Gamespy and IGN announce merger agreement
 

http://gamespyindustries.com/press/r...mber-ign.shtml

Saw this over a P-A and went to Gamespy to see if it was real... it is.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2003/20031205l.jpg

The two worst sites in the history of video gaming, together at last.

I thought Gamespy merged with IGN, not with the Gamefaq message boards?

OMFG teh gamefaq boadz pwn!@

I still like reading IGN.

Gamespy has always been shit (and Penny Arcade isn't a whole lot better, IMHO.)

I like both sites. Is there something wrong with me? :hscratch:

My biggest complaint about Gamespy, and I guess this is pretty inconsequential, is the "teasers" for reviews. You know, stuff like: "[title] is one of the holiday's most anticipated releases. Does it live up to expectations? Click here to find out." That approach always grates on my nerves for some reason. Teasers don't bug me so much as the uninformative "click here..." variety.

IGN sucks, I agree, but it's alot better then Gamespot which IMO has terrible reviews. I never really read anything from Gamespy.

I don't see what's so bad about IGN. I hate their insane amount of advertising, content limits, picture limits, and everything, but besides Gameforms and Gamefaqs, they are the only gamesite I care about.

Most people here I see are quite happy with "Cheap Rear End Gamer" and "Gamerankings.com", which to me are very sad and uninformative websites

That about sums it up.

OR

I hate a website where i have to wade through 45 flash ads just to read a damn article.

I hate those ads popping up when when i am reading an article, & i hate those "contine on to ____" pages with the huge ad.

I despise those too, but with pop-up and banner blockers, there are few ways to ensure that readers are looking at advertising. So unless we want to pay to read websites (which I would do for select ones), we have to spend the two seconds it takes to close the flash ads. Not much of a choice in today's still deflated advertising market.

(disclaimer: I work for a website with all of the annoying ad types talked about)

If you subscribe to ign you can turn all those ads off.

I could waste however much it costs to subscribe to IGN but i dont really see any reason why.

I get great info about games from message boards such as this one.

And to be honest, i dont really see how bombarding would be subscribers with a ton of ads is supposed to make people want to subscribe even more.

"If you pay money you can get rid of the ads" Well, i can do the same thing by just simply not going to IGN, which is what i currently do.

If IGN was as great as it once was then i might feel differently, but about two years ago the place went to crap and i have (tried) to avoid going there at all costs.

PA has a lot of nerve calling IGN "shit". Have they ever read their own stuff?

I subscribe to IGN. The draw for me isn't the reviews or whatever (charging for information is silly). I like the media that they have. The high-res videos (video reviews, head-to-heads, previews, dev commentaries, etc.) are great, and something you simply can't get anywhere for free. If someone isn't interested in that, I don't see a reason to subscribe. But I figure that for the cost of a magazine subscription, seeing videos of games is better than just reading about them.

I do wish they would tone down the ads for subscribers though. You can disable a lot of them, like the full screen splashes, but the flashing banners that are everywhere are super annoying. I use a banner blocker to remove them and make the site tolerable.

Honestly though, I don't know what Penny Arcade's problem is.

Sheesh i was just letting you know that subscribers don't have to deal with as many ads. Kind of like what dvdtalk is moving to - fewer ads for subscribers. Now whether you feel IGN ior dvdtalk for that matter is worth the cash for the content it is between you and your wallet. I really don't care ;) Just letting you know that is one of the perks of being an Insider.

I could not disagree more. Other than this board, they have the reviews I most look forward to reading.

You're comparing apples and oranges, PA is a blog run by two guys that like to write about video games and make web comics, they don't charge users. IGN is a news corporation which actually pays employees to write for them and charges subscription fees and whore advertising.

Anyway I'll also chime in and say that I also enjoy reading Gamespot's reviews, they seem to be more critical and tough than other sites. I usually wait for Gamespot's reviews on games I'm unsure of when a game gets mixed numbers. IGN Cube isn't that bad either as they are usually fairly tough, unlike the other sections of IGN.. I never visit Gamespy. If the content stays separate I suppose its fine. As much flak IGN gets I hope they'll stay around, you'll miss them when they are gone :).

edit: argh, grammar

I'm not angry, just pointing out why i dont care for IGN. IGN was great some years ago but when they did thier cutback on articles and staff the place went down the toilet. IGN just seems rather "me too" nowadays.

I do feel different about DVDTalk here, i have found out some great (and other times not so great) info but what i have saved by doing trades with members makes this place 10x more enjoyable and worthwhile.

And DVDTalk has never forced me to watch flash ads that made my computer crash. :) (this was some years and a computer ago)

IGN's web site brings my DSL connection to it's knees. The pages load slowly, eventually slowing to the point that nothing is loading. After that, I can't go anywhere else. Even Google will time out. If I close all browser windows and start over, everything is fine.

I've been an IGN subscriber for 2 years now, and it's my main source of gaming info. Gamefaqs is nice for walkthroughs, but, as silly as this is, it's awfully nice to have access to walkthroughs with screencaps. Access to the exclusive media and boards is great too. I have all the ads turned off, so I will admit that I don't know how bad it really is. My fiance is an avid Penny Arcade reader (and monetary supporter), so naturally he's anti IGN, but even still, he's using my account right now to access the walkthrough for Prince of Persia.

Speaking as someone who wrote for GB Station, a Game Boy site that prided itself on long-form, literate, tightly edited (is IGN content edited at all?) reviews, I have lots of reasons to hate IGN AND GameSpy. Back in the day, IGN made a lot of promises to us to get our content to fill out their then non-existent handheld section. In the end, all we got was one game apiece (there were three of us) for over one hundred reviews, editorials, and other pieces. They claimed our content as theirs, for a time not even giving us bylines, and treated us like second-class citizens when we covered E3 under their banner. We couldn’t even get a terminal to type up our reports in IGN's press center. After that experience we covered the show on our own the next two years and had a much better time. Eventually we threatened a lawsuit to get our content back and IGN relented, removing our stuff (or so we thought, as when I browsed around there recently I found a couple of my old GB reviews still posted there).

Then GameSpy came calling. This was just ahead of the tech meltdown in late 99, early 2000. They offered us $100,000 for our content, though most of it was in form of their private stock, which is, of course, worthless until it goes public (which it still has not). We negotiated for a long time. But at one point there was as much as $18,000 in cash on the table, split three ways. We should have taken it. But by the time we pulled the trigger, the bubble had burst and GameSpy wasn’t buying up sites anymore. They wouldn’t even return our phone calls. True, this was largely our fault, but they slowed up negotiations quite a bit and had equal share in letting the deal fall through.

Shortly after that we all moved on and got real jobs and GB Station faded away. I miss it sometimes. I still read IGN and even subscribe, but as one previous poster mentioned, I largely do so for the high-quality video and other media. The writing on the site is abysmal and really makes me long for something better…but it’s not there anymore.

You can't spell ignorant without IGN.