IGN immediately lays off every non-UK person at their newly bought sites, including some key members like deputy editor Alice Bell
IGN immediately lays off every non-UK person at their newly bought sites, including some key members like deputy editor Alice Bell
“At least one person from almost any department at a company like this you can imagine got some bad news today”
Welp, this didn't take long.
It's especially interesting that they laid off a lot of people who were the only ones in their particular job, leaving entire jobs uncovered. I suspect this comes right before shutting them entirely or doing it all "with AI" 🤮.
Sad in particular about Alice Bell. She was fantastic, and it always felt like she kept the site going through all the shit of recent years. Plus being the driving force behind their podcast (the Electronic Wireless Show) of course also spells doom for that one though I hope that like Indiescovery they go rogue and run it independent of the site.
Bleak times. Fuck IGN.
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I hate how this is phrased as "redundancies". IGN literally JUST bought these outlets, they haven't had time to dig into and examine the organizations they acquired; it's just straight into the Corpo playbook of "lay people off and let the dust settle where it may".
These are people, not "redundancies". They contributed in the old organization, and they could contribute in the new, but they never even got the chance.
Oh they're redundancies to IGN alright, they literally bought their competitors and got to kill competition with zero resistance
There used to be laws against this shit.
people also used to vote in their own interests
Especially because from what was said, the employees were told the sites will be bought "as is", so everyone gets to keep their jobs.
It's in situations such as these where C-suites being required to also apply to them what they apply to others would be nice:
- CFO or CEO at IGN has to quit. Won't hurt them much, but eh.
- CEO at Reedpop has to sell themselves (into slavery I suppose, plus it fits what they do to their workers).
You generally don't buy a business and then figure all of that out. You figure it all out and then buy the business. IGN already would have 100% known the managerial setup at these companies.
What should happen is not always what does happen. There are tons of examples of brain dead companies and rich people buying companies they dont understand and then ruining them because of that.
Is there anything pointing to that in this case?
Did you not read the title at least? How does firing all these people indicate they know what theyre doing?
There never was a chance.
Generally when companies like this are bought it isn't to acquire the talent. That's legitimately what needs to be taken into account when it comes to things like antitrust. You want to buy out this company, are you buying it because you want their talent to join with yours to make something better? Cool. We'll let you do that provided you do it today fair and competitive manner.
Any other reason for wanting to buy this company is going to need to be pretty heavily scrutinized.
Redundancy means that they get paid for being made to leave the company. That terminology is used because it's different from being fired.
It's basically just British terminology for layoffs with a severance package.
It amounts to the same thing, though. Whether you got a few months pay to carry you through or not you still lost your income, and there's no guarantee you'll ever find a job that matches it in pay, benefits, etc.
Read the guys comment again though. They say their issue is with calling them "redundancies" in a language sense. But it's not sugar coating it or anything, that's the legitimate term for what happened.