While its overall importance has waned over the last few years, E3 is still seen as the center piece of the gaming industry’s marketing cycle. It’s still the place where almost every major company comes to promote their products to the biggest audience possible. This years show was canceled due to the COVID-19 outbreak, leaving a huge hole. Well, it seems a rather unlikely entity has came forward to fill that hole.

Today, the news organization IGN announced they would be hosting a digital event called the Summer of Gaming. It will take place in June, the same time as E3 was scheduled, and will have a host of events with on-demand and live content that will include gameplay impressions, demos and reveals. They also explicitly mention next generation consoles, so it’s possible we’ll see a few next gen games as part of this as well. Publishers confirmed to be part of the event are 2K, Square Enix, SEGA, Bandai Namco, Amazon, Google, Devolver Digital and THQ Nordic with apparently more to come. You can read more details at their website linked above.

No dates are set yet, but we’ll keep you updated when they are announced. It looks like this will probably be the closest we’ll come to an E3 in 2020.

As the Indian market continues to grow in size and importance, it becomes more and more obvious that it will continue to garner enough interest from consumers and content creators to be able to host its own local games show, like so many other major markets do. The expo will take place in the Indian commercial capital, Mumbai, and it will allow visitors to ‘play the latest games across all platforms, go hands-on with cutting edge hardware, and even preview games and hardware that aren’t yet available in the Indian market,’ said IGN, the official media partner of the expo.

IGN also claimed that every major platform, from mobile to consoles and PC, will be represented, as will all major games. Their wording does raise interesting questions about the possibility, for example, of Nintendo systems (hardware not yet officially available in India) maybe debuting at IGX. It would certainly give the NX a larger market to sell to when it launches if it could also sell to a new market of a billion.

More details on IGX will follow, so stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage.

If you’re one of the people that is still waiting for  the very long awaited Heist DLC on Grand Theft Auto Online, then we finally have some official news that isn’t based on the speculation of the masses. Rockstar have confirmed that Heists will be coming as a free update to Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS4, PS3 and PC in early 2015.

Rockstar is firing on all pistons by promising somewhere in the region of 20 hours of new gameplay (that’s the length of some AAA games nowadays) that will stretch over “five unique strands” reaching across a total of 20 missions. Lead mission designer Imran Sarwar said “We never want to have to move a date but if something is delayed, it’s because it’s not at the level we expect of ourselves.”

Completing these new missions in the correct order will reward players with special goodies and you will earn more rewards by finishing the game in the new First Person mode on PS4 and Xbox One. In the mean time check out those screenshots below. Get hype people.

Thanks, IGN

This is what Pete Hanes had to say regarding the current situation with Prey 2 ad it’s rumors about shifting the development to Arkane Studios.

“We appreciate that folks are displeased that we haven’t had any update or any info on Prey 2, but whatever your displeasure is, you can’t even be remotely as unhappy about it as us,” Pete Hines stated.

“We spent years and millions of dollars and a ton of effort trying to help Human Head make a great Prey 2 game. What we said the last time we said anything was that it’s not up to our quality standards.

“We spent a lot of time and money and effort trying to make this thing happen and support folks, but at the same time, you just can’t keep throwing money at it and saying, ‘sure, it’ll eventually work.’ You have to have the discipline to say, ‘it’s not good enough. It’s not hitting the quality bar. Why isn’t it? We’ve been at this for a while, and what we have is not what we talked about.’ So that’s where we are.”

It’s seems the game is still alive and that it seems to be quite an ambitions title that has many high-quality goals in its mind. How soon will we see Prey 2? No one knows, but at least it’s confirmed that the game is still in development and is trying to get ready for the show as soon as possible.

Check back on GamingBolt as we find more information regarding Prey 2.

lectronic Art’s senior engineer Bob Summerwill has tweeted today his strong and honest opinions on the Wii U’s current struggle and the viability for third parties. EA recently said that they have no games in development for the Wii U. The tweets have been deleted, but IGN managed to grab screen caps of all of them for everyone’s viewing pleasure.

Here are the tweets from Bob Summerwill.

Tweet #1

“The WiiU is crap. Less powerful than an XBOX360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet. Nintendo are walking dead at this point.”

Tweet #2

“Nintendo are still operating like it’s 1990. They should have “done a Sega” and offered Mario/Zelda as PS4/Durango exclusives.”

Tweet #3

“Instead they make this awful console, and this…nintendo.com/wii/udownloads…. Just stop it! Just make great games!”

Tweet #4

“It is an utterly intentional decision to focus our resource on markets which actually matter… like mobile, and Gen4.”

Tweet #5

“One more : -). Nintendo platforms have always been very poor revenue-wise for third parties. Only Mario and Zelda make money.”

These statements were pretty harsh, and I am not surprised that these tweets have been taken down. It will be  interesting to see if Nintendo fires back with some sort of defensive statement. Let us know what you think of this whole situation in the comments below.

Check back on GamingBolt as this story develops.

From the post, he states that, “IGN stole my content, called it their own, slapped a watermark and adverts on it, and then didn’t even so much as put my f**king name on it.”

Afterwards according to Gamble, “An influx of tweets, retweets and even a Reddit post have caused a teensy wee bit of interest in the matter.” This was apparently enough for IGN to pull their page on the game.

The trailer with IGN’s watermark is still on Youtube however, and can be viewed here.

Meanwhile, SpikeDislike 2 can be checked out here.

Ziff Davis who recently bought IGN and Ask Men have shut down a lot of properties, and there have been no reasons given for it, but we do have a statement.

Lot of people were laid off including influential ones from IGN like Ryan Clements, and this could be a part of their restructuring process.

“We are focusing on our two flagship brands, IGN and AskMen. Unfortunately, as a result, we have made the decision to close sites and restructure our teams accordingly,” a company spokesperson told Joystiq.

This comes at an interesting time because IGN’s traffic based on Twitter comments–soared and this applies to a lot of sites out there. The company was sold to Ziff Davis for a rumoured $100 million, and considering AskMen hasn’t been affected, it kind of shows the new owner’s priority.

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

IGN has been sold to Ziff Davis, it has been officially confirmed. The mega site along with Ask-Men has been sold to the publisher who also owns 1UP.

Here’s a list of all the properties Ziff Davis owns: PCMAG.com, Geek.com and Toolbox.com, with IGN’s properties, IGN.com, UGO.com, 1UP.com and AskMen.com, make the group one of the largest digital publishers reaching tech, video game and entertainment enthusiasts.

They have also given advertiser details. The combined sites have over 600 advertisers and 53 million global monthly unique visitors. This acquisition more than doubles the revenues of j2’s digital media business.

“This is a transformative deal for our digital media business,” said Hemi Zucker, CEO of j2 Global.

“By combining two of the most storied organizations in tech, gaming and entertainment, we have created a very powerful company capable of producing and delivering content in all forms to an audience that marketers highly value.” Added Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis, “IGN and AskMen are tremendous best-in-class brands that we are proud to have as part of our digital media portfolio.”

The transaction is expected to be accretive to j2’s 2013 earnings, exclusive of transition costs.

The interesting part is that once this deal goes through – which it will, since Ziff Davis made a cash offer according to PanoDaily – 1UP will be back to its original owner.

Ziff Davis sold 1UP to UGO Entertainment in 2009, which was picked up by IGN in 2011. IGN though, was purchased by News Corp back in 2005 for $650 million. Before you say, “Wow, what a loss”, consider the irony of 1UP going back to its original company.

Of course, Ziff Davis will also own GameSpy, AskMen, GameStats and the Vault Network among other entities when it purchases IGN. How will this impact the flow of content and competition? As always, time will tell. At least things will hopefully be more stable at IGN going forward.

Source: GIBiz

Consider that News Corp purchased IGN for $650 million USD in 2005, besides also purchasing gaming network UGO, which included properties like 1Up.com, which were then consolidated into a single entity. There have been other sales over the years by News Corp, which includes Rotten Tomatoes, Gamespy and Direct2Drive and now IGN, which is expected to go for $100 million USD.

Who are the interested parties thus far? Break Media and SAY Media, the former being a digital video publisher with a reported audience of over 200 million people and the latter being an internet publisher and advertising network with over 100 million users. Will IGN still retain its identity post the auction? That remains to be seen.

Source: GIBiz