Ziff hopes the sale will ease its debt problems. CEO Jason Young said, “the transaction allows us to pay down debt and shift our full focus to our core PCMag Digital Network business. We thank our 1UP team members for their contributions and wish them the best of success into the future.”
Dozens of staff members have been laid off at Ziff Davis, which has been attempting to unload its games consumer businesses for some months.
EGM has been published for 20 years. In the 1990s it increased frequency to twice a month, via EGM2, and has been publishing online sites since the early 1990s. In the last few years, debt-stricken Ziff has closed numerous games pubs including Games for Windows.