Tag Archives: 1up

Ziff-Davis recently purchased IGN and all its properties, which includes 1up, GameSpy and UGO, and today they’ve set about restructuring the whole place, leaving behind many casualties.
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News Corp. is in the process of closing a deal with Ziff Davis over the sale of IGN, according to All Things Digital.

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It’s always sad to see our fellow members  of the press leave their respective outlets, and today is no exception. More »

GameSpy has gone live with the first part of a 101 Free Games of 2012 feature. RPG, adventure and strategy games are offered in this initial round up, with puzzle and arcade due tomorrow; sidescrollers, platformers, versus battlers and WTF will follow. It’s also got links to previous year’s offerings, courtesy of recently-adopted sister site 1UP, resulting in a whopping number of freebies. Go forth and enjoy; browser, Mac, PC and even Linux titles are yours for the taking. Your productivity is sure to suffer as a result, but in the best way.

It’s being reported that both Future’s US arm and IGN have been hit with lay-offs. At least five people have been let go from Future due to the company reorganising its games and technology groups, according to Folio. At IGN, least four staffers there have been let go, according to Gama, with UGO.com also affected. 1UP.com, however, has not.

All the best to those affected.

News Corporation has officially announced its acquisition of Hearst’s UGO Entertainment.

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The beautiful snowflakes of games media just got a tiny bit less diverse. IGN has apparently snapped up UGO Networks, the parent company of 1UP, amid talk the former is set to split from its own parent, News Corp.

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1UP and six of the top Street Fighter IV players from Northern and Southern California had a match over at the Hearst offices last night.

They live-streamed it, have no fear if you missed out. It’ll be posted on GameVideos come Monday.

The top Street Fighter IV players shared their match and characters strategies, and chatted a bit about the “fighting game scene”.

Be sure to watch this link for more information.

After news broke yesterday of Ziff Davies quitting the industry for good, and 1UP being bought out by UGO amid a round of redundancies, J Moses, CEO of the UGO Entertainment told MTV that he feels the criticism of UGOs treatment of 1UP and its staff is unfounded.

“We really have largely left it alone,” said Moses when questioned.

“We kept, we believe, the core editorial group that can continue to do great things. What we’re adding is 1up.com as an editorial site that will sit on top of the UGO publishing site. And we kept who we believe are the critical people who can make up a great site.”

Moses goes on to say that EGMs closure had “absolutely nothing to do with UGO.”

Full thing through the link.

It emerged last night that industry veteran Ziff Davis Media and Publishing has quit the business altogether, whilst magazine EGM has closed, and website 1UP sold has been to UGO.

“The transaction allows us to pay down debt and shift our full focus to our core PCMag Digital Network business,” Ziff Davis CEO Jason Young said.

“We thank our 1UP team members for their contributions and wish them the best of success into the future.”

Rumours of an UGO buyout broke early December and it has now become a reality as reports are that dozens of staff members have been laid off as a consequence.

EGM had been in circulation for 20 years.

By Mike Bowden

This Joystiq report claims that UGO is in “very advanced talks” to buy many of Ziff Davis’s games sites, including 1UP, GameVideos and MyCheats.

1UP Network editorial staff were reportedly informed of the potential sale in a meeting on Tuesday. UGO execs will reportedly be flying out to meet with the Ziff staff as soon as today.

If that’s true, it means it’s happened.

EGM and FileFront are not thought to be included in the deal. That report suggests EGM may be on its last issue.

UGO Entertainment started off in 1997 as Unified Gamers Online and currently attracts over 35 million unique monthly visitors to its general lifestyle portal at UGO.com.

Ziff’s openly struggled with its gaming properties in the past year, mulling plans for an online-only version of EGM and seeing some high profile departures.

More through there.

1UP’s posting a new Resident Evil 5 trailer from Tokyo Game Show this evening, releasing the footage at 5pm PST, or 1am BST.

“While we don’t want to give away too many details before the video is up, trust when we say that Resident Evil fans will want to be paying attention, as this includes lots of footage from new areas in the game and some revealing story elements,” says the site.

We’ll let you know when it’s up.

According to this 1UP page, the site’s giving away 2,000 LittleBigPlanet beta keys next week.

Details are going to be posted here on Monday, so if you didn’t get one already you know where to look next.

Seems there was a bit of a scuffle overnight regarding an id Rage talk at Austin GDC. A 1UP story reported that:

id Software lead designer Tim Willits the developer is cutting back on the amount of content they would have liked to include in their upcoming shooter Rage. The main reason for limiting the game’s content is the Xbox 360′s limited disc storage, which allows about six to eight GB of data.

“The PC is limitless in the amount of data you can put on it,” said Willits. “The PS3 has about 25GB. But the Xbox 360 roughly has 6 to 8 GB of data. We’re hoping we can squeeze the game down to two discs for the 360 version.”

According to Willits, the game was supposed to feature several wastelands for the player to explore. Because of the limitations of the Xbox 360′s media, they had to cut down the wastelands to only two, which are themselves split into multiple instances. These changes have been made across all versions of Rage, not just the 360 port.

Willits fired back angrily after the story went web-wide, telling Shacknews, “There was NO CONTENT removed from RAGE because of the 360–NONE AT ALL. We feel the 360 is a great platform and will provide a fantastic Rage experience.”

When in doubt, WRITE IN CAPITALS. Follow the links for more.

1UP will post the first video of Gears of War 2 gameplay tomorrow, the site’s assured.

1UP’s GameVideos will be the very first place online you’ll be able to see the footage, and we’ll be posting it in all of its HD glory. And trust us when we say you’re going to be blown away. So this Friday, go to dinner, go to the movies, or go play some GTA IV – but whatever you do, make sure you check back here at 10:30 p.m. PST for the exclusive first Gears of War 2 video.

For all the Euros in the audience, that’s 6.30am BST or 7.30am CET. Prove your dedication by getting up in the middle of the night to watch a videogame. You may as well.

US site 1UP has now switched over to a letter-based review system, a change that’s led to some fairly spectacular confusion this morning.

Ed boss Dan Hsu said there wouldn’t be a score-to-letter conversion chart published “because we want our readers to go with our new scoring system and not be constantly translating the new letters back to our old scores.” Sensible.

Joystiq decided to do one anyway and all hell’s broken loose, with 1UP VP Simon Cox getting involved. Check out the comments at the bottom of the story.

Just score out of 10, review sites. Then you don’t have to fight teh internets.

According to this, US site 1UP – one of the major American online publications – is to change its scoring system from numbers to letters, and will instead give games a rating from A+ to F, as opposed to scoring out of 10.

“1UP Network is making changes with its game scoring system on 1UP.com, in EGM and in GFW,” said newly appointed editor-in-chief, James Mielke. “Games will be graded on a letter scale, A+ to F, rather than a numerical scale. All previously scored games on 1UP.com will also be converted to the new letter scale. Look out for these changes in March on 1UP.com, in the April issue of EGM and in the April/May issue of GFW.”

The news comes on top of a significant shuffle at the site, a move-around that gave Mielke his job.

“1UP Network announced today a reorganization within its editorial department, effective as of Feb. 1,” a statement said. “In a continued mission to provide gamers with the most comprehensive, unparalleled level of content, 1UP Network has created a unique structure to connect all of its acclaimed online and print properties, delivering ’360-degree’ coverage and reader experiences.

“All 1UP Network editors will now be under one main editorial umbrella, split into to three primary areas — ‘Videogames,’ ‘PC Games,’ and ‘Video.’ By doing this, all editors will be responsible for either ‘videogames’ or ‘PC games’ content, filtering into both online and print properties, including EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly), GFW (Games for Windows: The Official Magazine), 1UP.com, MyCheats.com, GameVideos.com, Gametab.com, and FileFront.com.”

Go and see. Knock yourself out. Drown in an orgy of Nintendo spunkery. Brawl is currently destroying the internet, smacking GoNintendo’s servers yesterday as the masses flooded to see pictures of Nintendo characters hitting each other. 1up’s the first western site to actually have a copy, so expect even more movies of Kid Icarus and Kirby twatting each other with mallets in the coming week.