Fandom’s Giant Bomb, GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide Sites Hit by Layoffs

Fandom has made an unspecified number of layoffs at GameSpot, Giant Bomb, Metacritic and TV Guide — four months after buying the entertainment and gaming sites for about $50 million — as well as letting go other Fandom employees.

Multiple staffers of the websites affected by the job cuts posted on social media about the layoffs Thursday. A Fandom spokesperson declined to comment on the layoffs. The layoffs affected less than 10% of the company’s total workforce, which is less than 500 employees, a source familiar with the cuts said.

Those who said they were laid off include GameSpot entertainment editor Mat Elfring; Giant Bomb video producers Jess O’Brien and Jason Oestreicher; Stuart Kimball, associate video producer at GameSpot; Mason Downey, GameSpot entertainment writer; and Justin Vachon, a graphic designer who worked on Giant Bomb, GameSpot, TV Guide and Metacritic.

In October, San Francisco-based Fandom announced a deal to acquire GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News and Comic Vine from digital marketing firm Red Ventures. Fandom paid roughly $50 million in cash for the properties, sources said. Red Ventures in 2020 had acquired TV Guide, Metacritic, GameSpot and Giant Bomb as part of its $500 million deal to buy the CNET Media Group from Paramount Global.

Fandom was founded in 2004 by Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder, and entrepreneur Angela Beesley Starling. In 2018, Fandom was sold to a company headed by Jon Miller and backed by venture-capital firm TPG. According to the company, Fandom encompasses over 40 million content pages on 250,000 wikis about “every fictional universe ever created.”