Ziff-Davis shuts down 1UP, GameSpy as part of restructuring effort

Shawn Knight

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Ziff-Davis, owner of IGN Entertainment, recently announced they will be closing three very popular video game websites in their network: 1UP, GameSpy and UGO. The decision is also leaving a number of people looking elsewhere for employment as the company says it just isn’t feasible to run multiple sites focused on video game content given the state of the market and the economy.

Former 1UP editor-in-chief Jeremy Parish said the decision comes as a huge disappointment as he has invested nearly 10 years of his life in the website. He said he was proud to have been a part of something so much larger than himself and noted that there was so much that needed to be archived in case someone did decide to pull the plug on the servers.

ign layoffs goodbye 1up gamespy layoffs ign

That last bit is in reference to an official statement that said no timeline was given for 1UP’s closure or if its servers would continue to run indefinitely.

A similar message on GameSpy highlighted the fact that the site has been online for 14 years. The message quickly dispelled the notion that the site was closing down because PC gaming is no longer important. Instead, it all boils down to a “business thing” which is not easy to explain or understand unless you are crunching numbers and paying bills.

We are told that some of the staff from the sites Ziff-Davis decided to shutter will be moving over to work as contributors at IGN.

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I think I've visited 1Up about five times in its entire existence. I have never even been on GameSpy. While that's anecdotal I'm pretty sure Ziff-Davis was wondering why it was redundantly covering the video game industry through three different sites especially when IGN is the number one video game website at this moment and the other two did not even bring in probably a third of IGN's traffic.
 
Kinda curious though what will happen with games, that run through GameSpy as part of their online service? I'm sure not many games really do now, but that's going to likely upset some people. There's other services out there to handle it, but the fact of needing a third party because of closure?

Oh well.. nothing much we can really do.
 
Unfortunately, the video game industry is currently undergoing some difficult times, and those who've historically participated in the industry for the "easy money" are now having to take a hard look at their bottom line. THQ and Atari are just a few recent examples of companies who have "lost their way" in terms of providing content that gamers couldn't live without...and IMO, 1UP.com and GameSpy have been in this same category ever since they were acquired by ZD. They sold themselves to a parent company that didn't have any desire to utilize their content beyond cranking out ad revenues. They had become so bloated with ads that it made it almost impossible to visit those sites.

Regarding BlueDrake's comment...either someone will buy their service from ZD or the service will cease to exist all-together. I'm skeptical that it has the same value it once had, given platforms like Steam, so I'm thinking it's probably gone for good...but I could be wrong on this...

Anyhow, I'm hopeful that this new site called Gamacy.com will be able to infuse some "life" into this environment when it goes live later this year. The golden age of video games may be over, but that doesn't mean we can't relive it. I mean...why else did we collect those 1-UPs? ;)

Fare-thee-well, GameSpy and 1UP.com. Thanks for the memories!
 
Owning multiple brands that compete against each other only works if the products being marketed have real distinction. Cars, clothes, canned soup - hard goods can address specific markets and consumers. The only way you can do this with news and information is by spinning or framing it, usually to serve an agenda. That's not what most gamers want to see. They want in-depth reviews, preferably with multiple viewpoints. They want access to gaming files without having to jump through a lot of hoops. They want forums where they don't have to worry about moderators abusing their power. And they would prefer to get all of this from a single site. Maybe ZD will take advantage of this restructuring and turn one of their gaming outlets into a real go-to destination. Certainly they'll have staff to spare, so there's no excuse for being short on manpower.
 
That is TERRIBLE news! Gamespy was the best place to find mods and patch downloads, guides, info and more for tons of popular games (Planet [fill in blank], eg: PlanetQuake, PlanetDoom, PlanetDuke).
The game matchmaking service was nice when it first came out but became wayyyyyy too overcrowded with crap servers and players with dummy accounts, especially when they started splitting the client to a paid version as well.
 
As long as IGN maybe embeds Gamespies great stuff on its own main site, then this may not be that bad. But I guess with the site goes the employees
 
Ravik
From what I've been using, there's Game Ranger for those games you can't be without. I've seen countless Borderlands and such, there's a ton of people there so I'm using that instead. Just I'm kinda sad really.. because those services are key to some games properly functioning.

I'm looking to the future and hoping things go well. There's plenty of things on those sites, that people will miss when they close down.
 
Really sucks to see Gamespy go. Since they moved to PC only, they've done a really good job of looking at games under their reviews and especially their Port Authority columns, giving players a heads up on the quality of multi-platform games released for PC.

Hopefully there's a site somewhere else that does something similar that I can look at now. :(
 
That's a shame to see Gamespy get the axe. Its been around a long time. I remember when you had to install Gamespy to play certain PC games online.
 
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