The latest news about big companies buying other big companies doesn’t involve Embracer or Tencent. Instead, it’s about Fandom, a for-profit wiki hosting service that covers news and information from a wide range of media. This acquisition seems to have surprised many people.
The Wall Street Journal, Fandom posted on Monday, October 3, that it had “acquired a portfolio of entertainment and gaming brands” for $55 million (paywall). The deal includes GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, and Metacritic, owned by Red Ventures. Red Ventures bought the portfolio from ViacomCBS, which had owned it before.
Metacritic is a website that collects review scores for games. It is known for giving games an average score, which game studios often use to measure a game’s success. Since the 1990s, GameFAQs has been one of the best places to find ASCII walkthroughs and answers to weird questions about puzzles and boss fights.
GameSpot is known for launching the careers of people like Greg Kasavin, who is now best known as a writer and creative director at Supergiant Games, and Jeff Gerstmann, who was fired from GameSpot in 2007 because of a bad review of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men that made publishers threaten to pull their ads from the site.
In 2008, Gerstmann and his former GameSpot editor, Ryan Davis, started the gaming website Giant Bomb. In 2012, GameSpot’s parent company, ViacomCBS, bought Giant Bomb as a combined gaming portfolio. This brought Gerstmann back into the fold, but ViacomCBS later sold the site to Red Ventures.
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Since the mass exodus of talent from Giant Bomb in the middle of 2021, rumors have been swirling around the show. This occurred when veteran ‘Bomb cast members Vinny Caravella, Alex Navarro, and Brad Shoemaker left at once to begin their project, Nextlander, after having been on Giant Bomb since the show’s inception. In 2022, Gerstmann himself decided to step away from the squad.
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In the post in which they made the announcement, Fandom discussed their intentions for the sites. These plans center on providing “immersive content to our partners, sponsors, and fans” and extending their “global fan platform for super-service entertainment and gaming lovers.”
- The new combined platform will drive engagement across every stage of the consumer journey – reference, community, trends, ratings, reviews, news and commerce.
- With the addition of these game, film and TV platforms, Fandom will expand its 360 programs for its advertising partners – including game publishers, studios and streaming services – and enhance the data and insights of FanDNA, Fandom’s proprietary data platform.
- In addition, the deal will boost Fandom’s affiliate and merchandising efforts, including increased revenue at Fanatical, its game merchandising business.
This purchase, which includes Comic Vine, Cord Cutters News, and TV Guide, is the latest in a long line of investments for Fandom. Screen Junkies, Gamepedia, D&D Beyond, and Focus Multimedia, came before this one.
Tell us in the comments what you think about these latest purchases.
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