This is pretty big news for the UK games magazine industry – Highbury House Communications, the parent company of Highbury Entertainment (of GamesTM, Play, etc) is now up for sale having had its shares delisted and announcing that it’s £31 million in debt.

You probably won’t remember that Future Publishing was looking at buying them back in April 2005 (I talked about it here) so I’m sure that’ll happen now. The OFT might not have been happy before but a monopoly is preferable to a few thousand people being out of jobs, and now that Uncooked Media and Imagine Publishing are on the scene it might have even been allowed anyway.

The annoying this is that Highbury Entertainment is very profitable, but thanks to the parent company’s insistence on publishing an endless stream of cross-stitching and health magazines the whole thing’s in trouble. Hopefully it makes it through because there are some good guys and decent magazines there.