Ziff Davis-owned IGN Entertainment has now acquired all of Gamer Network’s brands, which include at least four of the most prominent gaming sites still alive in the space, as well as stakes in others.
The acquisition includes Eurogamer, GamesIndustry. biz, Rock Paper Shotgun and VG247. Then, moves on Outside Xbox, Digital Foundry, Nintendolife, PushSquare, Pure Xbox, and Time Extension. The move has already led to giant “redundant” layoffs of large companies. Name hounds of all brands, as they are absorbed by the megasite.
While consolidation is rarely very good in any industry, video game journalism is suffering and measures like this will only make things worse. Mid-tier or smaller-tier sites are already struggling against YouTube and Twitch, and for visibility in the face of Google’s increasingly hostile search policies (which are now coming with AI scams in their articles as of last week), however, you now have a site like IGN that has five main brands that, In theory, they can fill out the full list of links for a given topic.
While this is only the newest initiative, we have had projects in the past. Fandom bought GameSpot, Giant Bomb, and even Metacritic, the major aggregator, in 2022. The Gamur network has more than a dozen publications, adding Destructoid, The Escapist, Gamepur, and emagtrends.
There are some reputable sites that are autonomous, or at least they are the only gambling site on their network. Polygon arguably appears to be the healthiest, while anything like Kotaku turns out to be constantly on death’s door with a skeleton staff looking to fight its mismanagement of personal wealth. Elsewhere, there are big brands like the New York Times and Forbes (hey, that’s me) in the gaming space, covering the massive industry that makes it difficult for smaller sites to compete. But even there, there are problems. The Washington Post recently eliminated almost its entire playing area, reduced to more or less one guy (hi Gene).
There’s also the public war on video game journalists, waged in part through the “anti-woke” mafia that believes progressive-leaning media outlets are disappearing because of supposedly militant takeovers. And then there are console fans who constantly destroy the media for allegedly favoring one curtain or another, or punishing them for their “inconsistent opinions” among dozens of writers with varying views. In short, when it comes to layoffs and the general destruction of the industry, the reaction from players is disheartening “well, they deserve it. “
Almost all of this is bad news. Many of the former big names in the industry have turned to PR, the progression of the game itself, or created their own independent entities such as Kinda Funny Games or the recently created Aftermath. Others have learned that you yourself want to be a “brand” with a large social media presence, a paid newsletter, or your own YouTube/Twitch area to attract constant attention (which is necessarily what I’ve been doing in the last few years in particular).
It’s hard to see this improving. I sympathize with my colleagues who go through this sort of thing pretty much every month right now, and I feel like the recent push from Google AI in particular is the Mad Max dust typhoon on the horizon about to take each and every one of us. passod. May God help us all.
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