ziff-davis posts

When word got out that the former owner of Electronic Gaming Monthly, Steve Harris, had bought back the rights to the long running print magazine from Ziff Davis (the company shut down the mag last December), folks wondered who else might be involved in the mag's relaunch. As it turns out, Harris has done the expected and brought back two members of the magazine's former editorial staff to join the new version.

This week, EGM announced that the magazine's former Editor-in-Chief Dan Hsu and its Reviews Editor Demian Linn will be participating in its relaunch, which will include a print magazine, a web site and what they are calling a "digital magazine". According to the press release the duo will be "overseeing the reporting and writing of news and other content" for the EGM relaunch. Hsu and Linn are currently the co-founders of the gaming web site Bitmob.com but their new site will be sticking around even as the two work on the new EGM. There's still no word on when we can expect to read the first issue.

A few weeks ago, it was revealed that Steve Harris, the original founder of Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine, had bought the rights to the property from Ziff Davis, who shut down the magazine last December along with selling the 1Up.com web site. So what will the new EGM be like? In a new interview over at the Publishing Executive web site, Harris tries to describe his vision for the new version.

He states, "First and foremost, we're planning to incorporate digital content within the magazine. This includes professionally-produced video, audio and other types of content." When asked how this will be accomplished he states, "The digital content will be accessible by some directly from the pages of the magazine while other content will be delivered via a digital device included with each issue." Uh-huh. That almost sounds like one of those things we saw in Minority Report. Hopefully this is a real goal and not just a lot of hype.

The troubles at technology media company Ziff Davis are apparently still continuing. This week it was revealed that the company is shutting down its popular ExtremeTech.com web site. The PC hardware site had quite a bit of PC gaming coverage and had a solid list of writer-editors including Loyd Case, Jason Cross, Joel Durham, and others. According to a message post by Case at QuartertoThree.com all of those writers will soon be out of work as of June 26 as Ziff Davis will turn the site into a blog under their PCMag.com site. We know that the talented crew behind the site will land on its feet.

This is just the latest in the many cost-cutting efforts by the struggling Ziff Davis who sold off its 1Up.com gaming web network to UGO and sold off the FileFront.com site to its original creators. It also shut down its Electronic Gaming Monthly print magazine but its original owner recently announced plans to revive EGM in some capacity.

Earlier this year Ziff Davis announced they were going to shut down the Filefront web site. Instead the site's original owners came back, bought the site from Ziff Davis and kept it going. Now it appears that yet another Ziff Davis property might get the same treatment.

Electronic Gaming Monthly, the long running gaming magazine that Ziff Davis shut down last December, has had its assets bought by its original owner Steven Harris. Harris launched the magazine in 1988 and then sold it to Ziff Davis in 1996. Now Harris plans to relaunch EGM sometime in the second half of 2009. There's no word yet if Harris plans to recruit any of EGM'a editorial team to return but we are promised that more info on this deal will be announced at E3 next week.

Remember last week when the file download site FileFront would be shutting down this week? Yeah . . . about that. As it turns out the site has been saved at the last minute and will stay in operation. No, a huge company didn't swoop in to buy it out. As is turns out the site was saved by its original founders.

In a message on the site from the (unnamed) founding team, they announce that they have bought the site back from Ziff Davis who were going to shut it down due to "current economic conditions".Specific financial terms were not disclosed. The message states, "We look forward to improving FileFront and serving the gaming community for years to come."

Ziff Davis' final vestige of its game business is about to close its doors. FileFront, the popular game file download web site, has posted up word that it will shut down operations as of March 30. In a farewell message, the site blamed the "current economic conditions" as the reason for their shutdown.

Just a few years ago, Ziff Davis was one of the biggest companies in the US in terms of covering the game industry with several print magazines along with their 1Up.com game web site network. However the company hit a number of financial issues even before the current recession began and it declared bankruptcy in early 2008. It began shutting down its game magazines at first. In early January, Ziff Davis sold most of its 1Up.com web sites to the Hearst Corporation and its UGO subsidiary. FileFront, however, was not part of the UGO sale. It was kept by Ziff Davis with an internal memo saying the company "will determine the best ways to leverage the scale and functionality of this digital property to expand our business position." Apparently they were not able to do what they had planned.

With the demise of Ziff-Davis's game magazine business, including the shutdown of EGM, earlier this year, many have questioned the continued future of other game-oriented magazines. However George Jones, the Senior Vice-President and Executive Creative Director of GamePro Media says that on their side of things it's all good.

Biz GameDaily chatted with Jones due to the fact that the president/CEO of GamePro Media, along with its Senior VP of Publishing, have been revealed as departing the company for other ventures. However Jones said their depatures are just a "weird confluence of events that aren't related at all." Jones said that newsstand sales of GamePro's print magazine are "...selling through at a good clip – not like the heydays of the '90s but still really well on an issue-to-issue basis." He added, "I see all the numbers and there's no reason for us to worry right now."

GamePro Media also announced that Marci Yamaguchi Hughes, formerly the VP of sales for the now defunct Ziff-Davis game group, has joined up as GamePro Media's new executive vice president and general manager According to Jones she will take over the duties that were handled by the former President/CEO and VP of publishing. GamePro's staff will also create the official magazine for E3 2009 (both GamePro and the team behind organizing E3 are owned by IDG). GamePro Media also stated they plan to announce "several new initiatives launching later this year."

So why is Electronic Gaming Monthly, perhaps the most well known of the multi-platform game magazines, coming to an end? It's not its publisher Ziff Davis' fault nor is it the fault of UGO who bought Ziff Davis' 1Up.com network of sites but not EGM. No, the reason for the magazine's demise is..the game industry itself.

At least that's the reasoning of 1Up.com editoral director Sam Kennedy who told MTV Multiplayer's blog site, "The same companies begging for a cover of EGM - and [that] would love it when they got an article in it - were the same companies pulling advertising from the magazines."

Of course this begs the question of how long the other gaming magazines will last. Game Informer, the in-house mag of the Gamestop retail chain, would seem to be the safest bet for survival. However what is the fate of IDG's Gamepro or Future's PC Gamer and all of its official console magazines? 2009 may see one or more of these publications go the way of EGM, especially in this economy.

Technically the final print issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly is the one that's currently on newsstands (the one with the Wolverine game cover story). But before Ziff Davis decided to cancel the nearly 20 year old magazine (which reportedly still had over 500,000 subscribers per month) the staff had time to complete one more issue.

While that issue will never be mailed to subscribers or show up in your local supermarket magazine rack, it looks like you will get to see it in a slightly different form. Now former EGM editor-in-chief James Mielke posted up word on the making of that final issue and states that 1Up.com will in fact bring that final EGM edition online soon. Mielke states, "You will be able to read every hi-res page, ads and all (last time I checked at least) on 1UP, to see the beautiful job that crew did, even with the guillotine hanging over our heads every minute of the day." We can't wait...but we also wish it wasn't the final issue.

Even though rumors of the deal started weeks ago, the news that the 1Up.com gaming web site network from Ziff Davis was being sold to UGO hit the Internet like a freight train wreck Monday night. It got worse when news leaked out that a large number of the 1Up.com team had been laid off as a result. Today the wreckage was still being picked through on the Internet.

Former Ziff Davis employee (and former Games for Windows-Computer Gaming World magazine editor) Jeff Green got upset by some statements made by 1Up.com editorial director Sam Kennedy in his official statement on the deal. On his personal blog Green states, "You're not the same 1UP because you just lost a gigantic chunk of what made 1up 1up. It may go on, it may in fact produce great things, but it won't be the same. All that a company ever is is a mix of specific personalities. That's all it is. Period. When you remove people, it may go on, but it's never "the same." Saying it's the same is a disservice to all the people who just got canned."

Meanwhile Kennedy made an unofficial statement to the NEOGaf message board, admitting, " 1UP was a business that was losing money." He added, "But the reality of the market was that no company, including UGO, was willing to sustain 1UP as it was. And that includes Ziff Davis. I hate to to break it to you, but the sad fact was that there was little hope for 1UP to continue as it had been." Kennedy also expressed hope that some of the site's features, including the 1up.com, might continue in some form. He states, "I'm not saying everything will be back to "normal" as you knew it anytime soon, but I am saying there should be some good things to look forward to in the future."

Update: In a new chat with MTV Multiplayer, UGO's CEO J Moses defended his company's handling of the 1Up.com purchase, saying, "We have just hired 24 people At a time where all you read about is layoffs we have expanded UGO by 33 percent."