Fox buys IGN Entertainment @ Gaming Target

Written by John Scalzo on September 08, 2005

News: Cue the Darth Vader breathing!

Rupert Murdoch added another notch to his media empire today when the Wall Street Journal reported that Murdoch's News Corp. plans to purchase IGN Entertainment for $650 million.

Every gamer knows IGN as it's reach into gaming goes deep with IGN.com, GameSpy, Team Xbox, Game Stats, and FilePlanet. IGN also owns the Rotten Tomatoes movie ranking site and the ridiclous AskMen.com. In addition to all these sites, many games today use GameSpy Technologies for their online matchmaking services.

It's hard to imagine when we were all surfing little IGN64.com back in 1996 what they would become today. IGN Entertainment will join the recently recreated Fox Interactive, News Corp's name for all of their web related properties. Fox Interactive was also the name previously used for News Corp's video game publishing arm that was sold to VU Games a few years back.

With the addition of the IGN sites and previous purchases of popular web community MySpace.com and Scout Media's local sports site, Fox Interactive will boast 70 million unique visitors a month and over 12 billion page views. IGN currently boasts a readership of 28 million monthly unique visitors.

IGN lost $14.3 million dollars last year and has neer turned a profit. A planned initial public offering of the company will probably be canceled shortly.

Once all of the lawyers (and government regulatory types) sift through all the paperwork the deal should be completed by the end of the year.