1Up Taken!

Perhaps you've heard that 1Up.com, one of my (former) favorite videogame pages, was taken over by a company called UGO Entertainment. They plan to restructure the site, including gamevideos.com and mycheats.com. The 1Up Show is dead and America's oldest multiplatform magazine EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly) is officially dead, the january issue will be the last ever.
UGO fired 30 company members of the old editorial staff, but hired 24 new people.
And how can this asshole J. Moses, CEO of UGO, feel so great about it?

“How am I a bad guy?” Moses replied from his end of the phone. “I’m a great guy.”

We have just hired 24 people,” he said. “At a time where all you read about is layoffs we have expanded UGO by 33 percent. I don’t know of any content companies out there expanding their workforce.

Also read this Joystig arcticle.

I fear that 1Up just lost it's spirit. What a bullshit decision. I think I will migrate to GiantBomb.

A letter from Yoshinori Ono, producer of Street Fighter IV:

[...]
That said, it was with sadness that I heard that EGM was going to suspend publishing. Of course, 1UP.com will continue to thrive, and that's great, but I still hold paper publications in high regard, and I think that readers also appreciate having something physical to hold in their hands -- and that remains for reference once read. This provides something that the Internet, for all its usefulness, simply can't provide due to the fast pace of electronic news dissemination.

It's only fitting that my last dealings with EGM were to help roll out Street Fighter 4, a title that'll bring the series back into the limelight after a decade-long absence. We made our first SF4 announcements via EGM, and I recall telling my colleagues at Capcom USA that EGM was the right magazine for the job. I've long respected the reverence and importance their editors place on our chosen hobby, and I knew that they were the right choice to help make our announcements.
[...]
EGM, thank you for the memories! Thanks for supporting us and helping us make our games even better!

See as well Hard News:


Ex-1UP Staffers Help Create Rebel FM Podcast!