Acquisition alert! IGN acquires Gamer Network; Eurogamer, VG247, GamesIndustries and more

IGN Entertainment has acquired the Gamer Network family of digital brands for an undisclosed sum.

Gamer Network’s publications include GamesIndustry.biz, Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, VG247, and Dicebreaker. The business also holds shares in Outside Xbox, Digital Foundry, and Hookshot (which operates Nintendo life, Push Square, Pure Xbox, and Time Extension).

Industry consolidation continues. What are your thoughts?

Source

Pretty sweet. Meanwhile Gamespot acquires shitty web layouts.

Awesome, now opinions can be consolidated and sold as facts.😎

Don't forget dessert, which would be healthy serving of layoffs.🙃

Kind of pointless of IGN buying up all those gaming websites that pretty much does the same thing as they do unless they want to eliminate the competition.

Rock Paper Shotgun and VG247 are terrible. Throw those in the trash.

Eurogamer is alright, 98% of people in existence bother with it for Digital Foundry.

As if gaming journalism wasn't bad enough. Now we have one mega company calling the shots and controlling the narrative and selling out to the highest bidders.

First I have heard of them.

They gave UnderRail a bad review.

Thus, they should burn.

@BassMan: It is not just game journalism, but also journalism in general. Most people do not trust the mainstream media (some people called it the legacy media), and look to alternative media like social media for information.

Social media is the worst and puts you in an echo chamber even if your ideas are the worst and predate medieval times.

The game media is corrupt it is not surprised.

System Wars is where best takes are.

We're educated. Saiyan elite.

But yea do hate this idea alt media is automatically better. In both cases you'll get good and bad. Just the bad tends to command far more attention, alot of that due to culture war garbo that attract gamers like flies to shit and many game journos themselves very obviously far left and fairly fucking obnoxious about it.

It's a really sad situation, because loads of friends are telling me they quit traditional media;

And yeah I get it, I don't need to hear about death and decay while I'm eating my breakfast...

But the alternative being either avoiding news, or chasing after alt media... Those aren't good either.

So in the end I just like newspapers lol, just read what you are interested in and avoid all the crap you're not.

Like I've been avoiding sports news all my life and it's going pretty great.

DF better not become the next meme in town.

Not sure it makes any difference, the gaming community has for years pretty much been an echo chamber.

Oh no! Not Eurogamer...

Has consolidation like this ever yielded good results? Movies=bad, Games=bad, Food=bad.

Can we just have magazines back?(Gamepro or EGM) Spending this much time chasing gaming news is depressing.

Geez that sounds awful. Does NX_Gamer still work for IGN? If so haha now he's colleagues with DF.

To be honest I don’t think I really feel anything about this one way or the other.

If we're not careful, history will repeat itself, and so onto next-gen.

Here come the layoffs. Are we going to have a 500 post thread about this?

@kvallyx: Nope!

Don't forget "articles" written by AI!

In either case, another sign of late-stage capitalism.

Embrace socialism! EAT THE RICH! Unionize!

Regards

Comrade Bojangles

@mrbojangles25: You can have fun with your cannibalism.🙃

Ah yes. Buy up the competition, layoff the vets and proceed to pay the new pool of freelance writers pennies. And IGN of all places 🙄

I see that Digital Foundry folks have said they won’t be impacted, but GN owns shares of DF so I don’t know what to make of this.

Comrade Bojangles ... the AI stuff is getting scary good. lol

Boooo!!!!! I want differing opinions, not consolidated reviews all paid to one company.

I wonder when we will see AI generated reviews. No need to pay reviewers anymore if the company already knows what it needs to say in order to keep advertisers happy. Ask Jeff Grubb, I am sure he remembers why he was fired from his job.

No doubt there is already something going on. An AI program. How many turns/jumps did you take? That counts towards level design. How many encounters with enemies? That counts towards how exciting the game is. How many times did the player lose control to watch a cinematic? That counts towards how, umm...cinematic the game is.

They might just have like 10 people play the game with no writing background, with AI collecting metrics the whole time then let it "review" the game after it's collected the data.