Best gaming podcasts in 2026

Gaming podcasts have weathered a brutal decade. Networks have shut down. Beloved hosts have moved on. Outlets that anchored the format (Game Informer, Polygon's early podcast slate, the original Giant Bombcast era) have been rebuilt from scratch more than once. What's survived is generally good, the shows that made it through the layoffs and platform churn did so because the hosts care.

Here are the gaming podcasts worth your time in 2026, sorted by what you're looking for.

TL;DR

• For weekly news and industry commentary: Triple Click, Kinda Funny Games Daily.
• For long-form criticism and reviews: The Besties, Easy Allies.
• For Nintendo specifically: Nintendo Voice Chat.
• For freeform hangout-vibe gaming chat: Giant Bombcast.
• For thoughtful industry coverage: Insert Credit.

Triple Click

• Best for: smart, friendly weekly conversations about new games and the industry behind them.
• Standout features: Jason Schreier (Bloomberg gaming reporter), Maddy Myers, and Kirk Hamilton bring three distinct angles: industry reporting, criticism, and player perspective. Coverage spans new releases, big industry news, and recurring segments like "Game of the Year" predictions. Production is tight.
• Considerations: not the place for daily news. New episodes drop weekly and lean toward considered takes rather than hot reactions.

Kinda Funny Games Daily

• Best for: actual daily gaming news, delivered fast.
• Standout features: short-format daily news from the Kinda Funny crew (Greg Miller, Tim Gettys, and rotating co-hosts). Covers what happened in the industry in the last 24 hours with the kind of unhurried delivery that makes daily-news podcasts listenable.
• Considerations: tonal range narrower than the weekly shows. If you want criticism or interviews, look elsewhere.

The Besties

• Best for: weekly best-game-of-the-week debates structured as friendly competition.
• Standout features: Polygon's Justin McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Russ Frushtick, and Chris Plante go through the week's notable releases and argue about which was best. The format gives the show structure that a lot of gaming podcasts lack.
• Considerations: McElroys-heavy, which some listeners love and others find exhausting. Try one episode and you'll know.

Easy Allies Podcast

• Best for: long-form gaming discussion from a tight-knit independent crew.
• Standout features: the Easy Allies team (former GameTrailers staff) have been producing gaming content together for nearly a decade now. The weekly podcast is unstructured, often three-plus hours, and the dynamic between hosts is the draw.
• Considerations: long episodes. Best dipped into rather than consumed whole. Listener-funded via Patreon, which keeps the show going.

Nintendo Voice Chat

• Best for: Nintendo-specific news, reviews, and speculation.
• Standout features: IGN's long-running Nintendo show, hosted by the IGN editorial team. Covers Switch (and now Switch 2) releases, Nintendo Direct breakdowns, and broader Nintendo strategy.
• Considerations: Nintendo-only. If you don't own a Nintendo console, this isn't your show.

Giant Bombcast

• Best for: the longest-running gaming hangout podcast in the medium.
• Standout features: Giant Bomb's flagship podcast has been going since 2008 in some form. The cast has rotated multiple times, but the format (friends talking about games with very little structure) has stayed consistent. Recent episodes still hit the same vibe.
• Considerations: occasional production hiccups as Giant Bomb's parent company has changed hands. The show keeps going, but the release cadence isn't as predictable as a magazine-shop show.

Insert Credit

• Best for: thoughtful, almost academic conversations about gaming history and design.
• Standout features: Brandon Sheffield, Frank Cifaldi, and rotating guests cover gaming with a critical-history perspective rather than a news perspective. Episodes about specific game-history topics (forgotten arcade games, the early days of localisation, the indie boom) read like the audio version of long-form gaming journalism.
• Considerations: slow release cadence. Treat it like a deep-cuts archive rather than a weekly habit.

How we chose

We weighted three things: how much the hosts actually know about the games they cover (the post-layoff gaming-podcast world has a lot of casual takes; the shows on this list don't), how durable the production has been (gaming podcasts shut down all the time; we picked shows with multi-year track records), and how distinct each show's voice is.

If you're new to gaming podcasts, start with Triple Click for weekly news, The Besties for review-style debate, and Kinda Funny Games Daily for keeping up with the industry. Those three together cover most of what gaming podcast listening can give you. For more on building a sustainable podcast listening habit, our tips for managing your podcast queue help.

If you want broader pop-culture recommendations beyond gaming specifically, our best tech podcasts list and best film podcasts list cover adjacent territory.

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