The company that owns IGN now also owns the UK Gamer Network and sites like GamesIndustry.biz and Dicebreaker.
There is one simple reason why major acquisitions should never be celebrated: consolidation. There are dozens of reasons why larger companies gobbling up smaller ones are bad for consumers, but the reason they're bad for employees is that they always lead to layoffs, due to duplication of effort and the immediate need to cut costs after the purchase itself .
We recently saw that at Xbox and Bethesda and now it's happened almost immediately with IGN's acquisition of the Gamer Network website group, which includes influential sites like Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz, Rock Paper Shotgun, and VG247.
The network has been for sale for some time, after previous owner ReedPop decided he no longer wanted to operate it. That is why a number of senior employees have left the various branches in recent months, but many others have lost their jobs today.
The Gamer Network includes Eurogamer (with six different language versions), Rock Paper Shotgun, VG247, GamesIndustry.biz and Dicebreaker. It also owns shares in Hookshot, which operates Nintendo Life, Push Square, Pure Xbox and Time Extension; Outside Xbox; and digital foundry.
That means IGN won't directly own Digital Foundry, but will likely still manage their content through Eurogamer. VGC is also contracted as part of Gamer Network, but is privately owned and not part of the sale.
Gamer Network was a family-owned business until 2018, when they were sold to ReedPop. As many predicted at the time, ReedPop was only really interested in live events like EGX and MCM and recently announced that its website business was up for sale.
Apart from GamesIndustry.bizMost sites make no mention of the acquisition at the time of writing, but reports are currently emerging of immediate layoffs, including GamesIndustry.biz Editor-in-Chief Brendan Sinclair and Rock Paper Shotgun Deputy Editor-in-Chief Alice Bell.
It is currently unclear how much IGN paid for the sites and exactly how many people will be laid off as a result of the acquisition.
All of this is a sadly familiar story in the games industry at the moment, with this news radically changing the media landscape in Britain for video games, with only a handful of dedicated sites now remaining outside the control of US companies.
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