G4 is gone? I forgot it was back.

 It's like poetry, it rhymes.

There seems to be something of a spate of bad ideas running themselves firmly into the ground they were destined to land in since birth. Because despite all this talk of 5 to 10 year plans that every business in the world prides themselves on, no one seems able to get over the very immediate hurdle of becoming a worthwhile proposition in the first place. It's all well and good to talk about the investments and growth you're going to do after a theoretical decade of ceaseless, problem-free, growth; but if your product doesn't slot into the market it's primed for then you're never going to get to enact those grand plans; now are you. That's what Quibi learnt when it sunk a frankly absurd amount of money into a streaming service that only worked on mobile devices in fifteen minute episode chunks. That's what Stadia learnt when they tried to upend all the gaming industry with an system not ready to be supported by their entire target market and a financial proposition that seemed to work out worse for the consumer than traditional gaming. It's what Crypto Pay-to-earn games are currently in the middle of learning, with their model built around fixing problems that don't exist with a model that disincentives fun in a fun-driven medium. And it's what G4 learned in the middle of all of this without earning the renown of any of the examples I just discussed.

G4 was, in it's first incarnation, a TV network which introduced the, even at the time, still very niche hobby of gaming to the mainstream TV watching audience. In it's hay-day G4 was something of a cultural milestone as the first definitive point that enjoyers of games could point and declare their pastime had some degree of legitimacy to it. The network featured shows diving into new games and geek culture, and just about everything that appealed to fledgling gamers growing up, and it trucked along for a decent chunk of time until traditional TV got bored of it because, apparently, the audience had. Maybe they grew out of it's, admittedly younger-tipped, demographics; or maybe the world of entertainment was, even then, changing into what it is today.

Because when it comes to watching programming around the world of gaming entertainment, there really is no need for professionally produced programming in the modern age; not with the rise of the Youtuber. Honestly, the Youtuber makes pretty much any hobby-specific television redundant; but gaming in particular found it's home among the personable and innumerable denizens of social media. Through the current system we live in, you can find content creators tailored specifically to your individual tastes who likes the same sort of games you do and introduces new games that you'll definitely like. No network of programming can cast as wide a net over the ever populace world of gaming like social media can. The competition would simply be unfair.

Especially not in a world ruled by personalities that people like to watch, instead of information that people are searching offered up by corporate-friendly approximations of how human's are supposed to interact. It may be 'parasocial', as the buzzword of the year seems to be, but when it comes to entertainment, we'd prefer to hear the opinion of a person we feel connected and invested with over what a faceless reviewer with their career prospects held-higher than the quality of their work. Every other year we see an absolutely ridiculous rage-bait headline penned and projected from 'mainstream reviewers' that serves only to elevate the writers notoriety and status through substance-less opera speak. (Like that recent review for Sony's Spiderman on PC which critiqued the wall-crawling creep for being a police shill because he's not fighting the injustices of systemic racism in the police force. It's just pointless garbage that no one cares about.)

In the world of social media, bad apples and clout chasers are isolated and discredited, but in big networks and professional outlets; sticking together is a non-negotiable necessity. IGN and it's ilk have to stand behind the mindless gibberish whenever one of their staff goes off on one for a laugh and they take that reputation hit as an entire company, devaluing their opinion. That's the risk of running a big network in a world that lives and dies on personality; when you have sore personalities that ruins people's inclination to want to watch you. And after years of this rift and divide being nurtured by a insular circle of reviewers that mostly stroke each other's egos; new mainstream publications and Games industry aggregates have an uphill struggle wiggling their way into the games industry unless they specialise; like all successful Youtubers do.

Which is only a fraction of the reason why a G4 revival was a doomed idea, I might add; but it's the one I feel most connected to. Because even though I did hear about a G4 revival show, I avoided it for the very reason that I didn't value the input of mainstream figures, blended up in a corporate machine, telling me about the entertainment I should and shouldn't like. And it would seem I wasn't alone in that, given how only a few months after launch G4 was averaging 1,800 viewers daily on their new Twitch-based model. However it was the platform was making money, through sponsors or otherwise, that indicates a distinct lack of interest that is nowhere near sustainable for a multimillion dollar production employing hundreds. And the lack of interest was real; I didn't even see people reposting clips on Youtube showing off funny moments or anything. It was as if the entire sphere of social media outside the G4 Twitch chat was just pretending that the show didn't exist.

There are bit-part V-tubers who just steam themselves teaching English to themselves and playing a bit of Minecraft inbetween that average more than twice those numbers. And their overhead is smaller by orders of magnitude. Some believe that if Comcast just dropped enough money on them to weather their slow first year then the momentum of consistency would begin to pay off in dividends, and IGN is still around so I guess that's a possibility; but I think a new untested brand over the somewhat tainted-with-failure name of G4 has a better chance of making something of it's self. Maybe a platform that takes advantage of already beloved faces from the gaming social media landscape, instead of throwing personality-less journalists and asking them to perform like monkeys. We're past that age, as a society.

So G4 is gone, a lot of people are out of a job, and those who really believed this time would be the one are left without an exit strategy because the dissolution was super abrupt. And I mean it legitimately this time, it's not like with Stadia where the writing on the wall was so apparent it might as well have been penned in glowing Cryptid blood; Comcast just pulled the plug one day out of nowhere. That really does suck for the affected and I feel bad for them, even if I think this end was inevitable from the get-go. Maybe this will be a message to the mainstream going forward; we don't need you to legitimise our industry anymore; we're doing just fine without you, thanks so much. Although I suspect it absolutely won't be the last we here of efforts like these.