IGN and GameStop merge… I didn’t see that coming

IGN, the biggest gaming news website on the planet, and GameStop, the biggest gaming retailer on the planet, have announced this morning that they are to be married.. er I mean merged, online only that is…

You see it’s a partnership or something.. here’s the boring details

Why this has happened is anyone’s guess but I for one can’t see the benefit for IGN on this one.

Best case scenario is that everyone forgets about this and continues on as normal but worst case scenario the complaints of IGN not being impartial and only giving a game high scores so that they can sell a lot of copies are going to get louder.

Except this time people may have a point, could you imagine GameStop bought a million copies of Crackdown 2 and then suddenly they realised the sales weren’t stellar, all they need to do is give their bro’s over at IGN a call and make sure they post a front page Crackdown 2 story every day for a week to up the sales.

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist but this doesn’t smell all together good for consumers.

However if it was a small website or small store then my feelings are different as they could then lean against each other strengths for mutual growth.

Source: PGN

PS: For jealousy purposes did you know that IGN gets 28.9 million unique visitors a month, that’s bigger than all South African websites combined (AFAIK)

Last Updated: December 7, 2010