Joystiq & Massively Joystiq Closing Down

[Sorrior]

There's no place that was as reliable as Massively, IMO.

There are others, but you'll have to put together a hodgepodge of sites.

MMO Bomb has some pretty good articles and a great podcast (the one with Jason Winter), though they pretty much cover F2P games and don't put out much editorial content.
MMORPG covers a lot of news including non-MMO's, but their articles aren't on any set schedule and IMO their editorials/op-ed pieces are pretty "bleh".
MMO Site has awful writing, like, truly terrible, and pulls heavily from community/fan-posts for their content, but they do have a solid stream of news about Eastern MMO's.
On RPG/MMO Hut are alright. They cover a solid amount of news but they're nothing too special.
And that's really about it. ZAM is far too inconsistent in their news coverage nowadays, TTH barely writes anything and when they do it's generally pretty bad IMO, then a number of smaller sites that may or may not be worth peaking at (MMO Life, F2P.com, MMO Play, MMO Games etc.)

But really, I don't think there's any place that can come close to Massively : (

Yeah agreed.. Amazing how it takes that many sites to not even truly replace one.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The final Massively podcast.

[FluFF]

This was pretty obvious that it was coming, WoW Joystiq had openings months ago for new class writers but even after finding some many classes didn't had more than 1 new article for weeks, when those articles used to be weekly for every class.

To be fair WoW Joystiq already died when some of the long term class writers left months ago, even though the general news posts kept rolling, the class specific articles/guides/newsposts died and came to a stop.

[Edge-]

This was pretty obvious that it was coming, WoW Joystiq had openings months ago for new class writers but even after finding some many classes didn't had more than 1 new article for weeks, when those articles used to be weekly for every class.

To be fair WoW Joystiq already died when some of the long term class writers left months ago, even though the general news posts kept rolling, the class specific articles/guides/newsposts died and came to a stop.

WoW Insiders closing had nothing to do with its performance, or lack thereof (I've no clue how it was doing). It had to do with AOL closing down many of their blogging properties, specifically Joystiq (which is folding into Engadget) and the spinoffs of Engadget.

One reason why they stopped releasing some of the content they used to is that AOL cut a huge chunk of the budget for sites like Massively and WoW Insider (and some, though less of it, for Joystiq).

[Sharuko]

Massively didn't get many visitors, neither did Joystiq or WoW Insider (Joystiq averaged about 1.3 million monthly unique visitors over the last year and the other sites even less than that, per comScore). For comparison, Kotaku averages about 3.5 - 3.8 million. But a site like Massively was extremely influential in the MMO scene. They should literally make or break a game not only with their articles but the sites influential users. The MMO scene will definitely be missing a big and crucial part when they are gone.

I started going on Massively after Gamebreaker had banned me for idiotic reasons, I wonder if Gamerbreaker now tries to resurrect its site and become more like Massively (a MMO centric blog). Instead of the click bait stuff it has now.

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The thing that surprised me the most about this is that AOL is still a thing.

The AOL Network gets close to 200 million monthly unique visitors, which is HUGE. Mostly through Huffington Post, TMZ, Flixster and Mapquest. In the grand scheme of things the 2 million uniques for Joystiq, WoW Insider and Massively was really nothing which is why they probably felt it was disposable. But I am sure those sites didn't lose AOL any money. Crappy thing to do regardless of the situation.

[Graeham]

Unfortunately in today's society 'click bait' is what draws in the crowds. Most sites end up being more like the Daily Mail to stir up discussion and controversy because presenting a compelling and unbiased argument is becoming a rarity.

[dope_danny]

but kotaku is still around to talk about such hard hitting topics as "do japanese mcdonalds fries taste different?" and "my burnt toast kind of looks like a pokemon"...

[Krekko]

This has nothing to do with MMO's and everything to do with AOL being pants on head retarded. They are folding AUW/Joystiq (to large sites) into Engadget and axing others like Massively/WoW Insider (despite strong performance) to "realign assets" etc.

AOL really dropped the ball when they set WoW.com from WoWInsider to some failed website project they had.

That was the first sign to me that they didn't know WTF they were doing in the larger picture, and didn't care either way!

[xanzul]

Not a good sign for the MMO space as a whole. The money stream the site survived on must have been coming from somewhere.

Yes mmos are totally dying. Whatever. This can't possibly have anything to do with the fact that AOL does this all the time or anything. Nope mmos are totalyl dead.

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This has nothing to do with MMO's and everything to do with AOL being pants on head retarded. They are folding AUW/Joystiq (to large sites) into Engadget and axing others like Massively/WoW Insider (despite strong performance) to "realign assets" etc.

Super duper sad though. I really, really liked the site and most of its writers. It was always open for me and they had a steady stream of schedule news (pretty much hourly) as well as a nice group of diverse opinions. Hopefully they'll figure out a way to get most of them back under another site somewhere, because I'm going to miss the hell out of them. Can't think of another MMO news site I'd put anywhere near in terms of how much I enjoyed Massively and how much content they put out (that's good).

You will have to excuse Osmeric for his ignorant comments. For some reason he has a hardon for the death of all mmos and is constantly telling us the signs.

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The thing that surprised me the most about this is that AOL is still a thing.

They switched over to being a content provider some time ago. As in sites like Huffington Post and Engadget.

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I did not find either of these sites valuable to the intellectual discussion of video games. Indeed, I often found these sites to be corrosive to the discussion of video games- not the least of which were comments below.

The closure may be financially suspect based on the limited amount of investigation I did last night when first coming across the news on Reddit.

So again someone is butthurt that someone thinks differently and dares write about it.

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This was pretty obvious that it was coming, WoW Joystiq had openings months ago for new class writers but even after finding some many classes didn't had more than 1 new article for weeks, when those articles used to be weekly for every class.

To be fair WoW Joystiq already died when some of the long term class writers left months ago, even though the general news posts kept rolling, the class specific articles/guides/newsposts died and came to a stop.

What? Wow Insider was always more about lore and the social aspects of the game. The class stuff was always secondary. You would know this if you had actually looked at the site regularly.

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Unfortunately in today's society 'click bait' is what draws in the crowds. Most sites end up being more like the Daily Mail to stir up discussion and controversy because presenting a compelling and unbiased argument is becoming a rarity.

Can someone give me an example of "clickbait" from either Wow Insider or Massively? Because I follow both sites regularly and I haven't see that. At all.

[Vogyn]

When I played WoW I remember WowInsider fondly. I had that site opened 24/7. You could tell everyone had a lot of fun writing the articles and it was my favorite place to visit. There's really nothing else like it and I feel for em. Down with Aol.

[mmocc3a3dda21e]

I'm devastated ='( I visit Joystiq and WoW Insider daily, I love them. Watch their last stream now! ----> http://www.twitch.tv/Joystiq They are playing Super Smash on Wii U.

[Acidbaron]

The things i'll miss the most on wowinsider are probably the random lore blogs that go in deeper about certain figures. I like the last one about the corrupted titan what will probably and eventually play a big role in WoW.

[Edge-]

Aaaannnnnddddd they're gone : (

However, on the bright side, it seems like some of the folks from Massively are migrating to something new.

http://www.massivelyop.com/
https://twitter.com/massivelyop

[Eldryth]

Massively will be coming back as massivelyop.com! It's not up yet, but they linked it in their final post.

I believe they'll be using Patreon, since they don't have a corporate owner anymore.

Edit: And Edge beat me to it while I was typing!

[Orange Joe]

In case some don't read the wow gen section.



Wow insider is being relaunched as http://blizzardwatch.com/

[Sorrior]

I will certainly support them all hail the new Era.

[carnifex2005]

Me too. Never realized how great their content is for MMO's until I tried to look for an alternative site after the news broke.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The final post from the team.

[Junkdepot]

The site has been re-incarnated as BlizzardWatch. They're being funded through a monthly funding site called Patreon at this point. They just hit the $10k per month to bring back expanded class columnists. Pretty exciting to see how much support they have gotten from the community.

[Zeta333]

Well seems aol has taken a massive shit and shutdown at least my goto gaming new site for the past 10 years.

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/02...d-wow-insider/

http://www.joystiq.com/2015/02/03/there-is-no-end/

seems joystiq will attempt to be rolled up into endgaget but we will see how that works.