In , the network launched a new homepage that consolidated the individual sites as system channels under the IGN brand.
The homepage exposed content from more than 30 different channels. In September, the newly spun-out standalone internet media company, changed its name to Snowball. At the same time, small entertainment website The Den merged into IGN and added non-gaming content to the growing network.
Snowball held an IPO in , but shed most of its other properties during the dot-com bubble. In June , IGN reported having 24,, unique visitors per month, with 4. IGN is ranked among the top most-visited websites according to Alexa.
Ultimately, News Corp. Financial details regarding the purchase were not revealed. GameStats includes a "GPM" Game Popularity Meter rating system which incorporates an average press score and average gamer score, as well as the number of page hits for the game. A member of the IGN staff writes a review for a game and gives it a score between 0.
The score is given according to the "individual aspects of a game, like presentation, graphics, sound, gameplay and lasting appeal. On August 3, , IGN announced that the site would be changing to a new scoring scale. Instead of a point scale, where games are scored in increments of 0. Under both systems, the maximum possible score a game can receive is The scoring change is not retroactive: all scores on reviews written before the change will remain the same.
This change also does not affect the scoring system for reader reviews. On September 13, , IGN revealed that as part of their new review format all future reviews would now follow a point scale again, but this time without using decimals, meaning a score of 8.
Unlike the previous conversion to the point scale, this latest scoring system change will be retroactive and all previous IGN review scores will be updated to follow the new system. However, despite the announcement, the article included a short addition, post release.
It stated that after much discussion, they have decided to retain the decimal point in all upcoming scores. In early , IGN introduced a new policy, in which a game's review score can be re-reviewed and improved, provided that continuous updates form a significant change in the game compared to how it was at launch.
Examples of games in which they are were re-reviewed were League of Legends and the pocket edition of Minecraft. In , Snowball. IGN Wrestling met its end in early , when many of the staff departed. Interviews with professional wrestling personalities and coverage of wrestling games has been folded into IGN Sports, currently headed by Jon Robinson.
IGN Sci-Fi: Largely dead since , this section of the site included movie news, comic book reviews, anime coverage and other associated items. But lazy gamers had taken to calling it the N64, so Imagine Media did, too.
Imagine's N The folks at Nintendo of America weren't happy about Imagine's infringement on their brand name. After some back-and-forth and an uncomfortable visit to Nintendo headquarters in Redmond, WA, by Perry, an agreement was reached, and the site changed its name to IGN It was the official beginning of IGN as a branded media property, and it happened just as the Internet craze was becoming white-hot.
What online pioneers had suspected since the middle of the decade - that the web was the future of media - was now taken as indelible fact by Wall Street, venture capitalists and your nightly news-watching grandma. Investors were throwing money at any company with a domain name, and Imagine was no exception. Not content to remain solely gaming-focused, Imagine started the female-centric Chick Click site whose offices were quickly moved away from those of the IGN editors for reasons too numerous to mention and started publishing entertainment content from its Den Daily Entertainment Network online property.
The Internet was where the money flowed, and the motto of the day among young online companies was "get big fast. In February of , Imagine spun its online division off into an entirely new company headed by Mark Jung, who had previously founded and lead an Internet security firm called Worldtalk Corp.
At first, the new company was branded with the apt if uninspired name Affiliation Networks. Within a matter of months, the name was changed to the more evocative - and eerily prescient - Snowball. The new name was meant to communicate momentum, dynamism and aggregation. The company's young, media-saturated employees groaned. Tal Blevins: "I was home sick that day, and I called Mark Jung at the office to ask him if he knew what that word meant in the vernacular," says Tal Blevins, now IGN's vice president of games content.
Along the way, investors had been pumping money into the new company to help it fund its acquisitions. On March 21, , Snowball. The next day began a two-year slide that eventually saw the market lose almost 80 percent of its peak value. What had been a high-flying race toward Internet wealth turned into a reality check.
Like other Bay Area Internet startups, Snowball had been thinking big about its future -so big that it had plans in the works for new offices that would be sumptuously furnished, following the inflated fashion of the time. While working out of a temporary, Spartan location near what was then Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the company was designing its next space on Bayshore Boulevard back in Brisbane: a collection of three brand-new buildings.
But irrational exuberance was the mood of the day in the booming Bay Area, and offices outfitted with sno-cone machines seemed par for the course. Advertising revenue began to dry up across the web, and Snowball started to tighten the purse strings.
In September, the company laid off employees, nearly a third of its workforce. In early , 50 more people lost their jobs. Although the company was still sitting on a pile of IPO money, Snowball was rolling downhill at an alarming rate. It needed to staunch the bleeding from sites like Chick Click and Power Students Network that weren't pulling the ad revenue necessary to keep them alive.
Unlike the gaming industry, whose leaders recognized quickly that its market was migrating online, larger general consumer products companies were still on the fence about throwing their money at the Internet. IGN was scraping by, but the rest of the network was hurting.
In April , IGN launched its Insider subscription service as a way to create a non-advertising-based revenue stream from its gaming properties. The move was controversial both inside and outside the company. Some Snowball execs suggested making IGN completely subscription-based, an idea editorial managers strongly disagreed with. In the end, they compromised, time-locking some content and offering some game reviews early to Insiders. Some readers balked at the change, which they viewed as a betrayal.
IGN's popular message boards, acquired when Snowball bought the Vault Network role-playing game community site in , were also changed to Insider-only status. Peer Schneider: "In hindsight, we could have done things a little differently, but things were pretty hectic," says Schneider. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Edit source History Talk 0. This page is a candidate for deletion.
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