1UP Bought By UGO, EGM Going Out Of Print
Waking up this morning, my internets were ablaze with the fires of a corporate take-over afoot. To give you the situation in brief;
- Ziff Davis Media are crumbling as a business. Massive debt and a bankruptcy filing. They own a whole tonne of products, including the 1UP network and EGM.
- It was announced yesterday, after months of speculation, that the 1UP network would be sold to UGO Entertainment (Unified Gamers Online, later changed to Underground Online so they can peddle soft-core porn “expand their target audience”).
- EGM sadly had no such buyer and the Jan 09 issue will be its last.
- With UGO taking over 1UP came the unofficial announcements (via about a billion separate blogs and twitters) that around 30 of 1UP’s staff will be laid off. The popular 1UP show and 1UP Yours podcast are also apparently canned.
Whenever large companies merge/sell/make love, there is going to be a lot of commotion. What makes this so special is that a) there are huge communities of gamers washing around in the middle of all the mess, b) in the age of the twitter and the social news sites, all the messy details came out almost instantly and c) it fucking sucks.
For a few more details on what happened, as well as some very thoughtful opinion, I would recommend having a read of Niero’s post on Destructoid (Niero being the owner and co-founder of Dtoid, the largest independent gaming blog and community out there). Sam Kennedy, 1UP’s (still employed) editorial director has added his voice to the crowd over on NeoGAF (via GameZine).
Hopefully, once all the dust settles, 1UP will regroup and continue creating top quality content and legitimately good quality news. There is also hope that maybe UGO will figure out where they went wrong (hint: It was about the time in the “games” section you added a “girls” tab above the “games” tab). The thing that really blows is the loss of EGM, one of the few truly great gaming mags out there.
In the words of Bill O’Reilly; fucking thing sucks.
1UP’s announcement, UGO’s announcement, the official press release.
News Tags: 1up, controversy, corporation, Destructoid, EGM, sell-out, UGO
Next: Thank You For All The Years of Laughter and Insight EGM/1up
Previous: Once You Go HD, You Don’t Go Back
I know somebody who was devastated to find out 1up podcats hads been canned, pointed him to destructoids direction though, and this site.
Though its a shame when shit like this happens, even though I heard mixed opinions of 1up.
you know..
first GFW goes down.
then jeff green and sean elliot leave.
GFW Radio shuts down.
now 1up has kicked out shane and the rest of my favorite guys there.
i have so much anger and sadness. ive been reading EGM since i was like 14.
ugh.. this is going to be an interesting NGcast this week..
I fail to see the negativity in this post.
I fail.
I’m so frustrated by this. EGM and 1UP do games journalism right, and they get fucked over by their parent companies. Meanwhile, garbage like Game Informer is still surviving. At this point, I feel sorry for the few remaining good writers at 1UP (Jeremy Parish comes to mind) for having to deal with what will quickly become hollow portal to games sensationalism.
Definitely a sad day in the gaming journalism world :(
Also, I’m going to miss broken pixels quite a bit. Many of those episodes were quite funny.