Press Pass: Dan "Shoe" Hsu Takes on the Bitmob
The former Ziff Davis exec. talks about the fate of his former company and the recent launch of his new community-driven gaming site, Bitmob
7/2/2009 1:20 PM | 5 Comments | Page 1 of 4
Kyle Orland
Status: "You can't get quality video game editorial from a value menu!" "No, really, you can't."
What do you do when you've spent nearly a third of your life writing about games for a single company, only to see that company decline and be sold off as a faint echo of what it once was? If you're Dan "Shoe" Hsu, the answer is simple -- take a short break, then finally go into business for yourself.
An 11-year veteran of Ziff Davis Media, Hsu rose to be editor-in-chief of the magazine
Electronic Gaming Monthly and editorial director for 1UP.com before leaving in April of 2008, just months before
the magazine was shuttered and
1UP was sold to UGO. Since then he's dabbled in freelancing for G4, launched a
gaming video series with his girlfriend, and started a personal blog called Sore Thumbs with former EGMer Crispin Boyer. Then, just before E3, Hsu revealed his long-planned mystery project,
Bitmob, a game site that relies on a mix of professional content from Hsu and some fellow Ziff Davis alums and community content written by Bitmob readers.
I talked to Hsu about his thoughts on the post-departure Ziff Davis, his vision for Bitmob and the future of the game journalism in general. Here are the most interesting excerpts from our lengthy interview:
On the financial situation at Ziff Davis before his departure
This picture of Hsu is required to run with every one of his interviews. It's in the Internet bylaws.
"I'm not the CFO or CEO so I don't know every intricate or intimate detail, but there were debt problems that they had to manage. All those properties made money -- 1UP made money,
EGM made money -- but the thing is, all of our income, all of our revenue was going towards paying interest on these massive debts. A couple of times they had to restructure those debts to make the interest payments more reasonable but it never got to a situation where it was like, "Hey, check it out now, we're profitable and we can start building the business."
"I think that's why things looked so bleak for a while there. At the same time as that happened, the magazine business as a whole started suffering. Even the big magazines, the
Maxims and such, started suffering, losing subscribers and all that. Combine that with that massive amount of debt, it's just stirring trouble all the way around. 1UP did do really well, it was really well received, really well liked, but I think the economy wasn't helping, either. So many things working against us...
On the mood at Ziff Davis before his departure
"Here we are, Ziff Davis Media, as a company that was not in a position to grow the business or barely even maintain the business because of debt problems all the time. I'm not a financial guy, I'm not one of the CEOs so I don't know all that happened there, but when you don't have a budget to do anything to help promote the magazine, to help circulate the magazine, you don't have very much money to build everything you want to build with the Web site, so you're competing with these companies when you don't have the resources to do so, you're letting people go instead of hiring people, it's just sort of a bad situation.
