Massivley, WoW Insider, And Other Joystiq.com Websites To Close

By Bixyl Shuftan

Some sad news for gaming fans. Joystiq.com, the website that's the home of several caomputer gaming and computer websites, such as "Massively" and "WoW Insider," will be closing. Their final day of operations will be February 3, 2015. Joystiq was founded in 2004 as part of Weblogs, which was bought by AOL in 2005. It was AOL's primary gaming website, discussing MMOs and once in a while Second Life. It has been nominated for several awards for blogs of it's category and has been included in listings such as Forbes.com "Best of the Web."

Recode.net gave the reason as "part of an extensive house-cleaning of it's underperforming content properties." Editor in Chief Brianna Royce commented, "I would like to tell you truthfully that this is an equitable and just decision that makes some sort of logical sense, but the reality is that our overlords' decisions have always been unfathomable. ... a year ago ... a VP whose name I don't even know and who never read our site chose to reward our staggering hard-won 40% year-over-year page view growth by ... hacking our budget in half. There's nothing to do in the face of that kind of logic but throw your hands in the air." Royce had worked as the head editor at Massively for almost five years, "I came here as a geeky copyeditor, and am leaving with a fleet of good friends and a much deeper understanding of how and why my favorite genre runs the way it does, and it will forever influence how I play games and whose games I buy."

The closing comes just after hearing about the tragic news of their former editor Andrew Yoon drowning. He was 29.

Joystiq once had it's own Second Life newsletter, "Second Life Insider." Eventually, the staff was absorbed into Massively. Ciaran Laval on her blog stated when some gamers complained, they answered, "Maintaining editorial balance surrounding all of the many, varied games we cover is an ongoing proccess, and we've selected a suite of 'core games' based on many factors including subscriber/member numbers, overallbuzz and mindshare in the industry, and input from a secret algorithm I would love to call 'interestingness' if it weren't already taken. We are proud to offer in-depth Second Life coverage as one of those core current titles." Ciaran commented, "generally gaming magazines look down on Second Life. Massively ... most definitely did not look down on Second Life." The output did slow down over the years, especially after Tateru Nino stopped writing for them, but they never stopped entirely.

It's expected that the years of archived stories will remain online, at least for a while.

Ciaran concluded, "With a resurgence in virtual worlds likely ... having sites that will happily include that content in areas where such content may not be initially popular is important. Getting the concept of virtual worlds to a wider audience is very important. ... Joystiq played an important role in this the first time around. It will be a shame if they aren't playing a role when the new wave hits."

Sources: Redcode, Ciaran Laval, Massively.com, Wikipedia

Bixyl Shuftan