There has been a lot of upheaval in the gaming media recently. Even though they made hundreds of millions of dollars last year, Tencent recently laid off a large portion of the Fanbyte team, G4TV laid off a number of employees, and Future Publishing laid off a large number of writers and editors. Fandom, the wiki hosting firm, just acquired industry giants including GameSpot, Metacritic, and Giant Bomb, so we break the news with some hesitation.
The transaction, which Variety estimates to be worth around $50 million, would allow Fandom, which was created by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, to expand into the gaming media industry while maintaining its well-established wiki-based company.
If that number is accurate, however, it indicates a massive decline in value relative to 2020, when Red Ventures paid $500 million to acquire CNET from ViacomCBS.
GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News, and Comic Vine are just some of the well-known magazines that Fandom has announced it has bought from Red Ventures.
These sites have changed hands several times over the years, first to CNET and then to CBS in the last decade. There will soon be another rebranding, this time to the unexpected name of Fandom, and everyone involved is preparing for it.
For those of us who still think of it as Wikia, “fandom” is the place we go when we need to look up information on a long-forgotten TV show or remember the name of a planet from a Star Wars book we read as a kid.
It has been publishing carefully selected news and blogs in recent years, and it now seems to be preparing for a global takeover. Screen Junkies was acquired by Fandom in 2018, and last year, video game producer Focus Multimedia was acquired by Fandom, along with its authorized key distributor Fanatical (formerly known as Bundle Stars).
But nothing has been as monumental as today’s news. When contacted by Kotaku, Fandom stated, “Gaming is one of our largest audiences at Fandom.”
Over one hundred and fifteen million gamers use our platform, which hosts more than one hundred thousand gaming groups and seventeen million pages of content. If we integrate GameSpot and the other gaming sites into our existing library of gaming reference information, we will be able to better serve gaming aficionados.
Fandom did not answer our inquiries about possible layoffs and mergers as a result of the acquisition.