Today, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, a media conglomerate that owns a variety of newspapers, magazines, and Fox Broadcasting Company, hired investment bank Allen & Company to sell off their "videogame and entertainment websites" or, "IGN Entertainment." This sale comes on the heel of a failed deal with a number of bidders over the past year.
Chief Executive of IGN, Roy Bahat, resigned in August saying that it was time for News Corp to find new ways to revive IGN.
IGN is expected to sell for around $100 Million. This is quite a different price tag than the original $650 million News Corp paid for it in 2005 as part of a deal for Gamespy.com, TeamXbox.com, and a variety of other sites.
IGN is a division of News Corporation and is responsible for AskMen.com, GameSpy, FilePlanet, and GameStats.com (think of Gamestats as a MetaCritic site). Earlier in its life, IGN was owned by Snowball.com, an IPO during the dot-com bubble burst. The burst inevitably caused the failure of Next-Generation Magazine and a wide-variety of websites devoted to video gaming.
