Anonymous asked: Is the longer premium sale (and the lower price for first time subscribers), the unlocking of premium videos, and the increased emphasis on YouTube indicative of a struggling Giant Bomb, or is it simply a case of trying to get over a plateau that the site has reached?

No, it’s really more about finally getting the time and support we need to do things that we should’ve been doing years ago. Like… we’re a video-focused crew. We should probably be bigger on YouTube than we are, but no one has had any time to focus on it. So it just became a dumping ground for our video with no real thought to it. That’s less about making YouTube money than it is building awareness about us and what we do.

Or merch. The guy that was heading up a lot of our business and merchandise stuff left the company earlier this year, and without that person in place, we haven’t had the time to do anything there at all. So we’re finally getting more organized around that and we should finally have a new shirt up for sale in a week or two.

Our subscriber count keeps going up and the podcast, especially, has seen some kind-of-insane growth lately. But we want to reach more people so we can get a little bigger and take on some larger projects next year. Tightening up some easy stuff around the edges of our business can make a huge difference, and those are the sorts of moves that help put us in a position to do grander things down the line.

Putting some of the old subscriber videos up on YouTube was something we talked about like two years ago, but only now have the actual time to plan for and execute on. We’ve been telling each other that we need new video bumpers for like three years. We’re mostly just trying to put ourselves in a position to get all this shit done, but it can be hard to plan ahead while also worrying about which videos are going to hit the site every week. So some of that stuff just requires us to have more people or time. We’re doing what we can to make sure we get there sooner rather than later.

