I met Jamie Berger of IGN (who was on the GameSpy side of the fence when IGN bought Gamespy) when I traveled to LA to meet the IGN team after IGN bought my then-company.
He was very excited about the firm’s opportunities. This was before the sale to News Corp., I asked him point blank about his preference between selling and pursuing an IPO.
[I learned something at IGN, if something that was said was confidential, then you would say “this is confidential” and it would be a private discussion. As such, I do not think what he told me falls under confidential info. Besides, it will definitely not hurt his standing within FIM, so here goes:]
He understood that while an IPO (going in alone strategy) would work well in many ways, he recognized that it might make more sense to have a big brother to ramp up. In other words, money alone did not solve their problems. They knew they had traction within the men’s online demographic and video game market, but there was a world beyond these categories.
The more I learned about his division, the more I thought it would be a better fit within an independent company, and not a part of a larger media company.
Up to now, IGN’s Digital Distribution unit was used solely to promote News Corp. assets, but as reported by Variety and picked up by PaidContent.org, they seem to have opened it up to other companies.
This is interesting and is a long term positive for IGN and its DD platform… but it will be interesting to see if they will eventually make it a full store, instead of a male-oriented digital store, as Mr. Berger explains.
Here’s a crazy idea: News Corp. does not have a music platform, so it might want to combine the indie music appeal of MySpace and bundle in IGN’s Digital Distribution platform to allow music artists to get music straight to fans… with a few acts under its belt, News Corp. could suddenly approach other labels and get them to offer their digital albums and songs straight to MySpace and FIM’s burgeoning audience… the fact is that labels are looking for anything to wrest power and control away from Steve “iPod Pequeno” Jobs… this would give Mr. Murdoch’s men a helluva wild card in the music space without promoting movies from News Corp.’s competitors.
If the endeavor proves to be a success, then examining how much they should upon up DD to News Corp.’s competitors will become a good problem to have…
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