It was originally sold -- Costello and Shaun might be very long term members but they are not founders nor early operators. That said it was an intra community sale which is usually how these things go -- founders/owners lose interest, get a job that says you can't do that (be it competition, because the employers are miserable power hungry fools or your spies don't need public exposure like this) or have father time (or Grandfather Nurgle) catch up to them.
More generally we would have to figure out who would buy this place.
The user base is notable, active one (user base is time and some compelling content, those that stick around or count as active is way more important in these scenarios) not bad either, but nothing spectacular in terms of numbers or quality*. Existing database is nothing too spectacular nor evergreen -- this is not gamefaqs where the ever increasing retro set will be going there for faqs forever more. I am not predicting an upsurge in homebrew either; that more or less died with the rise of IOS and Android, and even without that (which is inevitable from where I sit) there is a ceiling on that too where passive games is basically whole human population (everybody plays games as a sega bod once said). Similarly I would like to believe this place is on the right side of the pop science - dry science journal equivalent spectrum for hacking (granted hackaday did pretty well for itself being on the pop side) it is also not assemblergames, xboxhacker and equivalents thereof, and there is a reason some that might inhabit such sites or be more generative of low level and properly spun up baseline hacks for any looking to hack the system refer to it as gbafail (granted performative anti piracy is a reason).
*while there are certain plenty of people here with high disposable incomes it is by no means an assured thing, and that is before the filthy pirates are accounted for.
Said filthy pirates are also going to be a black eye for advertisers (rates for which are dramatically down) and company relations (I am surprised continually at what gets sent for reviews and by who, though the absences are notable). Ripping that out would also gut the site.
To that end most offers would likely be from some kind of venture capital firm looking to shortcut baseline growth**. There are better options for those, and in case you missed the whole economic crash that is going on right now, and failures of buzzfeed et al, then that is going to be a long time forthcoming. Video content, which is the main deal for most things right now (who wants to read something in 5 minutes when you could watch a 10 minute video containing 3 adverts?), is also on the low side here -- there is sure to be some kid with a decent voice, bit of an audience and a website covering more benign notions, or indeed some existing forum with a few of them, that would make for a far better target there.
**you occasionally see sites gobbled up by one of a few firms (I did a breakdown in 2019 as part of
https://gbatemp.net/threads/the-201...-troubled-media-collection-sold-again.535563/ of which of about 6 companies owns most of the major gaming news sites, magazines and such) but I doubt GBAtemp will be on their radar as something to generate revenue, stop an opponent or shutter them to stop them from bleeding ploy.
While
@Flame has a contract which makes most of us look on and think "self respect, not even once" is his way that does not even give him access to the real ROMs section then everybody else is here for the fun of it. Buying the site does not then mean a shortcut to a group of journalists (buying a company to dodge having to recruit is a common enough tactic) - indeed you would probably be better trying to poach a few people that post on the portal or wrangle those that do (as indeed did see at least a few attempts happen on a few occasions over the years around here) if said hypothetical VC firm achieved neuron activation enough to realise "why don't we get people that know and like games to write here" is a solid plan as opposed to freelance those that wasted their life getting an English language degree in a country that has it as a first language and bullied a few gamers in high school, or even better those that like games and might have an ancillary skill to games but rather useful if you need to dig through law, accounting, computing, electrical/mechanical engineering, game design notions, art... as part of it. No VC firm would smoke enough crack to buy a place hoping to lock such things down either.
If doing the proper newspaper side of things (granted I don't know who would want that these days) then we also don't represent much at all in the industry contacts side of the equation -- PR firms, aggregators from other sites (filtering of which is a very valid way of getting good stuff for people to read -- give me someone that plays games to first analyse a trailer/screens/words and share that data accordingly rather than one that "sort spreadsheet by biggest ad spend + token thing from highest rankings for best of last 4 games in the series/from the dev on metacritic" and far more interesting results arise), data fun (yo) and self interested articles (also yo) represent most things here. Or if you prefer as much as I consider Jason Schreier an unreliable clueless slimy snake he does have those or relevant position or data access that whisper in his ear and thus why Bloomberg pulled him into their orbit, and possibly why Kotaku feigned any kind of relevance for as long as they did after the rot truly set in.
tell one eitherhow ?
