Over the past decade and a half, Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry has become the most knowledgeable and trustworthy place to find out just how powerful a new video game console might be, where the hottest new games run the best, and why they sometimes don’t! Even Sony and Microsoft often favor DF for exclusive access to technical details.
But as of today, Digital Foundry is no longer a Eurogamer sub-brand, and it’s no longer controlled by IGN. DF’s founder has purchased the publication and its complete archives, and a team of five is taking it completely independent.
Like Giant Bomb, or the former Kotaku writers who created Aftermath, it’s the latest example of video game journalists finding a path that’s different from corporate ownership. “We answer to nobody but you, the audience,” DF now says, as part of a new podcast episode explaining the change.
Buying Digital Foundry wasn’t much of an uphill battle, to hear editor and founder Richard Leadbetter tell it, partly because he only had to buy 25 percent. Leadbetter had been holding onto 50 percent of its shares since 2015, when he originally sold his other half to Eurogamer to help fund DF’s popular YouTube channel. Eurogamer’s parent company Gamer Network obtained that half, which then got acquired by ReedPop, before making its way to IGN when parent company Ziff Davis purchased Gamer Network in turn, each time postponing Leadbetter’s own attempts to buy the rest of his company.
Then, this year, IGN suddenly offered to sell its half back: 25 percent to Leadbetter and 25 percent to investor Rupert Loman, who originally founded Eurogamer in 1999 with his brother Nick. Even 25 percent of the company wasn’t cheap: “I think this is pretty much easily the biggest thing I’ve ever bought, more than my house,” Leadbetter says.
Thankfully, Digital Foundry doesn’t need to worry about building an audience from scratch to pay its journalists. It’s already profitable all on its own, Leadbetter tells The Verge — with an established audience of paying subscribers on Patreon, whose website estimates it pulls in roughly $200,000 a year, and a YouTube channel with nearly 1.5 million subscribers.
But DF wants to build on that profitability, Leadbetter says, and he thinks the team can do that better without corporate ownership. He explains that the previous relationship where he owned half, and IGN or Gamer Network owned half, meant that all new investments had to be agreed upon by two parties with different priorities. “When you’re part of a large corporate entity, that spirit of innovation kind of gives way to the hard numbers,” he says.
(Leadbetter won’t tell me if he ran into any particular difficulties with IGN, but we know that Ziff Davis recently cut workers in back-to-back layoffs, and IGN was one of the affected Ziff Davis brands. The decision doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the time a full-length Nintendo ad was placed on DF’s YouTube channel without initially being labeled as an ad; “The guy who presses the button on YouTube is not IGN, it’s me,” Leadbetter says, calling it an error that won’t happen again.)
So, what does DF plan to build? One thing the team doesn’t have anymore is a proper place for its written words to go. While DF does own digitalfoundry.net, Leadbetter says it’s currently just a portal to direct people to its videos. He says DF wants to “figure out the business case” to justify creating a larger site.
The dream is to take nearly two decades of archived Digital Foundry content and turn it into something new, something that’ll additionally make DF’s findings more accessible to a wider audience like many news sites (shameless plug) try to do. The team would also like to launch a retro games podcast, something DF’s John Linneman says would have been difficult under corporate owners; do more game developer interviews; and try to hire an additional editor to beef up PC coverage if funds allow.
Leadbetter, Linneman, and colleague Alex Battaglia don’t sound like they’re planning to change the formula much, though. DF plans to stick to PC gaming, retro gaming, and console performance analysis as its “three pillars” and doesn’t plan to chase SEO. Much of this is just about controlling DF’s own destiny, taking control of everything from hiring to sponsorships, ad sales, and merch.
Nor should you expect to see Digital Foundry move to a subscription-only model. Leadbetter plans to keep the vast majority of content free, the same as it is now, and you shouldn’t even notice a difference on its YouTube channel, where DF plans to deliver the same number of videos without interruption.
“If we do a website, it’ll be a public-facing website without any sort of pay-gating,” Leadbetter says. “There’s always been smaller subscriber bonuses, but ultimately the pitch we’re making is to support us. If you love what we do, please support the team, it really does make a huge amount of difference.”
