I irregularly listen to the Giantbomb Bombcast. They’re now doing membership ($50/year, or monthly $4.95, woo…). Hmm. Just: No thanks, while the irrelevant ramblings and absolutely off-beat podcast length might be unjustifiable as a cost, why make it that long in the first place? They even mention it during this 45 minute long one; they say they like it but it takes lots of time (and so money! “money going out the door”; “what do we get out of that? it’s a hard thing to quantify and a hard thing to monetize”, and going on into adverts on podcasts)…so…hmm, not shorter then; quantity over quality after all.

Instead they split it up into two separate hours. Justification? Other Whiskey Media sites don’t do such a long podcast. This weird split is done so free users get the first hour on time, but the second hour later. Kind of splits it up badly, but there we go.

Oh well, their choice. I guess we’ll see if it works for them. One reservation about this is that Giant Bomb would be pulled directly in two ways; from the people paying subscriptions and advertisers. I hope they’ll keep their quality up, hopefully it won’t slip – if I pay for a site I’d be expecting a level of service that I otherwise wouldn’t expect from free sites. Sadly I don’t expect that level of paid quality from Giant Bomb so can’t justify paying for it 🙁 but maybe they’ll prove me wrong: they’ll have to do it that way around first however.

With Idle Thumbs now gone 🙁 I’ve now got very limited good game podcasts to listen to. I’ll be giving Yet Another Gaming Show a chance, but what others are worth the time? Anyone got any? I guess I’ll try looking around the major sites to see who does a reasonable one.

Edit: no longer a mini-side post!