Joystiq & Massively Joystiq Closing Down

[Edge-]

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.

It's also why sites like Upworthy exist despite them not putting out a single piece of original content. Clickbait nonsense utterly disgusts me. I don't even bother dignifying them with a page view to add to their MUV numbers, even if I have adblock turned on.

[Korgoth]

Why couldn't it have been Kotaku, no justice in this world.

[carnifex2005]

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'm thinking that it has everything to gamers going to Twitch and YouTube and watching the content instead of reading about it.

[Valeron]

well that rather sucks, it was my go to site for mmo related stuff

[Edge-]

I'm thinking that it has everything to gamers going to Twitch and YouTube and watching the content instead of reading about it.

Not really. Joystiq/Massively still had solid numbers in terms of monthly unique viewers, and both were involved in streaming content as well.

Don't get me wrong, there's definitely a fight between new media and old media going on right now, but this is more of a business decision on AOL's part to shift funds around than a response to market pressures.

[Arlee]

I'm thinking that it has everything to gamers going to Twitch and YouTube and watching the content instead of reading about it.

Probably true in a larger case, but that doesn't seem to be an actual factor here.. At least in Massively's case they had been building their readership over the years and where increasing year over year pretty substantially.

[dokilar]

i dont think i ever went to their site. i may have read a couple articles by some of their writers but i dont recall actively perusing their site.

sucks they lost their job.

[zealo]

Why couldn't it have been Kotaku, no justice in this world.

Gawker media in general, but they are far too big for that to happen at this time.

[Ranger007]

This is really upsetting news. I am very saddened to hear this and I'm in shock... and angry about it. AOL can go <expletive word> themselves.

I'm going to miss reading the articles at WoWJoystiq. I visited them every day, pretty much since 2006 (when I started playing WoW). I will miss the writers very much and I wish them all the very best. So sorry this is happening.

[Sketchy]

Around Azeroth...

I will miss that the most. Some of those screenshots were amazingly done and I looked forward to seeing them each week.
So sad to see the site go away. Around Azeroth was just a tiny portion of a huge website that so many mmo'ers came to visit.

[Acidbaron]

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 : /



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 >.>)

TTH used to be good but hasn't been for a long long time, used to be a premium member there, mmorpg yeah well that in addition that i what i said before their mod censorship is hilariously harsh if you dared to question SOE at times, i'll still keep track of MJ here the only writer that despite not always agreeing with actually had a none "taunting" writer style something others did. link to the blog here


Well while yes they want to focus their news on their specific sites but right now some of their specific sites can't be pulling much traffic, pool those together with links to their addon database and forums and in games information list combined with other not covered games and you can easily start filling up a gap and create more traffic. They have been trying to get growth of other mmo's since the last years with this closure momentum is created.

[Deleted]

Imo, the last year or so the actual content on the wow joystiq site was already sub par compared to before that.
Somewhere last year-ish (or before that?) they already toned down and kicked out many of the people that offered class specific posts and information and that girl that did the pvp stuff (I believe she moved to wowhead, ive seen a screen of her with some other guy/girl on there)
It's mostly warrior related posts on wow joystiq and almost every post has a warrior in the top picture nowadays which is that main guys main I believe?

I wish them all the best.

[MrExcelion]

http://wow.joystiq.com/2015/01/30/wo...s-logging-off/

Final article is up, feel free to add it to the OP

Yeah, it felt like people knew awhile back =[ I mean even the top of the site still talks about MoP

[Phookah]

This sucks. I check wowinsider everyday... No more.

[tss]

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

I love your avatar.

[Iamanerd]

This sucks I liked massively a lot and it kept me up-to-date with things, not sure what other sites cover MMO's as much as them but hopefully they make a site of their own!

[Davemetalhead]

Imo, the last year or so the actual content on the wow joystiq site was already sub par compared to before that.
Somewhere last year-ish (or before that?) they already toned down and kicked out many of the people that offered class specific posts and information and that girl that did the pvp stuff (I believe she moved to wowhead, ive seen a screen of her with some other guy/girl on there)
It's mostly warrior related posts on wow joystiq and almost every post has a warrior in the top picture nowadays which is that main guys main I believe?

I wish them all the best.

I believe they were forced to let a lot of people go, if I remember rightly AOL slashed their budget by a huge amount - it wasn't by choice.

It sucks, WoWInsider was one of the few sites I visited everyday for the last 8 years or so - I came across it during the beta for Lich King.

I will deeply miss it ...

[Valeron]

yeah both massively and wow insider had to cut their staffs roughly in half about a year or so ago

[Torais]

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.

Indeed.

WI started out decently but haven't felt all that relevant in recent years. I stopped reading quite a few years ago when it felt most of what they were putting out came off as either desperate Blizzard cheer-leading or sensationalist non-news.

I can think of worse sites that deserve such a fate far more then WI but I am not quite "getting" what all the mourning is about either.

[MatadorMedia]

WOW Insider reported they were closing for reals. So sad! Insider had some great articles and I definitely checked them every day. They updated a lot more than MMO-Champ because they were like a blog I could follow. =(