How do you pick topics in a room full of strong opinions and low tolerance?
Talking about games is easy. Choosing what to talk about isn’t. Every person on this team has at least ten ideas at any given moment, and at least five of those ideas are guaranteed to annoy someone else on the team.
Topic selection sounds simple until you try it. One person wants to do a deep dive on an obscure classic. Another wants to talk about the state of modern game launches. Someone else throws in a weird one about inventory systems or pre-order culture. Before you know it, you’re not planning a podcast. You’re running group therapy for bitter gamers.
So we had to set some ground rules. First, if nobody can talk about it for more than ten minutes without losing steam, it’s out. Second, if someone says “we should do an episode on X” but can’t tell you why it’s interesting, it gets parked. Third, no one gets to pull rank. If the topic doesn’t click, it doesn’t go in the schedule.
The Grumpy Old Gamer tone helps. If a topic doesn’t have an opinion baked into it, we usually pass. We’re not doing retrospectives that sound like Wikipedia entries. We’re not doing reaction episodes just because a trailer dropped. If the idea isn’t grounded in experience or frustration or genuine interest, we move on.
We also test topics the old-fashioned way. We talk about them. Off mic. If the chat goes nowhere, it’s not a good episode. But if it turns into a rant, a debate, or someone saying “we’re not doing that,” then we’re getting close.
Most of the time, the strongest episodes come from things we already argue about anyway. Save systems. Bad UI. Forced tutorials. Rewritten endings. Games we remember fondly but secretly hated at the time. These topics stick because they come from somewhere honest.
There’s also the balance to consider. You can’t do three nostalgia-heavy episodes in a row. You can’t complain about modern monetisation every single week. You need variation without losing the tone. That’s harder than it sounds. Not because there’s a shortage of topics, but because there’s too much to say and only so many ways to say it without repeating yourself.
And sometimes, you just need to bin the whole idea and try again. A topic that sounds good on paper might fall flat once you get into it. It’s no big deal. Not every idea needs to be rescued. Some are just bad.
The longer you do this, the more you realise the point isn’t just the topic. It’s what you bring to it. You can make “game menus” interesting if the conversation is sharp. You can make “AAA bloat” boring if everyone’s just agreeing with each other.
We’re not interested in content for the sake of it. If a topic doesn’t spark something, we bin it and move on. If we don’t care, you won’t either. That’s the filter. And we use it every time.
What’s a gaming topic you could argue about for an hour without getting bored?
