Reaching out to a hungry crowd of gamers, Ziff-Davis and SpotMedia Communication will announce Monday their joint creation of online gaming content.
"One of the reasons we're so interested in fostering a relationships with GameSpot is because the industry is growing so rapidly - not just the number of people who play games but how interested those people are in it," says David Schnaider, ZDNet's executive vice president of interactive media and development.
The agreement - which has cost as much as $US20 million in development so far - will merge SpotMedia's popular VideoGameSpot and GameSpot sites with ZD's print magazine gaming content to create a new gaming Goliath on ZDNet.
The new ZDnet channel will include content from Ziff-Davis's Computer Gaming World and Electronic Gaming Monthly, as well as reviews, demos, downloads, patches, and tips from the GameSpot and VideoGameSpot sites.
Online gaming will account for more than 11 percent of all Internet revenues by 2000, Jupiter Communications predicts. That growth will benefit online game companies, since gamers are also avid Net surfers.
"In general, gamers have always represented the highest end of the computer-consumer spectrum," said SpotMedia president John Epstein. "They have always been more online than any other consumer subsection."
What's more, the mix of pay-per-play online gaming sites, such as mPath, gaming resource sites such as SpotMedia, and gaming consoles and their Net counterparts such as Sega's NetLink is one of the largest growing sectors of the computer market. Nintendo 64s, for example, was one of the hottest items this Christmas, selling more than 1.6 million units since its launch three months ago.
Online gaming reviews make sense as product cycles move more quickly and games themselves become even more elaborate. "Launch dates slip all the time, and as a result the lead times of print were becoming problematic. Online sites offer information when it's happening instead of two to three months late," Epstein said.
But while an online component is advantageous in terms of timeliness, SpotMedia's competitors are curious as to whether Ziff-Davis may be hurting its own cash cow, the popular Computer Gaming World, by making its own print magazine obsolete.
"We're wondering with their print background how they're going to run pieces in the magazine three months after they've been on the site," says a spokesman for gamecenter.com, CNET's two-month old game content site.
Meanwhile, Happy Puppy has let go its 11 editors and is shutting down its editorial section, citing difficulties in meeting the rapid pace of gaming reviews. Instead, Happy Puppy will focus on downloads.
