Report: IGN & UGO Merging, Spinning Off from News Corp

[DoctorFinger]

Big movings and dealings in the realms of corporate video game news. News Corp (parent company of Fox, among other media outlets) plans to spin-off IGN, and to make the new company more attractive is acquiring the UGO Network from Hearst publishing.

IGN began as a gaming website (the IGN used to stand for Imagine Gaming Network), but in recent years has branched out much more into guy-centric pop culture, creating sites covering movies, comics and music. IGN was purchased by News Corp in 2007, and now includes sites like Gamespy, Fileplanet and Direct2Drive in it's network. At the time the acquisition of IGN was considered a bad move by News Corp, as opposed to their then much lauded purchase of MySpace for nearly a billion dollars. Now MySpace is all but dead, while the IGN network last year made a reported $10M profit against $100M in revenue. UGO began as one of the earliest game & guy centric web networks and was absolutely huge in the late 90s-early 2000s before being passed by other outfits It's now best known as the corporate home of 1UP, GameVideos and GameTab. It was also purchased in 2007, in this case by the Hearst publishing house. 2 years later it bought 1UP and EGM from Ziff Davis, closing the magazine but keeping 1UP around, albeit with a smaller staff.

The plan - as reported by the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog - has News Corp buying UGO from Hearst as a way to beef up IGN in advance of spinning them off into their own company, presumably with an eye towards an IPO. News Corp would be the majority owner of the new entity, with Hearst maintaining a minority stake. The report goes on to say that this may not be the last acquisition made in advance of the eventual IPO.

So far no one in the management of any of the involved parties is commenting.

Sources - WSJ All Things Digital; Game Informer; Joystiq

[Serapth]

People that decry Fox's purchase of MySpace no little about economics. Fox milked many many times what they paid for MySpace. One of the few purchases in the online space to actually be profitable.

[shodan2020]

Heh, so 1up is now owned by Fox? This should be interesting.

[fitbabits]

IGN lost all relevance (to me) many moons ago. Same with 1Up. Interesting bedfellows, though.

[Serapth]

Originally Posted by fitbabits

IGN lost all relevance (to me) many moons ago. Same with 1Up. Interesting bedfellows, though.

All of them did, don't really know what happened. Gamespy worst of all, now its a glorified blog.

[Chris_D]

This will basically be the end of 1UP as we know it I presume.

[fitbabits]

Originally Posted by Chris_D

This will basically be the end of 1UP as we know it I presume.

It has been on life support for a while...

[Reverant]

I remember when IGN and Gamespy merged, and nobody gave a shit. Larger gaming blogs and websites are usually nothing more than glorified advertisements anyway.

[kyrieee]

They should just shut down 1UP, it's been pathetic for the past two years. They had some of the most talented writers working for them but then they fired them all and hired total scrubs that just produce top5 lists, and don't get me started on the community manager LOL!

[Serapth]

Originally Posted by kyrieee

They should just shut down 1UP, it's been pathetic for the past two years. They had some of the most talented writers working for them but then they fired them all and hired total scrubs that just produce top5 lists, and don't get me started on the community manager LOL!

IGN is the 348 ranked website according to Alexa the most authoritative source for such info. By contrast, RottenTomatoes is 882.

It may have gone down the shitter, but by web traffic standards it still getting the traffic and thats what advertisers care about.

[Gorvi]

IGN is still worth a read from time to time, but 1UP has gone from the best written gaming site out there to utter trash since they fired everyone. I still enjoy the random episode of Retronauts, but I think Jeremy Parish is the only guy they've got left that's worth a damn.

[Chris_D]

Funny how he was the guy I never liked back in the day. I'm not sure there's anyone else who could podcast and yet sound like they were hating it quite like him.

[shodan2020]

Originally Posted by kyrieee

They should just shut down 1UP, it's been pathetic for the past two years. They had some of the most talented writers working for them but then they fired them all and hired total scrubs that just produce top5 lists, and don't get me started on the community manager LOL!

Aww, come on, I like Teena. lol.

[RandoM51]

I think ad revenue is an evolutionary dead-end for sites like these. In the dark ages of print ads would show you products you didn't even know existed in many cases, or get you to revisit products you had used in the past. With today's Internet, the information is everywhere, and most of it is free. If you like RPGs it only takes an RSS feed or two to keep yourself up to speed on every upcoming game that you might be interested in, RSS feeds that provide you free, non-ad cluttered content.

Why pay for ads on a gaming-oriented website when I know for a fact that that website will do a review of my game, multiple previews, interviews, etc., as long as I have my people provide them with review copy, interview time, etc.? It is this information that these websites are going to provide anyway that drives our purchasing decisions, not ads we ignore or click through as quickly as possible.

[shodan2020]

Originally Posted by kyrieee

They should just shut down 1UP, it's been pathetic for the past two years. They had some of the most talented writers working for them but then they fired them all and hired total scrubs that just produce top5 lists, and don't get me started on the community manager LOL!

I still love the retronauts stuff. Sucked a bit more when they let Sharkey go, but they recently played some Mega Man X on the videostream and it was great.

[kyrieee]

Originally Posted by shodan2020

Aww, come on, I like Teena. lol.

I won lost of stuff that she never sent me
I is mad

Nah but seriously, I don't like her. It always felt like she was annoying as hell but everyone was too nice to tell her off or fire her. How do you axe 90% of your editorial team and then keep her? Every time she was on podcasts she would just interrupt to ask about the most dumb shit like not very difficult words or well known concepts that she had no clue about. The reason I went to 1up, read their stuff and listened to their podcast was because they had some of the most articulate and insightful people out of any site, and then they bring on this blabbering idi***.

I guess that's not her fault though, it's the fault of whoever hired her.

Yeah also, why did they fire Sharkey? The circumstances around that were weird, his blog was the only thing I still read at that point.

[J Arcane]

Man. All this time whenever I've bought D2D sales my money was going to Rupert Murdoch's pockets?

No wonder it always felt slightly dirty.

[Chris_D]

Karen Chu was pretty much the lone star of the admittedly small 1UP female brigade IMO. She always came across as cool, knowledgable and laid back.

[shodan2020]

Originally Posted by Chris_D

Karen Chu was pretty much the lone star of the admittedly small 1UP female brigade IMO. She always came across as cool, knowledgable and laid back.

Jenn Frank was pretty cool too. She left 1up years ago though. Alice Liang wasn't bad either, but she left a week ago or so for a job in Britian.

[tacitus]

I still listen to GamesDammit and sometimes retronauts, but I gave up on everything else awhile back. They don't reach the sublime heights of years past but they are OK.