Today we are pleased to announce that GameDaily—meaning both the consumer oriented site and what you're reading now, GameDaily BIZ—has been acquired by AOL to become the flagship video games brand within the AOL Games network.

Although you can read about it in today's press release, you (our readers) deserve more than that. So with the help of AOL Games General Manager Ralph Rivera we've put together a brief Q&A, which will hopefully answer any questions you might have about what this deal means for AOL, GameDaily, and most importantly you, the reader.

Many readers really like GameDaily the way it is currently. How will this acquisition change the site?

It's more about how GameDaily is going to change AOL Games because what our major impetus was in picking up GameDaily wasn't to get GameDaily and make some extension of AOL Games; it's the other way around. It's really about bringing in GameDaily as our premier website around video games, and from an editorial perspective that's the driver. And so, I'm not looking to change anything from a GameDaily point of view with respect to what GameDaily stands for, or the editorial content or what have you.

I think that what GameDaily will benefit from that may lead to changes for the better are really things on the backend in terms of just sitting on top of better, more scaled infrastructure, publishing systems that we have, enterprise class publishing systems, download capabilities and stuff like that. And also just having a wider distribution that comes as part of being with AOL in that network.

Will the reader ever be required to pay for any of the content on GameDaily?

No. As a matter of fact, AOL is going free in general. You can come to AOL.com today and not have to pay for anything. And so on GameDaily we're not looking to change the business model, the advertiser support model. If there ever is something that is paid for, it may be a function of the spade of digital downloads and e-commerce around digital downloads, but that would be an industry thing. That isn't a function of GameDaily all of a sudden being a part of AOL and needing to pay for something as part of a subscription price or anything. That's definitely not the case.

What attracted AOL to GameDaily? Why make this deal?

I think there were three things that were real drivers for us to do this deal. First off is the editorial content. We felt that GameDaily's independent thinking and also its driving to reach a broader audience that goes beyond enthusiast and into the mainstream is something that resonates with our own programming strategy. The second thing is we like the notion of being able to serve the consumer but also serving the trade via the GameDaily BIZ newsletter. And the third thing is that it has a brand that resonates with the consumer and the industry overall. People know when you say GameDaily, you're talking video games. If you say AOL Games, depending on who you talk to they might be thinking casual, card and board games versus Grand Theft Auto or Halo 2. So picking up GameDaily gave us a very well established and well defined brand that will encapsulate all of our video game activities.

What would you say to the readers who think GameDaily "sold out," because there undoubtedly will be some who will make that accusation?

It's about the site. Continue to check out the site, and make your judgment based on what is happening editorially. It's not like we're hooking up a URL and substituting GameDaily people for AOL people. It's not like we're all of a sudden asking the people who put the words on the page to drink the Kool-Aid and to start thinking and saying different things. And so it's going to be the same people writing and voicing their opinions on the industry and on specific games as before and we're not giving any instruction to change that.

If anything, that would be the worst thing that we could possibly do because what we're looking to do is to pick up those voices and just give them a bigger stage. And for folks specifically in the industry—consumers might not be aware of this—we picked up Weblogs and in picking up Weblogs we picked up Engadget and also Joystiq, and anyone that's followed that knows that we've been very good about not messing around with their editorial style and voice.

What kind of integration with AOL will there be that might give the readers new AOL specific options to look forward to?

The one thing that we took an early lead on and we continue to be fairly effective in is the production of video based programming, and so things that we've done in the past like "Inside the Game" and high production level video features and flash animation and things like that. That's something that GameDaily hasn't really been well known for and it's something that I think AOL can bring into the mix because it's something that we've done for a while in the gaming space and really do quite well across AOL, so I think that's a significant thing that we can contribute from a content/editorial perspective.

And aside from that, as I mentioned before, just enterprise highly scaled infrastructure, distribution and publishing systems. And we've always been very well known for our community and we'll look into opportunities to tap into things like AIM and AIM Pages to bring more of a community around the content that GameDaily is generating.

From a business and advertising perspective, a lot of companies look to GameDaily as a great way to reach a video game audience with their brands. With AOL acquiring the site, GameDaily could be an even more attractive option for these companies, right?

Absolutely. I think one of the things that this acquisition does is it gives GameDaily a much broader stage on which to present its content. It's going to get a lot more eyeballs and the folks in the industry that are interested in reaching a broader audience with this great content will certainly be interested in GameDaily as a vehicle for advertising dollars. The other thing to note along those lines is that one of the benefits that we have is that because it's AOL it's not just video games. We also have sports, we also have music, and so we have the ability to integrate and circulate our traffic across related areas.

And so if there's a game that has a Snoop Dogg track in it, or if you're talking about a video game with certain actors in it or whatever we can cross promote that in movies—there are a lot of movies that turn into games—and we can cross promote that in movie channels, sports games we can cross promote in the sports channel, there's music flavors to games that we can cross promote. That creates opportunities for advertisers to hit the demographic they're interested in hitting in one shot, to be able to get that male 18-34 audience with games, music and movies.