defensive pretty quickly and they’re like, “Well, look at it. Look at the microtransactions. This game is garbage and trying to cheat you,” and all this stuff they can quickly snowball and make a bigger deal out of it. The typical nerdy insecurities about their favorite thing. And then that stuff gets blown up in a million different ways. At the same time, I think people just noticed here because this was a relatively big game and it was easy to ignore in Resident Evil cause everyone knows what to expect from Resident Evil. They know how that works. Here, it’s like, “Are they trying to force me to use these things so I have to spend money?” And people can quickly build that narrative in their head and that can set these things off.
MW: That is a good point. The last Dragons Dogma game came out, what, 12 years ago? You might get those fans from other series maybe trying to stir the pot and also more scrutiny on this because when’s the last time a Dragon’s Dogma came out? We all know what to expect from Resident Evil.
Grubb: Right. It works the exact same way where there’s no store in the game, you’re going to have to go find these things out. But in Resident Evil 4, you just play the game. Here, if you just play the game, it’s “Well, I’m trying to poke my way around and ask some questions. Oh, there are these micro-transactions.” You could see how people make the leap there.
MW: Is it ever a bit of a mindfuck to be this this Midwestern boy getting quoted in publications around the world for for things that you have reported on?
Grubb: It’s hard to think in those terms when it’s happening, or even later. When I’m on my podcast or on Twitter, when I’m talking about these things, that sort of reaction is not even a factor in my mind at all. I’m not thinking about, “Isn’t this going to get everybody going wild?” No, I’m talking to the people who I’m talking to. I know people care about this game. I’m talking to that fandom or I’m talking to my normal listeners or followers. And then you wake up the next day and it’s all on fire or whatever. So I never get used to it. I’m never expecting it. It is a little bit of a mindfuck, but it’s also something where I’m like, I haven’t learned my lesson yet because it’s just it never occurs to me that people are actually listening.
MW: I was doing some nosing around on the internet last night and I saw IGN India had quoted you for something.
Grubb: It’s wild. It’s pretty humbling to go to any sort of gaming event, and 99% of people don’t recognize me, which is like, “Yeah, of course not.” So I keep that in mind. That’s what it feels like most of the time, I’m just another gamer like anyone else.
MW: You’re Video Game Deep Throat.
Grubb: Video Game Deep Throat. I do force my family to call me that. They hate it.
MW: I can imagine. What’s the food like inside Nintendo Jail?
Grubb: It’s bread and water mostly, but they have one of those stamp things that they make it shaped like Yoshi. It’s still just bread though, and old bread. Nintendo Jail is wild. We made a big deal about that because Mike did the “How many Cat Shines were in Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury”. And it wasn’t that big of a deal. And then every time I talk to someone from Nintendo, they’re like, “Yeah, we know all about that. That was a big deal.” I’m like, “It was? It’s such a little thing. Why do you take it so seriously?” They’re like, “We didn’t, Kyoto did.” Kyoto? What are you talking about?
MW: Nintendo gets upset about the weirdest stuff.
Grubb: Yeah, and it was a real deal thing to get upset about. I guess. So every North American PR person I’ve ever talked to that’s working at Nintendo is like, “Yeah, yeah, they, they know, they know your name. They know who you are and they know what you’ve done.” Like, my God, I didn’t do it! Mike did.
MW: Does Miyamoto have a photo of your face in his office that he throws darts at?
Grubb: Miyamoto probably doesn’t know. They protect Miyamoto from the riff raff.
MW: Who’s the warden of Nintendo Jail?
Grubb: It’s still Reggie, he freelances as warden.
MW: What surprised you the most about becoming a full member of the Giant Bomb crew? Because you came on board after doing Grubb Snax for a while. I’ve heard you say it’s the best community in games. So what was that like for you?
Grubb: It was surprising how easy it was actually to just fit in. And I think people were mostly — the people that stuck around especially — but most people in the community were just like, “We want people who care about what happens on this website to work on this website.” And so it was surprising how easy it was to just fit in, and get that kickstarted, and carry that forward. Carry that torch a little bit. That wasn’t even that surprising to me either. So the most surprising thing I guess would just be how much work Jan does, or how many meetings Bakalar has to be in to make things work, things like that where I’m like, “Why can’t we make more stuff all the time?” Everyone’s always busy doing a million things. So I guess that was a little surprising to learn.
MW: You didn’t know how the sausage was being made, right?
Grubb: It’s easy to imagine a different kind of sausage being made in a different way, for sure.
MW: So given the success of of Helldivers 2 and their more subdued approach to microtransactions, lack of a road map, and just the general way that they’ve been interacting with the community where they’re not saying, “Hey, we’re doing this, this, this and this”, they’re denying, straight up lying, or just messing with their community — how soon until we see other publishers or developers begin emulating those methods? Do you think that this is going to change the way that we are given information about games that are coming out, given the success of Helldivers 2?
Grubb: Definitely. I think this is something that paints a road forward for a lot of developers to look at and say, “We have a certain kind of game that isn’t anything like Fortnite in any real ways, but it has online elements or it has live service elements or we’re updating all the time”. Maybe it doesn’t even have multiplayer in any real way. Like Hitman. I think Hitman is such a good example. If they would have done more stuff like this in Hitman where they, you know, had a target pop up, but actually maybe the people who are like your handlers, i.e. the developers, are tricking you and telling you something that you didn’t know, and it turns out that that was supposed to be your ally and they might mess things up. And that could be a little story they kicked off. There is a way to make that work with a lot of different kinds of games, and I fully expect a lot of developers going forward to be like, “Listen, if we are going to try to make our game a little bit more long lived, this is something we need to be figuring out how to do.” You don’t have to be as aggressive or as overt with it as the Helldivers studio. They have a game that really fits with that really well, but having a couple of annual events or something like that could really work.
MW: How hard do you think they had to push to get that to be the style and method of communication with people? Because things have been the same, especially for online games, with how you let people know what’s coming up next. Do you think they had to really push to sell that to their partners at Sony?
Grubb: I bet it’s like “no, this is the game we’re making.” This just feels right because that’s typically how it comes across in Helldivers 2. They settled on this method of in-game storytelling and updating the game because it just fits so well. So I think it was likely something they were able to convey and convince partners of pretty quickly. And then, yeah, I expect this to spread. Fortnite is almost certainly going to evolve in this direction. Fortnite has always had sort of that meta storytelling, and I think they could do even more with that. And I think Helldiivers 2 is that more and I expect a game like that to be like, “Hey, what we should be doing, Maybe we’re looking at this and we could do that and that could get a lot of people excited about our stuff again.”
MW: Have reached a point where the “AAA is not sustainable,” bubble is beginning to burst, or did it pop a while ago? Just given all the layoffs and how tumultuous things have felt in the last year, does it feel like we’ve reached that point? Are we going to start seeing a sea change in how games are made, the scope at which games are developed? As an example, Spider-Man 2 cost $300 million to make and you already know you have to sell this many copies of that game.
Grubb: I think that we are in the middle of it bursting right now. A big part of it is I think we can look at the money spent on games and whether it’s up or down. You know there’s been a couple of reports recently. Circana NPD is predicting things will be down anywhere from 2 to 10% compared to last year in terms of dollars spent on gaming. And that’s not great on its face. But Newzoo, which does have kind of a global picture, similar to what Circana does but globally — more estimation. They’ve said gaming products are going to be up a couple of percentage points, but the fundamentals beneath that number from both sources and pretty much every analyst is saying that doesn’t matter so much as these numbers. Those numbers being that the top five games are more than six years old. Each of them are more than six years old, and they take up 60% of the time people are spending in games, and at the same time, people are spending about 20% less time playing games than they were a couple of years ago. The black hole games are taking up more and more space and people are not trying new things because they’re spending less time gaming overall. So there’s just less time for them to try stuff. And then when they are coming to gaming, they are going to the familiar ones and spending money there. So there is no oxygen left in the room for a ton of different other kinds of games, whether they’re live service, single player, no matter what they are, there’s just not enough oxygen in the room for those. I think that makes it very difficult as a big publisher right now to make big bets on major AAA games. So yeah, I think we are at the inflection point. And it’s frustrating because I think if you go back about twelve years every conversation around the future of games at that time was predicting this moment. There were a lot of slippery slope arguments. Turns out we were falling down the slippery slope, though. Free to play and mobile, and all this stuff, it was going to be too tempting for these developers and eventually they’re going to get distracted and they won’t be able to convince themselves to come back and make big AAA games, and it will be a race to the bottom. And that’s sort of what we have now. I mean, these big free to play games like Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone, all these things, they’re high quality, they’re well made, but they definitely create a stagnation in the market where if you cannot pull eyeballs away from those games, and you can’t, you just can’t. It begs the question of how do we even justify this budget in the first place? And the answer for a lot of these companies is right now they aren’t justifying it. They’re not making those bets. And I think that’s the problem. For me, I play a lot of indie games. I’m going to be fine. I think that the punk rock indie game scene is going to continue thriving and there’s going to be breakout hits from that constantly, but that doesn’t mean that the overall health of the industry is in a great place.
MW: And you look at something like Balatro: A single guy that made the thing that he wanted. Is there room in these big studios to have a very small team working on a passion project like that that they can now put out there?
Grubb: No, there’s not. The opportunity cost doesn’t make sense for them. That’s why they don’t do it. We don’t really know because Microsoft has had several smaller games in the last handful of years. Grounded might be one that one did start and produce and finish and got put out under the Xbox ownership, but something like Hi-Fi Rush started before Microsoft made the acquisition. Is that something that would continue to get greenlighted under Microsoft? Probably, because of Game Pass, but now it’s like, are they as committed to Game Pass as we thought they were? I think they still mostly are, but I don’t know if they’re in such a way where they’re like, “Well, we’re going to just greenlight 50 of these smaller projects from all these teams that we have.” It’s going to be kind of here and there. And for the most part, we need big hits that hit big because otherwise we are wasting our time and money where we could be going after something that is going to hit big because that’s going to pay for the whole shebang. So, yeah, these companies can’t justify smaller projects. It is going to have to come from independent developers. And the good news there is independent gaming is better every single day. They are getting bigger and more expensive looking. And if that’s the stuff you care about — for me, I don’t care about expensive looking games. A lot of people do though, and we are going to reach that inflection point where a game from an independent studio is going to look just about as good as any game from like 2016. The biggest indie games will be able to look like Doom (2016), where it’s like, “Does a game need to look better than that?” I don’t think so, and I think a lot of indie studios are going to get to that point where they can make games that look like that in an affordable way in the next five years or so.
MW: PCs continue getting better, but the consoles, they’re not. And we keep seeing all these promises that have been made, not necessarily promises, but you know, what we assumed would be the “future of gaming”. I don’t feel like we’ve hit that point really. It’s diminishing returns, right? Each new generation feels less transformative than the one that came before it, at least since I’d say Xbox 360. Do they reach a point where they say, “Okay, let’s stop wasting all of these resources trying to make the next biggest game world,” and instead focus on making just a good product that will sell well?
Grubb: Yeah. And I think Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo are all — especially Sony and Microsoft — are kind of in this holding pattern a little bit. But they’ll shake that funk off here in the next couple of years and get back to business as normal and growing. But it will be, I think, with consoles in the rearview mirror a little bit. I think the “console wars” that we grew up with, you know, it’s more clear than ever now that it was a marketing strategy. It was a way to get people fired up. So they felt an ownership over a brand, just like any sort of brand rivalry we’ve had in any number of other businesses. And it wasn’t about winning, it was about the fighting. It’s not about winning because if someone won the console war, it’s probably not because they did so much better than the competition. It’s probably because some of the bottom dropped out on the other competitor a little bit. And now they’re looking around saying, “We’re in bad shape,” which is kind of what’s happened to Xbox a little bit. And then that leaves the winner in there looking around like, “What do we win?” We won the opportunity now to also have to shift our business. We know Xbox is in a transition period. They talk all the time about trying to look at ways to grow their business beyond the console. Sony has said the same exact thing in their last earnings report, basically. “We’ve got to expand beyond the console.” They’re in the same exact position. One lost. What’s the difference? The difference is that the console war never mattered and these companies need to grow. And the growth in consoles feels done. You know you know, with people actually feeling this way twelve years ago in 2012 and in the lead up to the next generation and then it was proven — no, actually, those consoles sold really well, and it was great and everyone looked silly talking doom and gloom in the years before. It does feel like actually it’s just a delayed response, and now here we are and PCs and mobile you kind of cannot ignore these things anymore. So I think these companies are going to have to move on no matter what. Whether they won the console war or lost, it didn’t matter.
MW: I mean, we’ve been seeing that with Sony as they stagger the releases of their exclusive to PC. How close do you think we are to Sony saying, “The next Horizon game day and date on PlayStation and PC?”
Grubb: We’re pretty close. It’s maybe not something that will happen during the PS5 generation, but I think we could expect a PS6 next gen by 2027, 2028. So in four or five years we’re looking at a world where I think Sony says, “The PlayStation is part of a PC gaming ecosystem as well, just like anything else. And if you want to play games on a console, it’s going to be a great experience. We promise we’re going to have great stuff for you. Maybe occasionally there will still be some stuff from us that’s exclusive, but for the most part, our games are going to be there day and date or about a year later at the most.” And that will be dictated, maybe not by trying to position the PlayStation as the console that you must have and more, “When our port studio is available they’ll get that game over on PC. Don’t worry, we’re working on it.” That sort of thing.
MW: Do you think it’s possible to have a Game Awards style show without it feeling like one long commercial with a few awards peppered in, rather than an actual event to recognize the work of developers? Or is that what DICE and GDC accomplish? And the Game Awards is more about letting video game fans know, “Hey, this is what’s coming out in the next couple of years and we’ll hand out a few words while we’re at it.”
Grubb: You basically got it there. DICE and GDC, those things exist. They’ve been around for years and years and years. They’ve always been an option if what you cared about was developers getting recognized. What people actually show up for is the commercials. I think Geoff Keighley is making the show that is most financially responsible for himself. And the thing that pays for the whole show is a bunch of ads from a bunch of other companies. I think that he could do a better job with that show still, but I think this is the way it is for a reason. Yeah, most people aren’t actually all that interested in awards for video games.
MW: Is there a game that you could hold a record in that you are 100% certain Dan Ryckert would not be able to beat?
Grubb: I was 100% certain that he wouldn’t be able to beat my record in the Mountain Run speedrun time in Astro’s Playroom for years because they actually patched out the speedrun trick that I was using. And so it was physically impossible for someone to beat my time. That was very fun to see it stay in the top 50 for years and years and years. I think they did patch that move back in so he could technically do it, but he had lots of time and he couldn’t. And if he beat me, I’m sure I could beat him again. I always felt like I could get better times in that. So, yeah, Astro’s Playroom is the one that Mike and I and Dan, all kind of went really hard at. And when it was all said and done, mine’s the top time against those guys in all eight courses combined and especially Mountain Run.
MW: Grubb reigns supreme. I have a few questions here from the Giant Bomb community.
Grubb: Hell yeah.
MW: Chucktowski asks: What kinds of personal sacrifices did it take to leave the paradise of Michigan for the hellscapes of Ohio?
Grubb: Being 14 or 15 and my parents telling me I had to. Now I do think they felt guilty because I remember being pretty moody and teenager about it at the time, and I think that helped pave the way for me getting an N64 for the day it came out. When I look back on things, it felt like that was the only reason that actually happened. I think they knew. I don’t know if I knew we were moving at that time, but I think it was going to find out pretty soon after that. That was the reverse sacrifice, getting the N64. I loved Michigan. I really did enjoy growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, 24 mile. I’ve grown to really like and love Ohio in many ways. I really loved Colorado. It turns out you can have a good time wherever you live.
MW: Gregpivo asks: If you could legalize one and outlaw the other on Giant Bomb content, hockey speak or wrestling jargon?
Grubb: I would actually outlaw the hockey speak. Because fewer people actually care about hockey than wrestling. So in the end, the wrestling jargon is sort of a statement that “we kind of own this.” We get to decide what Giant Bomb is. And when people kind of get miserable and say, “Oh god they just won’t stop saying ‘shoot’ and ‘work,’” I’m like, you know, every sort of micro culture has their own way of talking and us embracing this is really fun for us, we really do enjoy it. I was doing the Kinda Funny panel at PAX and there was a game where it’s like, is it real or fake? And I used shoot and work the entire time. And every time I did, I could hear Dan and Mike laughing really hard every time. And I did it like ten times. And they laughed every single time. And it’s infectious for us to keep doing that. So I really like wrestling jargon.
MW: It’s just fun to say.
Grubb: It’s fun to say, right? And then when people give in and finally start doing it themselves, you’re part of it now. You’re part of the culture that we’ve built, this little micro culture. It’s worth it in the end to sort of just go with the flow in that stuff and not be a stick in the mud about it.
MW: Final community question here from alephone: Hug, marry, kill the Minotti brothers?
Grubb: I kill Mike Minotti. Without a doubt.
MW: No hesitation on that.
Grubb: I’ll hug AJ Minotti and I’ll marry Chris Minotti. There you go.
MW: Fantastic. Was there anything that you wanted to plug or talk about while you’re here?
Grubb: We have the Game Mess Discord, and Game Mess where me and Mike do a bunch of extra podcasts, until I kill him, apparently, and then I’ll get one or the other Minotti brothers in there. They’re all the same. Am I right? Yeah. We do Game Mess Decides on Thursdays and we do the Last of the Nintendogs podcast on Tuesday nights. Those are always live on YouTube, so feel free to check those out.
