The top of the most important gaming web site on this planet is leaving the corporate on the finish of August, Kotaku has discovered. John Davison, who has been IGN‘s writer since becoming a member of again in 2019, instructed employees on Monday it was time for “the following chapter.” The high-profile departure comes shortly after a giant spherical of layoffs that noticed a number of departments throughout the corporate impacted.
Arriving simply months earlier than the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, Davison’s tenure at IGN noticed the positioning develop into occasions like IGN Reside and a market analytics platform referred to as Gaming Traits. Beneath parent-company Ziff Davis, IGN additionally made an enormous acquisition final yr within the type of the Gamer Community, a set of European-facing gaming websites like Eurogamer, VG247, and Rock Paper Shotgun. A lot of these websites had been hit with mass layoffs on the time of the deal, and GamesIndustry.biz was gutted. One of the vital invaluable components of that bundle, Digital Foundry, introduced simply final week that it had bought all excellent fairness to permit it to go away IGN and go totally unbiased.
Davison, whose 25+ years in video games media embody stints at EGM, Official PlayStation Journal, and GameSpot, will likely be leaving IGN at a time when its future trajectory has by no means been extra unsure. A reporting, information, and options operation that expanded underneath earlier EIC Tina Amini has suffered cuts lately attributable to a number of rounds of layoffs and buyouts. Amini, who left in 2022 and now works at Xbox, was by no means changed. Davison reported to Ziff Davis president of gaming and leisure Yael Prough, and it’s not but clear if the mum or dad firm plans on backfilling his position.
Davison and IGN didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
IGN laid off over a dozen employees earlier this month, which included roughly 12 p.c members in its editorial union. “The corporate has instructed us that the rationale for this layoff stems from a Ziff Davis mandate to chop prices regardless of a number of quarters in a row of year-over-year income will increase, to which IGN Leisure responded by coming for our members’ jobs,” the IGN Creators Guild wrote on the time. “That is perplexing to us, as we’re instructed many times that IGN Leisure has had a tremendously profitable yr to date due to their exhausting work.”
“It’s been an honor to work alongside such gifted, passionate folks, and I’m deeply pleased with what we’ve achieved collectively,” Davison wrote in a message to employees right this moment. “I’m excited for what comes subsequent.”
