My Name is Nemo

To be a blogger in 2020 is to be anonymous.

To be an MMO blogger in 2020 is to simply not exist.

I'm talking about blogging in the traditional sense, of course, although the Influencer crowd would have you believe that Tumblr and YouTube channels --not to mention Instagram and TikTok-- are also blogging. While I don't doubt that the effort it takes to put together a good Influencer photoshoot can be pretty extensive and take up a ton of time, putting words on virtual paper in a blog is a pastime that has seen its heyday come and go. Those of us who continue to blog these days do it for the love (or compulsion) of writing, not to become internet famous.*

But just starting up a traditional blog in a TikTok world, and a gaming blog at that, is to be akin to shouting at the Void.

And if there was one way for me to participate in the online community and remain (relatively) unknown, this is it.

***

In case you're wondering, I'm actually happy about that. 

Back when blogs such as Righteous Orbs and The Pink Pigtail Inn were gathering places for one of the most popular video games on the market, getting into the blogroll was a bit of a big deal. It meant that Tam or Larisa actually read your blog and commented on it, which would give you a semi-official stamp of approval.** 

Even so, the biggest bump we ever got was from a couple of hundred hits per day to 3000, and that was when the old WOW Insider promoted a series I did concerning the Draenei and Sindorei, titled Two Sides of a Coin.

Nowadays, the blog watering holes are gone*** as people blogfaded, moved to other hobbies, or had real life intervene, and the MMO industry has shrunk considerably. Even the blogs that would bring in a lot of readers from outside the immediate WoW community, such as From Draenor With Love, have brought their stories to a satisfying ending.****

***

All of this isn't new, of course, but on the anniversary of WoW Classic just a few days ago I read all of these anniversary blog posts and I realized that throughout the entire year --with the lone exception of Ancient from Tome of the Ancient-- I didn't run into a single person in game who I used to play WoW with, blogger or no.

Obviously some of that is because quite a few of the current bloggers still playing Classic are overseas, and Blizz still won't let European players hang with North American ones, so there's that. But for others, real life dictates schedules and once you get settled on a server you tend to want to stay put. It's nothing like the blogger guilds of yesteryear.

As an experiment, I googled my co-mains and "Myzrael" just to see what would pop up, and my suspicions were confirmed when the first entries for each were this blog as well as Ancient's. In a WoW Armory era, there would have been tons of links for that before you'd see anything about blogs.

But given the lack of interest in MMO blogs in this day and age,***** the likelihood of someone trying to find info about a toon outside of the game are practically non-existent. Okay, not non-existent, but someone would have to have a real burning desire to try to find someone that way, despite knowing that there is no WoW Armory (and that Google doesn't search Discord servers/channels).

***

So I can blog to my heart's content and not worry about being recognized in game. Not that I ever really worried about that, but after the past year's worth of WoW Classic blogs I started to wonder if I was saying too much in some of my posts. (Like, you know, the last couple of posts.) But there's only so much sanitizing one person can do, so I'll just live with it.

After all, anonymity has its advantages.

 

 

 *Okay, some traditional bloggers can become internet famous, but the topics of those blogs are frequently topics that are about reading --such as the Romance genre-- or are sponsored by larger websites, such as the people who would in previous decades be known as columnists for newspapers or major magazines.

**I related the "OMG!!!! TAM COMMENTED ON OUR BLOG!!!!" story back when I was a guest on the Twisted Nether Blogcast back in 2012. And even then, I downplayed my real reaction by quite a bit.

***For a slice of nostalgia, The Pink Pigtail Inn still does exist at http://pinkpigtailinn.blogspot.com/. Alas, Righteous Orbs is long gone.

****I wonder what Vidyala would have thought about the storyline in BfA after having worked on FDWL all those years. I should ask her and see if she's interested in a guest column.

*****If you want to know about something in WoW Classic, you go to WoWHead or WoWpedia or.... you get the idea. Places, like the old Hots and Dots blog, that had full maps and descriptions of Vanilla instance content, are a thing of the past.

A Tale of Two Models

In the past week since I posted about the death of Joystiq and the sites Massively and WoW Insider, there's been a flurry of activity. Most notably, the "relaunch" of both Massively and WoW Insider as Massively Overpowered and Blizzard Watch.*

Both new sites have set up crowdfunding to help support the relaunches, with both garnering a lot of attention. Oh, not even in the same league as the attention paid to The Oatmeal's Exploding Kittens card game or Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick reprints, but they met (and exceeded) their respective goals very quickly.

And, to be honest, the selection of Massively OP's and Blizzard Watch's crowdfunding method is a perfect demonstration of "know your audience".

Massively OP went with Kickstarter to provide the seed money for the site and content, and will eventually use a combination of ad sales and Patreon funding to provide a steady revenue stream.** Given the prevalence of non-subscription based MMOs in the wider MMO landscape, this makes perfect sense to attract the diverse MMO player. When your audience prefers B2P and F2P games over the subscription based model, you go with a model that replicates the MMO online store as much as possible.

Blizzard Watch, however, decided to go straight up with a Patreon funding site to provide an (ostensibly) steady income. Again, this is perfect because of who they are hoping to attract: the WoW player who is used to plunking down $15/month to visit Azeroth. Sure, there will be online ads too, but creating --in effect-- a subscription based model of support demonstrates that they know their audience will not blink twice at another "subscription."

***

Now, I suppose the big question out there is whether both sites are sustainable in the long run.

I believe that both are sustainable, not only because there's enough interest out there in keeping both sites running, but because each economic model mirrors each site's potential audience.

The people who believe that the Patreon model may eventually bleed subscribers forget that we're talking about WoW here. Sure, the initial blast of subs may eventually go down, but there will always be the hard core to sustain the site. Just like the Castros in Cuba or WoW itself, people will come and go and predict the end of WoW (Insider) as we know it.

Massively OP's modus operandi, getting the seed money up front to get the operation running, works well because they can get everything running without having to worry about keeping subs right away. They realize that their core --those that will support Patreon-- is going to be smaller than a WoW based site, so a greater emphasis on initial startup and selling ad space alleviates those concerns.

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What will I do?

Probably not much; I'm on a tight budget that is frequently beset by (seemingly) monthly emergencies such as car repairs and new clothes***. If some money frees up, I'll look into sending a few dollars the sites' way, but I'm also likely to look into Netflix or Hulu as a potential replacement for our satellite service.****

I wish both new sites the best of luck, and here's to hoping both succeed beyond their wildest dreams.





*Massively OP for short.

**A (very) reduced version of the economic plan from the Massively OP Kickstarter page.

***Overheard at our house: "Really, you need new pants AGAIN? Just exactly what are you eating, kid, Miracle Gro plant food?"

****We get our internet connection through our local phone company, which is expanding a Fioptics network. If there were a way to get college basketball --my big sports weakness-- without needing a cable/satellite/FiOS package, I'd jump on board. For that reason, I'm watching Sling TV with a great deal of interest.


EtA: Fixed grammar bugs.

Changes

As the years went by, we drifted apart
When I heard that you were gone
I felt a shadow cross my heart
--from Nobody's Hero by Rush


Today, I had the duty of moving the links to Massively, WoW Insider, and the WoW Insider podcast to the Blogs in Mothballs section.

I wanted to make sure I grabbed this for posterity's sake. I still
regret not having done this for Righteous Orbs or The Pink Pigtail Inn.

The owner of Joystiq, AOL, has decided to get out of that end of content creation and is shutting down the domain. Collateral damage to that decision is that Massively and WoW Insider are forced to shut down as well.

According to Syp over at Bio Break (and Massively), Massively and WoW Insider were making money, but AOL decided not to be in the enthusiast gaming blog business.  By extension, it's likely that AOL would have been fine with that aspect of the business if they were making even more money.

This isn't exactly the first time a major corporation has decided to shut down and/or sell a division because it wasn't making "enough" money.* IBM got rid of their PC division to Lenovo. P&G sold Folgers and Jif. 3M sold off their boardgames division --which included Acquire and Facts in Five-- to Avalon Hill. The disappointing thing about all of this is that it smacks of a decision borne entirely from the finance department. I'm of the opinion that a little goodwill goes a long way, and the money saved by jettisoning Joystiq probably isn't enough to make more than a minor blip on the balance sheet.

Or this.

What Joystiq's shutdown is not, however, is a comment on video gaming in general. I'm 100% confident in saying this had nothing to do with Gamergate, the "MMOs are passe" trend, or anything resulting from a boycott (real or threatened). Last I checked, video games still command more dollars than movies or other forms of entertainment media, so if enthusiast sites like Joystiq are shut down, it isn't for a lack of broad popularity.

Because AOL shut down Joystiq with such a short lead-in time (and according to Syp there was originally supposed to be NO lead-in time, just termination notices), there was almost no time to get a successor site up and running. It is also likely that AOL will retain the rights to the names "Massively" and "WoW Insider", so any replacement site that the writers might want set up will have to come with a different name.**

***

It sucks to be in this situation, to be terminated so suddenly. I can really empathize with the writers since I've been in their situation, having been fired from a sales job back in the early 90s right after my college years. There's always the self recriminations that you hear when you're lying awake at night, wondering if you'd have done something differently this wouldn't have come to pass. Even when you tell yourself you did nothing wrong, and that is often quite likely the case, you can't keep that inner critic quiet. It nags at you, picking at the scab of your humiliation, and it won't. leave. you. alone. EVER.

At the same time, I make no bones about the fact that I stopped reading WoW Insider long before I gave up WoW itself. The first nail in the coffin was the shutting down of The Daily Quest, which I used to find interesting new blogs to read. When Chas and Tam from Righteous Orbs and Larisa from The Pink Pigtail Inn shut down their blogs there became precious few clearing houses for new WoW blogs, and TDQ filled that void for a while until it simply stopped being written.***

Next, there was the shutting down of the class bloggers. While I wasn't so hardcore about the game and the raiding emphasis that a lot of the bloggers took, I appreciated their expertise. And I would be lying if I didn't say I was thrilled to see Vidyala --someone I actually KNEW both in and out of game-- as the mage blogger. I'd read her blogs from the beginning --courtesy of Tam from Righteous Orbs-- and I was insanely proud of her to get the mage gig. But cutbacks being what they were, her time at WoW Insider was far too shortlived.

Finally, there was my decline in interest in the game throughout 2014, culminating in allowing my subscription to lapse. I'd poke around the site once in a great while, but the "all WoW all the time" nature of W:I really didn't hold the interest of someone who had moved away from the game.

***

I wasn't about to forget Massively either.

In the end, I suppose that this sort of change will lead to something new. No, I'm not sure what, but I can't imagine that the creativity that Massively and W:I had will simply vanish into the ether. The writers still play games, and they have that burning need to share things with others.

So it's not "goodbye." Not really, anyway. It's more "until we meet again".





*If Joystiq were making more money, AOL would have likely sold it to some potential buyer instead of simply shutting it down. My guess is that AOL felt that the process of selling was a money loser for them, so killing it was more cost effective. [You can insert whatever your thoughts are about corporate bean counters here.]

**AOL might even retain the rights to some of the column names, too. I've not seen the ownership agreements, so YMMV.

***I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that PC had been highlighted a few times on TDQ. Each time it happened I found out about it due to the sudden spike in readership, from the traditional 50-100 people reading the blog to a few thousand. I've discovered that when THAT happens, you suddenly don't need coffee that morning.


EtA: relapse:lapse.  tomato:tomahto.  Sheesh.