You can call me a hypocrite all you want. I won't deny that there is a hint of truth behind it, well, when it comes to Review Sites anyway and how I feel about them-- they seem more like fanboy marketing departments for games companies rather than consumer advocates sometimes. I used to follow Joystiq.com but more recently read their MMO focused site Massively regularly. Recently Joystiq dropped reviews for their games because they caused controversy and didn't align with Metacritic rules or whatever, but I suspect the real reason was that their bad reviews for games was affecting the salaries of the developers. This I think is bullshit. If the game is bad then say it's bad, controversy or not. Reviews should help consumers know if a product is good or bad, and if a game is released buggy and unplayable, then it is bad. You don't give benefit of the doubt to Devs.
Massively on the other hand is a really great MMO site and I have a lot of respect for them because they don't necessarily give MMOs reviews, but they play the hell out of MMO games for a long time, like years, and cover them with daily or weekly blogs, like ours on here on Pixlbit, because MMOs are always evolving and it just makes sense to have continued coverage. They've been covering every MMO release for years and I really appreciate the hard work that goes into doing that. It's pretty daunting. Their podcasts are very informative and they keep up to date with all the MMO news, patches, updates and even answer questions from followers and comments sections regularly.
So, it really pains me to see these two gaming sites go down. Although I have mixed issues about Joystiq, they did a hell of a job covering the gaming community for years plus their articles are more blog-like and personal which I enjoyed. First it was 1up.com, now Joystiq and Massively. Part of the reason I started blogging regularly was to fill a void that was left behind after 1up went down. I was considering giving blogging/gaming a break for a while but now that two more sites have gone down, I feel like I should be blogging more regularly than before, especially since Massively went down, which I visited daily actually.
Hopefully these sites will exist and live on in another format the way some 1up writers went over to USGamer. Speaking of which, USGamer has a new podcast which features Jeremy Parish and Bob Mackey, plus Kat Bailey is doing an RPG podcast soon.
As much as I like to complain about other sites, I still feel like the writing community is quite small and niche and I'd hate for more sites and their communites to disappear. Speaking of which the reason for the sites going down has some other bullshit to do with page views or something? I feel like more blogging is the best way to keep the game enthusiast fire alive.
What are y'alls thoughts on Joystiq, Massively and the AOL sites shutdowns in general. I feel like this is bigger news than Microsoft Hololens or whatever.
-asreal 
Comments