It's been no secret that Ziff Davis has been looking to sell 1up.com and its associated video game publications for quite some time. Rumors that the magazine publisher was shopping its video game publications around have been circulating for approximately two years; at one time it was even reported that Dell would be acquiring 1up.com. While that turned out to be false, Ziff Davis finally succeeded in unloading 1up to Hearst-owned UGO Network, whereupon things took a definite turn for worse.

The sale, it was announced, would bring 1up.com, Mycheats.com, Gametab.com, and GameVideos.com under UGO's control. In the official announcement, UGO CEO J Moses made it sound like his company wouldn't actually be changing too much about 1up. "The acquisition of 1up, with its authentic voice, tenured editorial personalities and bustling user community, allows us to expand our base of quality content and represents a major step forward in UGO's mission to become the leader in the games space." The announcement also stated that 1up would "stand beside UGO as a flagship brand." A few hours later, though, it was revealed that this was far from the truth, as Ziff Davis seemed intent on thoroughly gutting its online publications before it changed hands.

Even though Ziff Davis CEO Jason Young claimed—via an internal e-mail sent to his employees shortly after the sale was announced—that "many of our employees will travel with this business and become part of the UGO team," it seems that this was not to be. Gamasutra received some inside information that, at roughly the same time, a large percentage of Ziff Davis' Game Group suddenly found itself unemployed. According to various reports, 30 members of the editorial, podcast, and video production staff was promptly told that it was fired. The detailed list of those who are now jobless is rather staggering. This is well beyond a corporate bloodbath, it's a scorched-earth policy with only a few survivors.

Adding another nail to the coffin was the simultaneous announcement that Ziff Davis would be shutting down production on its popular Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine, which has been in production for nearly twenty years: this month's issue will be its last. "With demand for print continuing to decline amongst both advertisers and readers," Young said in his e-mail, "and the content being produced by 1up no longer available for use in the publication, it simply did not make sense for us to move forward with this business any longer."

When asked about the massive layoffs, 1up site director Sam Kennedy told MTV Multiplayer the answers lay with his former bosses. "Honestly, questions like that have to go to Ziff Davis at this point," said Kennedy. "All I can say to that is UGO held onto as many people as they could to run the business going forward and [kept] a lot of all-star key players."

To say this news is staggering is to put it lightly. 1up has been one of the major players in the industry of video game journalism since it was launched in 2003, and it managed to survive for quite some time in spite of the deaths of several excellent sibling magazines like GMR, Official U.S. Playstation Magazine, and Computer Gaming World. Meanwhile, the fact that Ziff Davis is resorting to cost-cutting measures like these implies that things may be far worse at the magazine publisher than has been let known: while no one expected things to be pretty after the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, it seems safe to say that no one saw this coming, either.