Joystiq & Massively Joystiq Closing Down

[Val the Moofia Boss]

http://massively.joystiq.com/2015/01...ively-that-was
http://www.joystiq.com/2015/01/27/joystiq-closing-shop/

My condolences.

[Osmeric]

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

[iriecolorado]

"Rumor."

/fail

[Val the Moofia Boss]

"Rumor."

Not rumor; "official", if you had actually read the article.

[Worgoblin]

It's not April 1st. Fuck.

I check massively every day.

[Poysonivy]

I regularly visited wow.joystiq.com (formerly wow.com) to read their articles. Often I found out new stuff by reading the players comments. I Kinda look at reddit/r/wow more though. Shame AOL pulls the plug. Good luck to the writers to find new jobs.

[Chaosseed]

"Rumor."

/fail

It's confirmed by Massively themselves.

[Acidbaron]

If this is true, it is bad news for a the "few" good writers they had left. It would explain their bait articles, that increased over the years, sadly as it attracts a certain type of viewers it pushed a frequent visitor like me away as it felt like online tabloid reading and if i want to melt my brain cells i have more enjoyable ways of doing that.

I no longer visited the site beyond a quick overview of news, all my other gaming news on the PC come from PC gamer what i to be a more focused and superior news format.

Probably will keep track of MJ, beyond that can't think of another writer right now.

[Goosebump]

Bad news - hope the staff involved get hooked up with a new gig quickly. Maybe they can launch their own venture, free of large corporate faceless numpties.

[Edge-]

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

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).

[Graeham]

That's a shame. I'm not too well versed with gaming discussion sites these days though. I assume it was one of the better ones?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

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).

I feel the exact same way Edge; loved Massively, and probably one of my most visited sites. Now I don't know where to go to read about MMO news from here; I'm homeless!

[Chickat]

What a shame. Maybe curse and WoWhead can hire some of them?

[unholytestament]

That's a shame. I'm not too well versed with gaming discussion sites these days though. I assume it was one of the better ones?

Eh, they were better than Kotaku and its ilk. They still would put out awful click bait, just not to same degree.

[Ratboy]

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

[Zoaric]

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

I know, right? I had to reread it the first time I saw the story.

[Acidbaron]

What a shame. Maybe curse and WoWhead can hire some of them?

If they are smart, curse would start up a news site that use all their existing sites and create a more "universal" platform adding other tidbits. depends how much revenue is in there but would cover a good corner of the mmo news reporting.

As beyond massively you have mmorgp.com and while i don't particular like massively with a few exceptions on their staff, mmorpg.com is just even worse, actually haven't even checked back on mmorpg.com since years perhaps a time to see if they improved and are no longer the SOE whiteknights as they were back then.

[Moxal]

What a shame, I checked massively regularly. Good luck to the staff to find new work.

[Edge-]

I feel the exact same way Edge; loved Massively, and probably one of my most visited sites. Now I don't know where to go to read about MMO news from here; I'm homeless!

Yeah, I'm running through the sites in my head now...

MMO Site has some decent Asian news, but their articles are pretty awful and a lot of them are crowdsourced from their forums.
MMORPG has the worst posters ever and their news is very inconsistent, not to mention I really dislike many of their opinion pieces and think their writers are generally idiots.
Ten Ton Hammer barely writes anything, and what they do write is generally fucking awful.
ZAM has really sporadic news coverage and little interesting unique content.
MMO Bomb I like, but they really don't write that much news unfortunately (but they do have Jason Winter! He's rad and I still have the final print issue of Beckett Massive Online Gamer!)
Then a number of other smaller ones that are of varying quality : /

If they are smart, curse would start up a news site that use all their existing sites and create a more "universal" platform adding other tidbits. depends how much revenue is in there but would cover a good corner of the mmo news reporting.

They used to do something like this. They had a decent size news team that covered gaming news in general for a while. I guess they didn't like how it was performing because the frequency/variety of articles is far smaller now.

But if they were to just aggregate everything in one place it would drive too much traffic from each of the community sites, which would lower engagement etc. etc. (this is all assumptions/supposition on my part, I have no information on the internal workings of Curse or even MMOC >.>)

[Arlee]

Eh, they were better than Kotaku and its ilk. They still would put out awful click bait, just not to same degree.

The thing is, clickbait works... and not just sort of it works REALLY well. Clickbait articles get substantially more views than many real and thoughtful articles. basically thousands of clicks verses a few hundred (to give a bit of a idea on scale). It's why there always seems to be more clickbait out there. It works.

I'm rather sad to see it joystiq and it's divisions go It's kinda rough out there, but I hope they find good things quickly.