Massively.com is Closing, Officially

This is not something we want to write, even though Massively is our closest competitor. The venerable MMO news and opinion site is being shutter down on Tuesday, February 3rd as a part of parent company AOL's restructuring.

Editor in Chief Bree Royce took to the site to announce the closure:

This week, we learned our AOL overlords have decided that they no longer wish to be in the enthusiast blog business and are shutting all of them down. This mass-sunset includes decade-old gaming journalism icon Joystiq, and therefore, it includes us. February 3rd, 2015, will be the final day of operation for Massively-that-was. I would like to be able to tell you truthfully that this is an equitable and just decision that makes some sort of logical sense, but the reality is that our overlords' decisions have always been unfathomable. I know more of what I know about corporate from reading tech and finance news than through my own job. We all suspected this was coming eventually a year ago when a VP whose name I don't even know and who never read our site chose to reward our staggering, hard-won 40% year-over-year page view growth by... hacking our budget in half. There's nothing to do in the face of that kind of logic but throw your hands in the air. It's not about merit or lack thereof, and it's not about journalism or gaming being dead or anything grand like that, so there's no point in taking it personally.

Some will take this closure as a sign of the times, or a sign of the MMO decline... this isn't that. Those may be true in some sense, but Massively had/has been doing fine for years. This is a clear case of people at top cutting those below them to save their numbers when they go to a shareholder meeting.

If I have one wish, it would be for Massively and Joystiq and others affected to get bought up by someone with sense to rebuild the sites instead of wasting their brand and loyal communities. 

But that won't happen, because the world's not fair. Instead, we're losing a valuable resource for our favorite genre's fans. If there's anything to come of this, hopefully some of those fine people at Massively get jobs elsewhere in the industry. Their voices will be missed.

Here's to you all at Massively... we salute you.