As of tomorrow, we’re seven years out from the launch of this site. This means that we’re actually into the point when I’ve been working here longer than I worked at the original Massively, and we’re actually going to have been running longer as an indie site than the original site was running at all. None of us actually talk about that all that often, generally tending to mention this stuff more as offhanded notes or bits of trivia here and there, but since this column actually does fall on the seven-year launch anniversary, I wanted to share some trivia.
Obviously, I’ve offered peeks behind the curtain before in this space, but today I want to turn the clock back to the days when we all first learned that our parent site informed us with very little preamble that we were getting shut down. Technically, all of Joystiq was getting shut down; we were just basically caught in the crossfire. And all of us were left figuring out what the hell we were going to do now, which led to discussion of launching a Kickstarter and going indie.
Which Bree was opposed to.
Lest this seem like I’m dragging our editor-in-chief here or something, nothing could be further from the truth. She and I talked about this a lot, and since I had not-so-recently left my other job to focus on writing full-time, we were a flashpoint for the debate. She quite legitimately didn’t want “failed Kickstarter” to be on any of our resumes as we looked for work, and it was a legitimate fear that this was far from a certain success.
And while we were definitely debating over whether or not to go for it, I explicitly agreed with her on that point. None of our discussions really accounted for the possibility that our Hail Mary throw of “let’s fund on Kickstarter and go fully indie” could actually work. My contention was entirely that if we tried and failed, well, at least we had tried. Sometimes people surprise you.
Those of you with long memories will recall how surprised we actually were. Our goal was $50,000 to start funding the site, and we had fully funded within 48 hours. And a lot of what happened after that was all in response to that mad, sudden, unexpected rush. We had thought we might be able to make it to funding; instead, it very quickly became a matter of how far we’d go and what stretch goals we’d make, with all of us embarking on a flurry of activity behind the scenes as we tried to figure out what the heck happened and holy crap people really do want this site to stick around.
I joked at one point in a WRUP intro that we had never really decided on our initial site design, that it just sort of happened as we were flinging things together and trying to get stuff to work. Obviously, no one takes 80% of what I say in WRUP seriously, but that was not actually so much a joke as a humorous observation of fact, since the initial site design plans didn’t work out and we had to chuck together a replacement the morning of launch. We went from launching an ambitious project none of us really thought would work to realizing in short order that this was definitely happening, and if you ever scroll all the way back to our first articles you can see that we hadn’t really established our plans just yet. We’d kind of thrown half an idea together, and while I’m proud to have the first regular column on the site (yes, the first installment of an ongoing column was Wisdom of Nym), we were still deciding on our exact plans and schedules even as we were launching the site and getting recognized.
Part of what helped this was the fact that studios, by and large, decided to cooperate. We retained all our contact information, and so our first few weeks were marked in part by reaching out to PR folks we knew and saying, “Hey, we’re all still here, we’re on a new site, please treat us like you always have, but we don’t have AOL on our back any longer.”
AÂ lot of the continuity of coverage you saw there did, in fact, rely upon the fact that studios, conventions, and PR in general let us basically import our existing relationships instead of having to establish ourselves from the ground up. I remember being at PAX East that year and finding so many representatives and studios expressing how happy they were that our Kickstarter succeeded and we were back on our feet, although I conveniently avoided mentioning that none of us were really planning on it until it happened.
I also fondly remember that this meant we could fully branch into World of Warcraft. Under AOL, we had a sister site that covered WoW exclusively, and while we did cover the game as just another MMO, we didn’t have a dedicated column about it – because why make duplicate content? As an indie team, we could, so we did.
What IÂ don’t remember is how our pitch meeting went for WoW Factor beyond just suggesting the name as a stupid pun that wound up becoming the header. Have I mentioned that we were kind of just flying by the collective seat of our pants back then?
Obviously, a lot has changed since those initial days, but it didn’t take long before stuff started to get pretty dang nuts in our sphere; heck, even though Daybreak spinning off from Sony happened after we’d been around for a couple months, it still coincided a lot with being one of our first “big” stories. We’ve kept most of our original writing crew, added more, and generally refined our process pretty well.
You don’t want to know what our backend looks like. We’ve cobbled together working code from a lot of separate fragments. All the magic that you see on the front end is assembled with great care and then hammered into working order, and my admittedly small amount of coding knowledge is basically enough to look at it and say, “Wow, that looks difficult.”
But as we’re passing into our next year of operation, as Blizzard is embroiled in a buyout and scandal, as several parts of our industry seem to be alternately flirting with disaster and success, and as things keep becoming weird all over the place as we continue to write about online games… well, sometimes it’s interesting to look back at that early chaos and see how things developed. We went from a collapse to a relaunch that we spent no small amount of time thinking would still sputter out at some point along the way before finally accepting that we do, in fact, seem to be sticking around. And it’s in no small part thanks to you readers who keep engaging, sharing our content, supporting us on Patreon, or even just reading and keeping the discussion going.
Hey, sometimes it’s just fun to look back at the past.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
