It was a horrible situation, but it looks like it wasn’t UGO who laid the people off. It sounded like they hired as many people as they could. It sucks, but I still expect great work from the remainder of the 1up staff. 1up Yours and Retronauts are going to come back at some point. The 1up FM crew started a new podcast called Rebel FM and the 1up Show crew is working on some new stuff as well. I think the only people really hurt by this are the 1up.com staff. They gotta carry a huge burden, but it’s almost a good thing. Now the 1up style of games commentary is being spread to different places. It will just a take a bit for everything to get going again.
I never realized how huge 1up’s following was when neogaf was down because of the 1up support thread that was made and when Valve put out a graph of their user activity for the day. When the news broke out, there was a huge negative spike in their server activity.
edit- And this has nothing to do with the recession. EGM was on their way out because print media is in trouble and Ziff Davis doesn’t want anything to do with print anymore that’s why PCMag isn’t printed anymore and don’t forget Ziff Davis has a huge debt they need to pay off.