The gaming press world has been in some turmoil lately. Tencent just got gutted Fanbyte, G4TV just fired a group of its staffand Future Publishing just let go of a bunch of writers and editors, despite earning hundreds of millions of dollars last year. So it is with perhaps some trepidation that we announce the news that Fandom, the wiki hosting company, has just purchased behemoths, including GameSpot, Metacriticand giant bomb.
In a deal reported by Variety Worth around $50 million, the sale sees Fandom – originally founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales – become a serious player in the world of gaming media, piling on its already very established business based on the wiki. However, if that number is correct, it suggests a colossal drop in value from the last sale of this collection of outlets in 2020, when Red Ventures purchased the entirety of CNET from ViacomCBS for $500 million.
The full list of publications announced as acquired by Fandom from Red Ventures today contains many well-known names: GameSpot, Metacritic, tv guide, Game FAQs, giant bomb, Cable Cutters Newsand comic vine. Previously owned by CNET and then CBS over the past decade, the sites have changed hands numerous times over the years. Now, everyone involved is gearing up for another rebrand, this time in the surprise Fandom name.
Fandom, who I imagine like me, you always think like Wikiis the site you end up on when trying to find details about a forgotten TV episode, or the name of this planet from this star wars novel you read as a child. For the past few years, he’s been posting curated news and blogs, and now seems to be kicking off world domination. In 2018, Fandom bought Addicted to the screen and last year, video game publisher Focus Multimedia, and with it Fanatical, the authorized key reseller that was known as Bundle Stars.
However, none of this compares to today’s huge announcement. “Gaming is one of our biggest audiences at Fandom,” Fandom said when Kotaku asked for a comment. “We have 115 million gaming fans across 17 million content pages and over 100,000 gaming communities on our platform. So adding GameSpot and the other gaming sites will help us better serve gaming fans even deeper in addition to the gaming reference content library we currently have.
We asked if there might be any job losses or mergers in light of the acquisition, but Fandom didn’t answer those questions.
CNET was originally purchased by ViacomCBS for $1.8 billion in 2008, then sold to Red Ventures for much less in 2020, at $500 million. While Fandom’s purchase today doesn’t include the CNET name and all of their associated websites, $50 million for major players such as Metacritic, tv guideand GameSpot looks incredibly weak. It could, of course, be that Variety is simply wrong about this number, as other places report the number is “undisclosed”.