IGN Co-Founder on Blizzard IPL sale, IGN esports

Slasher

United States1095 Posts

April 09 2013 19:40 GMT

Yesterday, Blizzard Entertainment announced it would purchase IGN ProLeague assets. In addition, the Warcraft studio revealed it had brought on some of the team to form a new Blizzard studio in San Francisco, California focused on content production.

To get a better sense of how the deal came to be, what it means, and more, GameSpot spoke with IGN cofounder Peer Schneider.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/ign-cofounder-on-ipl-sale-to-blizzard-6406664

With how successful the IPL events have become, why not keep the brand?

Peer Schneider: If you look at the asset transfer, Blizzard is picking up the team and the technology associated with it. We are committed to covering competitive gaming and broadcast events in the future, so you never know what you're going to see from us. The idea behind IPL and what it stood for over the last two years doesn't make sense in our current focus area.

With the acquisition by Ziff Davis, they really wanted to focus in on our core media business. We've got a pretty good thing going when it comes to users that we can afford to take a step back and really kind of focus on the stuff that we kicked off 16 years ago and have really grown over the past decade plus.

The core of what IPL did…it wasn't just about broadcasting eSports matches, something I'd love to continue doing, and it was basically an events business. At this time it doesn't really make sense for us to be in the events business.

How much was IPL sold for?

Unfortunately, neither side will be disclosing any numbers surrounding the deal.

To read more, click the link above to GameSpot!

Integra

Sweden5626 Posts

April 09 2013 20:08 GMT

This article pretty much confirms that Blizzard was a buyer at least by the time IPL issued the statement to meet the rumors which had started regarding IPL being cancelled;
From the article:

There were multiple interested parties. If you look at the IPL business in the past, when we started in 2011, we basically started it as a startup within IGN; the market looked really different. Publishers have started to launch their own leagues, push them more, and it really made sense to partner with one of the players at the table. Blizzard with StarCraft of course has been paying attention to IPL, and were really interested in the team and live streaming capabilities.

This whole statement regarding the change in the scene is bullshit which has been pointed out before, however it makes more sense if you consider their earlier statement in response to the rumors which they said the same thing, and only reason to even say it like this back then was is if a game developer was the entity to buy them and they wanted to "adjust" and make up a reasoning as to why they thought the new partnership was good, beyond just the money.

So ya, looks like IPL feed us bullshit regarding WHY they failed but you have to adapt I guess, rather make up some bullshit story than to piss off people you rely on in order to do business, like IGN or Blizzard. After all.