IGN immediately lays off every non-UK person at their newly bought sites, including some key members like deputy editor Alice Bell

Oh they're redundancies to IGN alright, they literally bought their competitors and got to kill competition with zero resistance

Especially because from what was said, the employees were told the sites will be bought "as is", so everyone gets to keep their jobs.

It's in situations such as these where C-suites being required to also apply to them what they apply to others would be nice:

• CFO or CEO at IGN has to quit. Won't hurt them much, but eh.
• CEO at Reedpop has to sell themselves (into slavery I suppose, plus it fits what they do to their workers).

You generally don't buy a business and then figure all of that out. You figure it all out and then buy the business. IGN already would have 100% known the managerial setup at these companies.

There never was a chance.

Generally when companies like this are bought it isn't to acquire the talent. That's legitimately what needs to be taken into account when it comes to things like antitrust. You want to buy out this company, are you buying it because you want their talent to join with yours to make something better? Cool. We'll let you do that provided you do it today fair and competitive manner.

Any other reason for wanting to buy this company is going to need to be pretty heavily scrutinized.

Redundancy means that they get paid for being made to leave the company. That terminology is used because it's different from being fired.

Oooh that's why it's been ass for a while now 🤦‍♂️

While I still "subscribe" to Humble, I don't recall the last time I actually unpaused a month. Maybe this is the push I needed. Their offerings have been mostly subpar after they bought Humble. Not knocking the indie devs, I think my gaming tastes have changes over the years. Also, I don't need coupons for DLC, please and thank you.

Has there been any good bundles in the last 10 years? According to my email history the last time I bought something from them was at the end of 2014, and even before then I'd been complaining about it's quality.

That I did not know!

My thoughts exactly. I'm not going to boycott them, but good will is lost.

Someone should remind them that they didn't do it the last hundred years or so because the alternative was angry mobs trying to kill them.

They care about being able to hire labor, which we provide, and they care about revenue and profit, which we also provide. Not defending any behavior, but the consequences in a healthy economy would largely come from customers, potential and current employees. Failing that, large issues would be overcome by regulations, or at least enforcing existing ones (codified rules against monopolies, for examples, are just words if not enforced).

Without consumers willing (and able) to make sacrifices (like paying higher prices) to reward good corporate behavior, and to avoid companies with purely short-term profit motivated behavior, this is what we can and should expect. Nevermind companies are rewarded by shareholder and investor support based more on profits than.how those profits were made, especially when many of those shareholders feel forced to turn to the stock market to fund their retirement, as pensions are so increasingly a rare option.

Would voting for fresh representatives possibly increase instability in out daily lives? Is that instability a possibly necessary cost of maintaining effective regulation of the investor class that has captured our legislative system to their own benefit?

There are systemic problems at play here- not to downplay the choices this individual company made, but the focus could be on the larger forces at work. If your first reaction is that boycotts and choices by consumers and employees, no matter how organized and widespread, do not work, then I ask you, dear reader, to consider what might work to make the necessary systemic changes, and what, if anything, you can do to help make them happen.

The investor class has made it clear what their playbook is, as they have time and time again thru history: explotation, and as much of it as they can get away with. The question then becomes what us, the ever-increasingly exploited, are going to do about it.

no war but class war.

ed:I hope that didnt come off as disagreement- just trying to voice frustration with a side of "everyone who agrees with you please take a moment to think about the big picture, and what you can do about it" because I'm also tired of this slide into an increasingly boring dystopia

Second Wind (old video team from the escapist) has been going strong but they're still pretty new.

Idk anything about rps but hopefully some of them rally and do the same.

We also need people to realize that it's not sustainable to expect free content while running an ad-blocker.

At RPS we like Alices. When somebody comes along with the name "Alice" you don't just say "oh hi" like some insolent rube. You nod with solemn respect and you say, "Alice". An Alice is someone you should not take lightly, nor take for granted, nor leave unmonitored. For they will destroy worlds and build better ones while you are not looking. This is dangerous and exciting. Alices are a force to be reckoned with. To treat an Alice poorly is to invite shame, dishonour, and contempt. Here are some of the best Alices in video games!

But that's it, readers. That's literally ALL the Alices we can possibly think of. What about you? Can you think of any Alices who deserve to be celebrated?

Guys job will probably fall off a window after this, but God he probably felt awesome when publishing

Really hoping that we see more stuff like Second Wind, though that took some real name recognition (and I suspect some pre-planning) to pull off.

This is originally why anti trust legislation was created

If you look at the history of anti-trust legislation, some of its first uses and biggest targets were labor organizers. Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, one of the first and most notable cases was the US lawsuit against the Workingmen's Amalgamated Council (also known as the "Triple Alliance" of teamsters, scalesmen, and packers) over what was then the largest labor action in US history.

It wasn't until the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act that unions were granted safe harbor from anti-trust provisions. And it took until 1941 for the courts to finally fully decriminalize labor actions - a process that was ultimately reversed starting in the 1960s under Nixon, and extended under Ford, Carter, and then Reagan.

High taxes exist to reduce accumulation of assets and slow down the snowballing effect of huge investors.

That's the Keynesian approach, certainly. But the Chicago School that came to dominate US economics during the Volcker Era suggested instead that we can adjust the Federal Funds rate to keep malinvestment from derailing an economy. And that this strategy means asset accumulation is now safe and profitable for large corporate interests.

Large investment banks are actually good, because they give us a steady and constant flow of price information on a private market. And since price discovery is the real goal of regulation, the advent of these mega-banks means we can let the institutions regulate themselves without any conceivable downsi- sound of the 2008 market crash

Acquiring a company just for the brand or even just to make it disappear is pretty common in all of the corporate world.

Quality worsens. Losing a lot of reliable sources for Wikipedia and other free content sites to use.

The violence is the point

We also got Digg out of it, while it ended up poo reddit and lemmy wouldn't be quite the same without it.

I remember the TechTV days before G4 took over. AotS was fun but never really replaced Screen Savers. Then G4 did whatever the fuck it did (mostly airing ghost hunters from what I remember) and went off air so we lost that too. Then there was the terrible attempt at revival a few years ago that failed spectacularly.

TWiT is still going though. Maybe something cool will come out of this.

I remember when RPS started, Kieron Gillen and the the PC Gamer gang. Fucking shite now.

I’m amazed they are allowed to own

By this point I'm surprised that they're not allowed to own people, seeing as their business model treats people as if they are property.

one of the best people in games journalism fired because......?

Seriously fuck late stage capitalism ughh

You guys are still reading IGN?

No, that's why they buy other sites.

It's tough. A long-standing rule of video games media--even well before web publishing--is that reviews don't pay the bills. Hype gets clicks, as do guides now that independent guide writing has waned.

Yeah... Let's call it.. G4tv