So it looks like Fandom, the company behind (what was once?) wikia, has acquired Gamespot, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Metacritic, Fanatical and a few others, and if you ask me this seems like, well, very bad news. I'm not going to pretend to know whether or not this makes sense from a business perspective (Red Ventures seems like it caused a whole lot of turnover at Giant Bomb if you look at the fact that basically all of their founders left within the past two years, so maybe Fandom will treat them better) but purely from a user's perspective this does not feel great.
Wikia, way back when, used to be a pretty standard, boilerplate way for just about anything to get a wiki, but over the past decade it's become one of the worst websites to navigate because it's just loaded with autoplaying videos, obtrusive banner ads, and a whole lot of other marketing-driven garbage that basically means I avoid going there whenever possible. Maybe this won't happen, but I'm really not looking forward to them doing the same thing to Gamespot, to GameFAQs, to Giant Bomb, to Metacritic, etc., because, well, those are some pretty dang influential websites that I really don't want to have to stop using.
Even beyond that, this probably means the Comic Vine and Giant Bomb wikis will effectively be dead soon, and all of that accumulated data and trivia will either be reformatted to look more like every other one of those other (messy) wikis or they'll just be lost entirely. GameFAQs and Gamespot, in particular, are websites with well over twenty years of history, so I'm hoping they make it through (largely) unchanged. Anytime a major shakeup happens there's a risk that old pages and links will not survive the transition and losing PS1 FAQs with ASCII art from the 90s or old game trailers (or whatever) would be a real shame.
I don't know though, maybe I'm blowing this all out of proportion. There's a chance that the only noticeable difference will be some different disclaimer text on the bottom of the site, but, even if that is the case, big acquisitions and consolidation of media companies is almost always a worrying thing, even under the best of circumstances.
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