Building a Podcast Team When Everyone Has Opinions
The hardest part of podcasting is people.
How the Grumpy Old Gamer Podcast Got Its Name
It started as a joke. It stayed because it wasn’t.
Patch Notes: Now With Extra Marketing Spin
"Improved player experience" means nothing.
When Games Had Secrets Instead of Checklists
Exploration used to mean something.
Gaming News Used to Matter, Now It’s Marketing
The legacy outlets are collapsing. Good.
How do you build a podcast team without it turning into a never-ending group chat? Getting people to join a podcast is easy. Everyone’s got an opinion, a mic, and at least one “you know what would be cool?” idea. The hard part is building a team that can hold a conversation without falling apart mid-sentence or mid-season. The Grumpy Old Gamer podcast wasn’t built through casting calls or brand pitches. It started from conversations...
Grumpy Old Gamer is a team of four: Al (that’s me), Andrew, Ethan, and Wayne. Between us, we’ve got decades of gaming experience, bad attitudes, and strong opinions. Some of us are genuinely old. All of us are definitely grumpy. We’re not doing full bios (yet) or glowing intros. That’s not our style. Instead, we sent each host a bunch of questions to see what they’d come back with. Next we have: Ethan. 1. What’s...
What do you call a podcast when you’re sick of the nonsense and too tired to pretend otherwise? I didn’t hold a naming session. I didn’t put it to a vote or ask for suggestions from the team. I just called it what it was. What I am. Grumpy Old Gamer. I’d love to say that it started as a placeholder while I was working through the planning documents, but that would be a fib....
Why do patch notes read like PR statements instead of developer logs? There was a time when patch notes told you what changed and why. They were blunt. Technical. Sometimes dry. But they gave you the facts. “Fixed a bug where grenades exploded twice.” “Reduced enemy health on Hardcore difficulty.” No dressing it up. No...
What’s the point of an open world if you’ve marked everything on the map before I even leave the tutorial? Exploration in modern games is a chore. You open the map and it’s already full of icons. Points of interest, collectibles, shops, events, fast travel markers, and three different currencies you didn’t ask for. There’s...
When did covering games become a side gig for selling them? Gaming journalism used to be about curiosity. Writers covered games because they were fascinated by them. They wanted to tell stories about how games were made, how studios worked, how systems interacted. They wanted to shine a light on the weird, the broken, the...
How did we end up normalising day-one patches the size of the game itself? You buy a new release for £60. Maybe you even preloaded it. Midnight hits, it unlocks, and the first thing you see is a 40GB patch. You finally get into the game, and something’s off. Frame drops. Cutscene audio out of...
Grumpy Old Gamer is a team of four: Al (that’s me), Andrew, Ethan, and Wayne. Between us, we’ve got decades of gaming experience, bad attitudes, and strong opinions. Some of us are genuinely old. All of us are definitely grumpy. We’re not doing full bios (yet) or glowing intros. That’s not our style. Instead, we...
When did games become jobs, and why are we still pretending that’s fun? At some point, video games stopped ending. You used to play a campaign, beat the boss, watch the credits, and walk away feeling like you’d done something. Now? You log in for the tenth time this week to shoot the same enemies...
Why does replaying old favourites feel like a waste of time—except when it doesn’t? You know the feeling. You get the itch to replay something from your so-called glory days. You load it up, remembering how much you loved it, only to find out you’ve aged, the game hasn’t, and now you’re stuck in a ten-minute tutorial trying to remember...
When did “modern” become a dirty word in gaming? Everyone’s too busy moaning about microtransactions and day-one patches to admit that games now are actually… playable. That might not sound like a big deal, but compared to the crash-prone, resolution-challenged disasters of the past, it’s worth saying. Modern gaming isn’t perfect. Some of it is a greedy, bloated mess. But...
Why do we act like time turns every mediocre game into a misunderstood masterpiece? There’s a strange thing that happens when a game is old. People start to treat it like it was unfairly judged. Like maybe we just didn’t “get it” back then. So we go digging through bargain bins of memory, trying to revive things that should have...
Is it the games you loved, or the time in your life when you played them? You have your list. The games that meant something. The ones you’ll bring up in every conversation about how gaming used to be better. Maybe it was your first console. Maybe it was that one summer you played nothing else. Whatever it is, it’s...
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...
What started as me shouting into the void has turned into… well, several of us shouting into the void. Grumpy Old Gamer now has a team. Actual people. With actual opinions. And crappy microphones. And decades of pent-up gaming grievances. We’ve barely started this thing but apparently I wasn’t grumpy enough on my own. So I’ve roped in a few...
Many people will tell you that the best way to start a new podcast is to plug in your microphone, record something, and publish it. Just get it out there and worry about the rest later. Others would have a more structured approach, but the ultimate aim is to record, publish, and then watch the listeners roll in. I am...
Tired of manufactured enthusiasm, influencer nonsense, and every game being the most anticipated release of the year? So are we. This is The Grumpy Old Gamer Podcast, where opinionated rants, sarcasm, and the occasional half-decent insight come together to form something loosely resembling commentary. We cover games old and new, mostly whatever we’re playing this week, and we don’t sugar-coat...
