shacknews posts

Soon, you might be able to own a piece of GameFly. The video game mail subscription service and parent company of the well know gaming news web site Shacknews has decided to file for an IPO, according to PaidContent.org. Going public is expected to raise $50 million for GameFly which it plans to use for "working capital and sales-and-marketing activities." The company generated $4 million in profit in its last 2009 fiscal year and has made $2.97 million in profits in the six month period ending September 30, 2009.

The company was founded in 2002 and like the highly popular movie-based company Nexflix GameFly lets its subscribers pay a monthly fee to have unlimited console game rentals sent via the mail service. In 2009 GameFly began expanding beyond its main business as it bought the Shacknews and FileShack web sites.

It's looking like the video game mail order rental service GameFly is looking to the future and expanding into more and more areas. Earlier this year the company made the surprise announcement that they were acquiring the popular gaming news web site Shacknews and its associated file download site Fileshack. Now Shacknews is reporting that GameFly has recruited now former 1Up.com editor Garnett Lee to become GameFly's new editorial director.

Lee will supervise all of GameFly's editorial based web sites including Shacknews, FileShack and a number of other sites that GameFly has either acquired or launched on their own. That includes their casual gaming cite Ponged, their game cheat code site Cheat Freak and their social gaming answer site Gameanswers.com. Lee will write a weekly column for Shacknews and also develop a new podcast.

The gaming news community got a shock a few weeks ago when it was announced that Gamefly had purchased the long time independent gaming news web site Shacknews. It was an even bigger surprise when it was later learned that the founder of the site, Steve Gibson, had decided to leave the day-to-day job on working on the site.

Now it looks like Gibson has found a new gig working in the game industry itself. An update on the Gearbox Software community site shows a new listing of "Steve G" as Gearbox's marketing director. Gibson himself mentions his new job in a recent Shacknews forum post. He states that his new gig is "mostly what you would expect, short term is helping out on marketing and longer term really fun stuff is business development side." We wish him the best in his new endevor.

Just a few weeks after UGO bought out 1Up.com, a somewhat smaller but similar game media deal was announced on Tuesday night. Gamefly, best known for their console rental business, bought out popular indie game site Shacknews and its corresponding file site FileShack. Big Download chatted with Gamefly co-founder Sean Spector on the phone briefly today to talk about the purchase.

Believe it or not this is not Gamefly's first such deal to purchase a gaming content site. Most people may not be aware of this, but Spector told us that the company also owns and operates three cheat code web sites (CheatFreak.com, ConsoleCheatCodes.com, and CheatServer.com) along with a free casual game site (Ponged.com). However this is by far the most high profile deal that Gamefly has made in this space. Spector told us that they initially approached Shacknews founder and owner Steve Gibson "about six months ago" to first discuss the acquisition.

As to why Gibson himself is not staying on board at Shacknews, Spector told us, "He's been running the site for a long time and he wanted a more normal life," Spector said that while Gibson won't be working on the day-to-day operations at Shacknews anymore, he will still have some kind of involvement in the site with Spector saying, "He and I have become friends,". Another co-founder, Maarten Goldstein, will stick around in some capacity for now. The other two editorial writers for the site, Nick Breckon and Chris Faylor are now, 'full employees of Gamefly," according to Spector. Spector said that other unnamed members of the Gamefly team will be in overall charge of actually running the site.

Spector said Shacknews, which includes a huge community that generates thousands of comments a day, will remain the same, saying, "We don't want to change the site in a meaningful way," However he does see the possibility of Shacknews' content expanding its reach, including syndicating its news to other sites including Gamefly.com. And what about buying other such game content sites? Spector told us, "There might be others. There's nothing I can talk about at this time."

It's been a busy day for news and it's been capped by the surprise announcement of the acquisition of a well known game news and file site. Shacknews has announced that it has been bought by the console game rental service Gamefly. The deal also includes the Fileshack file download site. Specific financial terms were not disclosed.

Shacknews was launched in 1995 by Dallas-based Steve Gibson and was at first just a fan site called sCary's Quakeholio. It was originally launched as a site devoted mostly to coverage of id Software's FPS Quake. The name of the site later changed to Shugashack before setting on its current title. It also slowly expanded its news coverage to include the entire game industry. The company launched their Fileshack service in 2002.

Shacknews' announcement of the Gamefly acquisition added that the deal was not made because Shacknews was dealing with any financial problems. Gibson is quoted as saying it would allow the site to have "much needed resources to expand into new and exciting areas that would not otherwise be possible." Gamefly co-founder Sean Spector pledged not to "turn the site into something else," adding, "We purchased Shacknews because it's a great site."

Update: In an article on Forbes.com on the new Shacknews-Gamefly deal it was revealed that Gibson will actually be leaving Shacknews. Gibson was not interviewed for the article and there's no word on what he will be doing next. Another co-founder, Maarten Goldstein, will remain on the site "for at least the short term." but that the rest of the editorial team will remain. The article speculates that Gamefly might have purchased Shacknews and Fileshack to look to the future where they might enter the digital download business but Gamefly exec Sean Spector dismissed this, saying, "...there's a large need for quality content. Shacknews fills that need, delivering great news and features and a vibrant community. We can leverage a lot of things we have internally, like our infrastructure and resources, and help expand it."

Demiurge has made itself out to be one of those studios you can depend on. If you have a huge, expensive, killer-IP, AAA title, and you need some extra hands -- Demiurge is the company to call. But since it's (so far) produced little stand-alone, original content, its workers are unsung heroes of the gaming industry. No longer!

In the wake of the release of Mass Effect for the PC (a port on which Demiurge did much of the work), Shacknews interviewed head honcho Al Reed, asking him about the company's past, present, and future. It's a great read if you want an inside look at the video game industry.

Notably, Reed revealed which PC improvements in Mass Effect were invented by Demiurge rather than BioWare -- configurable hotbar buttons and individual squad mate commands. He lamented the piracy situation, saying "I don't know what the right solution is ... I wish someone did!" Finally, he laid out his company's future plans, which finally include some original, in-house games.

Deus Ex, an esteemed classic of the first-person-shooter genre, will join Psychonauts and Thief: Deadly Shadows on GameTap's list of free-to-play games next week. Even though it uses the original Unreal engine, Deus Ex has aged surprisingly well. It stands next to System Shock 2 as one of the deepest and most praised shooters in PC gaming.

GameTap offers a vast library of old to semi-recent games, which can be downloaded and played by members. Most of those games are only available to paid subscribers, but every once in a while a good one is made free for a while to promote the service. It used to offer gaming news and other editorial content, but that division was just shut down.

This week, new games available to subscribers include Ducati World Championship, Tortugo Pirates of the New World, and Brian Lara Cricket 2007. Ah, well; they can't be awesome every week.

Valve Software's Doug Lombardi revealed in the second half of a two part interview with Shacknews (in part one he declared PC gaming alive and well) that the studio hopes to ship its co-op, zombie-themed, survival horror FPS Left 4 Dead sometime in November of this year.

Left 4 Dead is Valve's big release this year, and the company hopes that it will do the same thing for co-op multi-player gaming that Counter Strike did for competitive play. The audience is clearly there; zombie-themed, user-created Half-Life 2 mods like Zombie Master and Zombie Panic are among the most popular on Steam.

Lombardi also suggested that gamers will get to play the full version of Left 4 Dead free for a whole weekend, and that a demo is probably coming as well. He wasn't able to confirm a time-frame for either of those, though.