News Corp. Buys Online Game Business

[stanchat]

IGN (http://www.ign.com/) was bought for $650 million in cash. Wow!!

Read Article (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050908/ap_on_bi_ge/news_corp__ign_entertainment)

[Omega]

I stopped visiting that site, and gamespot.com, many years ago after they added constant ads that needed to be clicked before you got to their 'content' which was still 80% ads as well.

Although, on the other hand,

IGN is a network of online video games and game-related Web sites that includes IGN.com, GameSpy, GameSpy Arena, FilePlanet, TeamXbox, 3D Gamers, Direct2Drive, and GameStats.com. IGN also owns two movie-related sites, IGN FilmForce and Rotten Tomatoes, and a male lifestyle site, AskMen.com.

And I think almost every single male has visited at least one of those sites. AskMen.com articles were regularly linked from the MSN.com homepage at one point, and Rotten Tomatoes is the most famous movie review site. File Plant--the first to require payment for downloads business model. 3D Gamers and GameStats.com are two that I never visit but have heard of. GameSpy is an interesting case. I forget who owned GameSpy at first, but then they bought MPlayer and a bunch of other stuff and called it GameSpy Arcade. MPlayer was the best place to play online poker at the time, and it even had voice chat and supported many casual (card) and non-casual games.

[DFG]

With the addition of IGN, News Corp. said in a statement that its U.S. Web traffic will increase to nearly 70 million unique monthly users

The numbers surprised me as being low...heck, ArcadeTown gets more than that! ;)

[Anthony Flack]

Hey Brian, I'll give you $700 million for ArcadeTown.

[BinaryMoon]

The numbers surprised me as being low...heck, ArcadeTown gets more than that!

No it doesn't!

Miniclip gets 21 Million uniques and the Alexa traffic ranking (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=medium&y=r&url=www.miniclip.com) shows Arcadetown is considerably smaller. In fact I've just looked it up on Media Metrics and that says 2.7million uniques - 70 Million is incredibly high.

[digriz]

Hey Brian, I'll give you $700 million for ArcadeTown.

I bid $800 million. Will you take a post dated cheque? :D

Sorry, just being childish now.

[DFG]

Binary, it was a joke, hence the winking smile ;)

I bid $2 billion!

[arcadetown]

Sold, sold, and sold! ;)

Interesting story, that's a huge amount of cash for IGN. News Corp is getting serious, also recently bought Intermix (grab.com, myspace.com, etc) for $580 mil. Know a few guys there, met the IMIX CEO back when he was CEO of Superdudes.net. For a year's work figure he's made a nice barrel of cash. So @ $700 mil for less than 70k uniques/mo, that values my 3 mil uniques at alteast $30 mil. Sold again!

Sometimes I feel like Charlie Brown, while everyone else gets tons of great candy while trick or treating, all I got was a rock.

[Omega]

So, just write to them. Maybe they'll compromise at 20 mill. LOL.

Or, you could start calling yourself the largest independently owned online game community, if it's true.

[arcadetown]

Call me Emilio Estevez if it gets me $20 mil... shoot call me Janet Jackson! Nuts just got another rock :rolleyes:

[Nexic]

70 million uniques? Bah even I get 120 million!

[Robert Cummings]

It all adds up to my prediction that retail will dominate internet sales and you, the indies, will be squeezed right out in no time.

Therefore get your cash while you can :)

It's the end of the world.

[Jay_Kyburz]

Hey Robert, I don't know if you were joking or not but these mega companies will never be able to squeeze the indies off the net.

At retail its possible because of the limited channel. The physical space on the shelf and the costs of getting good to the consumer.

The net will never have these problems.

[Hamumu]

Man, it's killing me... is nobody going to make a "fair and balanced" joke?!

[DFG]

Mega companies can't even compete with jr. seo's right now for rank let alone push them out of the space. The big machine turns too slow, is too inefficient, has too many employees that just don't care - the Internet is a great place for the little guy.

[Abscissa]

IGN is a network of online video games and game-related Web sites that includes IGN.com, GameSpy, GameSpy Arena, FilePlanet, TeamXbox, 3D Gamers, Direct2Drive, and GameStats.com. IGN also owns two movie-related sites, IGN FilmForce and Rotten Tomatoes, and a male lifestyle site, AskMen.com.
Hmm, that explains why FilePlanet and 3DGamers have always annoyed me.