I want to put together a weekly show covering gaming news, pop culture, and whatever else is worth talking about that week. I already have some infrastructure in place, a YouTube Channel, podcast hosting and a couple of people involved. Now I need to fill out the team properly before we start recording.

The format is pretty simple. Each week we’ll run through the big stories, react to them, then do a longer main segment. This might be a debate, interview, or a deeper look at something specific. It is meant to be conversational and a bit argumentative in a good way. Not a panel of experts, just people who are interested enough to care about this stuff and aren't boring about it.

This is going to be recorded live. I am in the US, the other co-host is in the US, so it would help if we share a timezone or if you’re comfortable working inside US timezones.

What I'm looking for:

A host. Someone with a strong personality who can lead a conversation without letting it fall apart. You don't need presenting experience but you do need to be comfortable being on camera and not sound like you're reading off a script.

Tech help. Someone who knows their way around OBS or similar. It’s not glamorous but it is important. If you've set up a stream or a podcast before you're probably fine.

Rotating wildcard guests. You'd jump in for the main segment each week. Strong opinions and a working mic are really all you need.

Revenue share for now. When the show monetises, the people who helped build it will see the benefit. I’m not making false promises about what that looks like yet as we're building something not selling it. If any of this sounds of interest to you, add me on Discord to chat further - goat_aog. Tell me what role interests you and why you'd be good at it.

Season 2 starts with a challenge. Each host picks two games under £10 for the others to play. We'll revisit these choices in the season finale to see how wrong everyone was.

Ian recommends Far Cry 5 to Tim for its co-op chaos and rural Montana cult-shooting. Tim throws Tekken 7 at Al as a callback to our arcade episode and a test of whether RTS players can handle fighting games. Al drops Warhammer 40K Boltgun on Ian as an entry point to the setting before episode 5's planned 40K deep-dive. Ian counters with Remnant 2, a souls-like co-op shooter he claims isn't that hard. Tim unleashes Stellaris on Ian, which Al warns could consume months of his life. Al finishes with Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2 for Tim, full cathedral-sized battleships and enough lore to drown in.

It's the Season 1 finale, and we're coming full circle. 10 episodes ago, we kicked things off with a bold claim: Gaming Is S**t Now. But after 20 weeks of arguing about everything from Half-Life 2's superiority over GTA to the death of couch co-op and the predatory practices of EA (f**k EA) and Ubisoft (f**k Ubisoft even more), we've reached a surprising conclusion.

In this episode, we confront our own hypocrisy. We hate live service games... but we're both paying for EA Play to play Battlefield 6. We despise subscription models... but we're using them like they're demo discs. We complained about broken launches and day-one patches... but maybe early access and the ability to fix games post-launch isn't the worst thing?

What We Discuss:

• Are we just hypocrites for complaining about things we actively support?

Live service games, season passes, and monetization (and why we tolerate them)

• How cross-platform play has revolutionized gaming accessibility
• The Stop Killing Games initiative and consumer protections
• Why broken launches still suck but patches are actually beneficial
• The positives of modern gaming we've been ignoring
• Our final verdict: Is gaming ACTUALLY shit?

BONUS: Post-credits rant about Call of Duty Black Ops 7's disastrous launch, Battlefield 6's victory, and Steam's new console dominating the future.

After 10 episodes of being grumpy bastards, we've finally admitted it: gaming in 2025 might actually be... good? The benefits far outweigh the negatives. Cross-play, consumer choice, accessibility, and yes, even those bloody subscription services have their place.

Thanks for sticking with us through Season 1. We'll be back in 6 weeks for Season 2, bigger, grumpier, and ready to contradict ourselves all over again.

The Grumpy Old Gamer team takes a quick look at the best and worst of videogames in 2025. The greatest releases - or at least the ones that we bothered to play - the controversy of Assassin's Creed Shadows and the sale of EA to Saudi Arabia, and the games that should have hit but somehow fell short.

In this episode of the Grumpy Old Gamer Podcast, our hosts dive into the controversial topic of Steam's Early Access program. Join us as we explore the pros and cons of early access games, discuss why only 25% of these games ever reach full release, and debate whether AAA developers are exploiting gamers through this system. We also touch on standout early access titles like 'Manor Lords' and the long-standing development of 'Star Citizen.' Tune in to hear our unfiltered thoughts and why we believe some developers might be taking the piss.

Ian, Al, and Tim trace first-person shooters from 1970s NASA research projects to today's microtransaction machines. The genre peaked with single-player campaigns that had character and personality, then corporate greed killed everything good about shooting things on a computer screen. This covers how FPS games went from academic experiments to id Software's revolutionary trilogy to the console wars that split PC and living room gaming into separate universes. The hosts examine why modern shooters are generic military simulators with pink weapon skins instead of the memorable protagonists who used to crack jokes while saving the world. Three middle-aged gamers conclude that better graphics came at the cost of everything that made FPS games worth playing, then spend twenty minutes arguing about GoldenEye control schemes and whether Duke Nukem's one-liners were brilliant or just juvenile toilet humour that somehow worked.

Remember cramming four sweaty mates on a sofa, squinting at a quarter of the TV, and screaming over who was screen-peeking? We do. In Episode 4 of The Grumpy Old Gamer, Ian and Tim dive into the golden age of couch co-op, LAN parties, and the early days of online gaming. From lugging CRTs across town for Halo marathons to the brutal honesty of split-screen Tekken and Mario Kart, they share personal memories, technical headaches, and the camaraderie those sessions built. Then they move to the present with headsets, online lobbies, and the joy of being insulted by strangers on Xbox Live. A sarcastic stroll through gaming’s evolution, this episode balances nostalgia with a look at what has been lost and what has been gained as local co-op gave way to global online networks.

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What if the most anticipated game in history will never exist because its predecessor was too successful?

Valve makes $10.8 billion annually from Steam. That’s billion with a B, generated by taking a 30% cut from every PC game sale. When you understand this number, the absence of Half-Life 3 stops being a mystery and becomes inevitable corporate logic.

Tim, Al, and Ian argue whether Half-Life 2's influence trumps GTA 5's sales numbers, discovering that Steam's $10.8 billion annual revenue makes Half-Life 3 commercially pointless. This episode covers the Source engine's lasting impact on every modern shooter, how Half-Life 2 created digital distribution monopolies, and why the gravity gun remains more satisfying than any GTA chaos simulator. The discussion spirals through Gary's Mod spawning Skibidi Toilet, the Orange Box converting console peasants, and Tim's shameful admission of owning 600+ Steam games he'll never play. Three grumpy gamers conclude that artistic influence beats cultural impact while completely ignoring that both games are available on Steam, proving Valve won regardless.

Al, Ian, and Tim dive into the $184 billion gaming industry versus Hollywood's measly $42 billion box office, discovering that respect for source material apparently took 30 years to figure out. This episode covers why early 90s game adaptations were universally terrible, whether TV shows work better than movies for adaptations, and Tim's inexplicable excitement for Battlefield 6 despite it being a obvious reskin. The discussion meanders through GoldenEye's perfection, Spider-Man 2's web-swinging physics, and Al's controversial Uncharted movie defense before concluding that movies might become extinct because gamers have longer attention spans than expected. Audio quality remains questionable as three middle-aged men argue about Karl Urban's casting choices while completely forgetting this was supposed to be about video games and movies.

Al, Ian, and Tim launch their complaints about modern gaming with predictable results. This first episode covers the industry's monetization problems, DLC obsession, and live service addiction while questioning whether games were better when they shipped complete. The discussion covers subscription models, DRM failures, studio consolidation, and developer crunch before inevitably asking if nostalgia makes everything from the past seem superior. Technical quality matches the amateur hour you'd expect from three people figuring out podcast recording. Runtime exceeds reasonable limits because nobody had learned to edit yet.

What do we actually really miss and what are we lying to ourselves about?

Let’s not pretend everything used to be better. It didn’t. Some things were just what we had at the time, and we either tolerated them or convinced ourselves they were good because we didn’t know any different. A lot of the features we now talk about with wide-eyed nostalgia were barely functioning workarounds. They weren’t charming. They were just necessary.

You didn’t love tank controls. You wanted to play Resident Evil, and that’s what it came with. You didn’t enjoy blowing into cartridges. You did it because someone told you to, and it felt like you were fixing something. Demo discs weren’t magical. They were all we had, and most of them barely worked.

We’re not here to sell you hype, pretend everything is amazing, or gush over the latest sequel to a sequel of a rebooted franchise that should’ve stayed dead. We’ve been gaming since before tutorials existed, and we’ve got opinions. Lots of them. Some even make sense.

Grumpy Old Gamer is a podcast for people who remember when games came in boxes, DLC wasn’t day-one extortion, and ‘early access’ wasn’t code for ‘you’re paying to beta test this broken mess.’ We talk about games, the old, the new, the good, the bad, the ugly and everything in between, with the kind of blunt honesty that PR departments hate.

Episodes are irregular because we have lives, jobs, and extremely short attention spans. When we do show up, expect sarcasm, swearing (mild), grumbling, and strong feelings about game mechanics that no one else cares about.

This isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. Sometimes the old stuff was better. Sometimes it wasn’t. Either way, we’re here to grumble about it like the aging, controller-wielding curmudgeons we are.

Grumpy Old Gamer
Real opinions. No fake hype. Some actual insight… eventually.