<<There may have been a conflict of interest
with both owning a videogame store and a videogame magazine.>>
Well, looking back GameFan/GameGo!! has for a good portion of it's
life span been owned by a retailer. The DieHard stores (which may
still own the rights to the "GameFan" name) own them before I believe
Millenium (?) took over, and then later they were owned by GameCave >
Eidos/Express.com. While I understand the point, I don't think this is
too much the case since if you look at a good portion of print and
online magazines, retailers are often times the ones pulling their
strings in some manner.
EB for a long time pumped money into Snowball/IGN, Babbages Etc.
was a huge partner in Daily Radar, GameDealer bought out UGO.com and
then basically chased out or fired everyone that worked there, Imagine
has worked on magazines that were given away free to customers of
certain retailers because those retailers picked up the entire bill
during last year's busy Christmas season, Warzone was bought out by
GameCave, and really the list goes on to include everyone from IDG to
ZNet in some manner of fashion.
In fact, even if the VGD people bow out of retail but stay on as
staff, a good portion of GameGo's!! investments will still come from
retailers I believe. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it's just
the staff must be a little more careful. In all the years that VGD has
been around, they've actually been pretty good about telling customers
up front if it's a worthwhile investment or not. Sure you don't always
agree with them, but the fact that they could bash a game they're
selling was to me at least pretty re-assuring that they wouldn't BS me
on something.
Later.