IGN Acquired by Ziff Davis
ign.comNearly all the talent at 1UP left to work in the games industry long ago, but Jeremy Parish is still there and has been there throughout all the selling and buying. Must be odd for him to be back at Ziff again.
This is a great example of a cyclical industry. Ziff-Davis buys 1UP and other sites and then hits a wall with its debt load. After the bankruptcy, liquidates and sells 1UP to UGO. UGO is sold to IGN/News Corp. Ziff Davis brand is recapitalized without the debt, buys 1UP and the rest back. The long standing brands never really die, they are just recycled.
Actually, most media brands in the games industry are long dead and were left there to rot, without the assets even being sold. Look at EGM, GamePro, Computer Gaming World, Official Xbox Magazine.
Hopefully, none of these acquired sites will be shit canned, but sadly, Ziff is well known for destroying things.
EGM, CGW, XBoxNation (and maybe a few others) were rolled into 1up.com. I worked on the original 1UP.com site in NYC (classic ASP and Vignette!) prior to it being moved out to San Fran.
Yeah... "Rolled Up."
You mean Scooter and Sam? Cause that's the only thing I can think of that made the transition from magazine to 1up. I worked there too... They kept Scooter and Sam. Sam eventually left anyway.
CGW 'changed its name' to Games for Windows. I seem to remember many of the writers/editors staying on for a bit, then it just sort of fizzled out.
Yay, a company that quite deliberately spams HN bought another website. Can't wait to see the same handful of accounts submitting ign.com alongside extremetech, pcmag and geek!
I can't recall the last time I saw an IGN story here, and I visit this site a few times a day.
The parent is referring to other sites, perhaps most notably ExtremeTech, that Ziff Davis owns often (appear to) spam HN.
Fair enough. I haven't noticed submissions from them either. Then again, I just browser the first 2 pages and hardly dig into the new submissions area.
Ziff Davis had/has a half a dozen employee shill accounts at different times for extremetech.com, geek.com and pcmag.com.
This is a great illustration another HN user (DanBC) put together:
They have almost no natural submissions to HN.
To be honest, those accounts in those pics don't convince me of anything. Most of the frequent posters from those domains post plenty of other links to other sites. They were created years apart. Two of them seem to post extremetech.com and/or geek.com exclusively, but posts are 5-10 days apart.
Isn't it a lot more likely that these are simply people who happen to read enough of those particular sites and post to HN to turn up on in a chart like this?
There's not enough data points to point to any kind of concerted effort by these sites over the span of years.
And even _if_ that were the case. Suppose someone affiliated with these sites is posting 1-2 links a week, that's hardly flooding the system. There's still the voting system, right? Good articles float towards the top. The new submissions page isn't jam packed with dozens of articles a day from these sites, is it?
ukdm and russellholly are this guy: https://plus.google.com/106631699076927387965
http://www.geek.com/users/rholly/
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=russellholly
mrsebastian is this guy:
http://www.extremetech.com/author/santhony
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mrsebastian
maxko87 is an unknown who ran an autosubmitter for two sites one of which happened to be extremetech, till he got hellbanned:
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=maxko87
adeelarshad82 is their social media marketing guy:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/adeelarshad82
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82
Then there's these guys who really love ziff davis properties:
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=memoryfailure
And this guy who just likes them a lot of the time, he may just be a regular karma whore if that is a real thing.
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=evo_9
That accounts for almost all Ziff Davis submissions.
IIRC, IGN has previously been banned from reddit for malicious upvoting, so I guess they suit each other.
OP here, I'd just like to point out I'm a real person who submitted the article on my own volition.
Don't worry, 9/10 reviews are still available for the bargain price of one pre-release copy of the game.