IGN

• 1. Introduction

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  IGN launched on the 29th of September 1996, born as a network of five separate websites covering gaming platforms that barely existed yet. Its founder was media entrepreneur Chris Anderson, and its first home was inside publishing company Imagine Media. What began as N64.com, PSXPower, and a handful of other platform-specific pages would eventually grow into a global media brand operating in 25 languages across 28 editions. How did a collection of niche fan-adjacent websites become one of the most-visited entertainment destinations on the internet? And what happened along the way when the money got complicated, the editorial standards slipped, and the audience grew large enough to matter politically?

• 2. A Network Takes Shape

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  Jonathan Simpson-Bint, a publishing executive, founded the original content network that would become IGN. He built it inside Imagine Media as five distinct sites: N64.com, PSXPower, Saturnworld, Next-Generation.com, and Ultra Game Players Online. Each spoke to a different piece of the gaming audience. Imagine expanded that footprint by pulling in independent fansites as affiliates, including PSX Nation, Sega-Saturn.com, Game Sages, and GameFAQs.

  By 1998, the network launched a new homepage that pulled those scattered sites together under a single IGN brand, consolidating them as system channels. That homepage served content from more than 30 different channels at once. Not all of the original sites survived the transition. Ultra Game Players Online dissolved when its companion magazine was cancelled, and Next-Generation was placed "on hold" while Imagine chased a short-lived brand called Daily Radar.

  In February 1999, PC Magazine named IGN one of the hundred best websites, placing it alongside competitors GameSpot and CNET Gamecenter. That same month, Imagine Media spun IGN and its affiliate channels off into a separate company called Affiliation Networks. By September of that year, the company had renamed itself Snowball.com and absorbed a small entertainment site called The Den, which added non-gaming content to the growing network.

• 3. From Snowball to Empire

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  Snowball.com held an IPO in 2000, riding the wave of dot-com enthusiasm. When that wave crashed, Snowball shed most of its properties. IGN survived by building its audience and launching a subscription service called IGN Insider, later renamed IGN Prime. The Snowball name was dropped on the 10th of May 2002, and the company formally became IGN Entertainment.

  By June 2005, IGN reported 24,000,000 unique visitors per month and 4.8 million registered users. That summer, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation acquired IGN for $650 million. The site celebrated its tenth anniversary on the 12th of January 2008. In 2010, IGN relocated its headquarters from Brisbane, California to a smaller office near AT&T Park in San Francisco, completing the move on the 29th of March 2010.

  News Corp. eventually tried to spin IGN off as a publicly traded company, a strategy consistent with how it had handled other digital acquisitions including MySpace and Photobucket. That attempt failed. On the 4th of February 2013, News Corp. announced it had sold IGN Entertainment to Ziff Davis, a publishing company that had itself recently been acquired by J2 Global. The financial terms were not disclosed. Ziff Davis was already familiar with the gaming audience: before IGN acquired 1Up.com's parent UGO Entertainment from Hearst Corporation in 2011, 1Up.com had previously been owned by Ziff Davis.

• 4. Scoring, Re-scoring, and Scoring Again

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  IGN reviewers assign scores to games based on individual aspects including presentation, graphics, sound, gameplay, and lasting appeal. The overall score is an independent evaluation rather than an average of those category scores. For most of its history, IGN used a scale from 0.1 to 10.0, moving in increments of 0.1.

  On the 3rd of August 2010, IGN announced a shift to a 20-point scale, where scores would move in increments of 0.5. The maximum score remained 10.0. That change was not applied retroactively; older reviews kept their original scores. Reader reviews were also unaffected.

  That system lasted only two years. On the 13th of September 2012, IGN revealed a move to a 100-point scale without decimals, meaning a score previously listed as 8.5 would become an 85. Unlike the 2010 change, this one was retroactive; all previous scores were to be updated. A postscript to the announcement complicated things: after internal discussion, IGN decided to retain decimal points in future scores after all.

  In January 2020, IGN moved back to a simple 10-point scale running from 1 to 10, citing the difficulty of maintaining meaningful distinctions at the 100-point level. In early 2014, between those two reversions, IGN had also introduced a re-review policy allowing a game's score to be raised if substantial updates changed the product significantly after launch. Games including Heroes of the Storm, League of Legends, Stardew Valley, Warframe, and the pocket edition of Minecraft were among the titles re-reviewed under that policy.

• 5. Subsidiaries and Spin-offs

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  Rotten Tomatoes joined the IGN group in 2004, when IGN acquired the film review aggregator. IGN held it for six years before selling it to Flixster in 2010. GameStats, a review aggregation site with its own Game Popularity Metric rating system, was founded by IGN in 2004; it incorporated both press scores and gamer scores alongside page-hit data, though it eventually stopped receiving updates.

  GameSpy Industries merged with IGN Entertainment in 2005, bringing the file download site FilePlanet along with it. That same year IGN acquired the online male lifestyle magazine AskMen. TeamXbox and VE3D, also known as Voodoo Extreme 3D, were both acquired in 2003. The role-playing interest site Vault Network had joined even earlier, in 1999.

  In October 2017, Humble Bundle announced it was being acquired by IGN. Then in May 2024, IGN Entertainment acquired Gamer Network and its properties for an undisclosed sum. That deal brought Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, VG247, and other outlets into the IGN group. Some layoffs followed as part of post-acquisition redundancy cuts.

  The esports side of IGN had a shorter lifespan. IGN Pro League launched in 2011, running tournaments for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, ShootMania Storm, and League of Legends. On the 6th of March 2013, IGN abruptly cancelled the finals of IPL 6 just weeks before they were scheduled to take place in Las Vegas. On the 8th of April 2013, Blizzard Entertainment announced it had acquired the IPL's staff and assets.

• 6. Controversies and Editorial Tests

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  In 2007, Video Game Media Watch accused former IGN editor Doug Perry of journalistic misconduct over an exclusive review of the game Prey. That controversy foreshadowed harder tests to come.

  In November 2017, several IGN employees refused to work in a show of solidarity with Kallie Plagge, a former editor who alleged that in 2016, another editor named Vince Ingenito sexually harassed her and a second female colleague. Human resources reportedly responded by telling Plagge that she needed better judgment about who she was friendly with and that she was an equal participant in inappropriate flirtation. The incident circulated widely on social media.

  In August 2018, the owner of a YouTube channel called Boomstick Gaming accused IGN reviewer Filip Miucin of plagiarizing his video review of Dead Cells. On the 7th of August, IGN acknowledged substantial similarities between the two reviews, apologized, and dismissed Miucin. A new review by Brandin Tyrrel went up on the 10th of August. Miucin later responded in an unlisted video, saying the similarity was not intentional, though he took full ownership of what had happened. A separate investigation found similarities between Miucin's work and material on Nintendo Life, Engadget, and the gaming forum NeoGAF. On the 14th of August, IGN announced it would remove all of Miucin's work pending further review. On the 19th of April 2019, Miucin admitted plagiarism in a video on his own YouTube channel.

  In May 2021, during the Israel-Palestine crisis, IGN's main site posted an article urging readers to donate to charities helping Palestinian civilians, including the Palestine Children's Relief Fund. The article went up on the 14th of May. IGN Israel issued public condemnations. The Palestinian flag added to the site logo was soon swapped for a Red Cross, and on the 16th of May the article was deleted. On the 17th of May, over 60 IGN staff members signed an open letter criticising the removal as a breach of editorial freedom and the site's own correction policies. IGN reinstated the article on the 24th of August under a revised headline, alongside a statement of newly formalised editorial policies.

• 7. Going Global

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  Starting in 2006, IGN began opening offices outside the United States to support localised editions, first in the UK and Australia. Those editions shared American content while adding material from local editors. As the expansion accelerated, IGN shifted strategy and began franchising its brand, licensing media publishers in various countries to operate regional sites on their own servers.

  By 2021, IGN operated 28 editions in 25 languages. Licensed regional publishers can link to IGN's central database, import or translate articles, and embed videos hosted on IGN's own servers. When a reader visits www.ign.com from a supported region, geolocation software redirects them to the local version automatically.

  Some regional launches carried particular weight. IGN Japan went public on the 11th of April 2016, in collaboration with Sankei Digital, the online arm of Japanese newspaper publisher Sankei Shimbun. The source noted Japan as one of the world's largest video game markets, one with limited mainstream journalism reaching Western audiences. IGN Japan was designed to feed original content from the Japanese industry back to other editions, not just translate outward.

  IGN Russia launched in March 2013, managed by Gameland publishing house with staff drawn from a print magazine called Strana Igr. That edition was closed without notice in 2022, after the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war on the 24th of February wiped out years of work by local editors. IGN China launched in September 2020 as an editorially independent outlet of Tencent, a structurally distinct arrangement from most other regional editions.