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Whither IGE?
Pig at Wandering Goblin tries to connect the dots as to where, oh where our favorite gold sellers have gone. This time, with leaked background paperwork!
Affinity appears to be vomiting up disinformation like a bunch of outrageously dissipate fraternity boys. The company is involved in gold-selling. They are involved in virtual goods transactions. Hell, their CEO had the juevos to give an interview at the Virtual Goods Summit, while his subordinates were claiming the company was out of the virtual goods business.
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about 3 years ago
It’s too bad the market for bullshit is so saturated – it appears Affinity has a lot to spare.
about 3 years ago
I’m shocked, SHOCKED to find out they were lying.
No wait, what’s that other word that means the opposite?
about 3 years ago
So effectively, Affinity Media trying to distance itself from the negativity that association with IGE, Yantis, DEN with Marc Collins-Rector, RPG Holdings, MySuperSales, Rose Petal Galore and so forth generated isn’t really working out for it.
I’d say the people in the organization have an affinity for negative media…. /groan
about 3 years ago
Looks like I’m not the only one who is is a fan of the DaVinci Code :p
I got sent that document as well and showed it to a lawyer friend. He pretty much said that “based on that document there’s no question IGE bought Allakhazam and that Affinity is an affiliate of IGE”. I got more up over at that website where I get to play some guy on the internet.
about 3 years ago
Ah, that’d be the missing evidence then.
Burn IGE allready.
about 3 years ago
It’ll be interesting to see what sort of backpedalling they’ll do. Then again, they might claim all this stuff is false … at least until the next round of leaked papers rise up from the depths of the internet. Fun!
about 3 years ago
I don’t even know why they bother at this point. They obviously have money to burn so they can just tell ANYONE who wants to fork off a good spoiler site to have fun and go nuts.
If the site is worth a damn it will grow in users and ultimately need to pay a hosting bill and/or require so much time that it becomes untenable for a single/small group to operate as a “hobby”.
IGE, Affinity, whomever, then makes a modest offer and absorbs another site and all of the clicks, new and old alike, that it was generating. As any old sites become useless they can just dissolve them content in the fact that they, by way of deep pockets, have monopoly on said content.
There is a way out though and thine name is the WoW Armory. It’s effectively immune to any external monetary influences and has a singular understanding of the content. Add to that a strategic partnership with WoWWiki would pretty much lock IGE out of their game.
How many “small” spoiler sites are there anymore?
about 3 years ago
I wonder if its such a stretch for MMOG companies to start their OWN spoiler sites? SOE has a badly done version of such a creature with EQplayers.com. Time due for someone to put together something halfway competent. RMT and gold seller companies are just taking the money left on table by these games companies – simple as that. Frankly, I’m thinking the people running the MMOG games (upper management and bean counters) are such unimaginative business school rejects. No wonder the RMT people are running circles around them.
about 3 years ago
It is very expected of them. When you get caught, deny, deny and deny.
about 3 years ago
I wonder if the WoWHead guys will come clean or continue to insist they didn’t sell out to IGE.
Don’t get me wrong, a million smackers would tempt me too, but I’d like to think I’d have the guts not to LIE about it.
about 3 years ago
The Wowhead guys, like Allakhazam, were probably convinced through some careful FUD that ZAM/Affinity weren’t involved with IGE.
about 3 years ago
Or, you know, a million dollars. For those of you keeping score that would be one million tick-marks in the “pro” column.
The reality of the situation is that most people really don’t care. They don’t know who IGE, Yantis, et al are and wouldn’t care if you told them. They may agree that gold pharmers/sales are bad, but until it directly impacts them they will just nod and make the “coo-koo” sign in their mind as you talk.
These people (the vast, VAST majority) don’t care about the health of the industry. They don’t care about the economic and political ramifications for future games or even the possible legal problems that could arise. They play the game they play and use the sites they use. The rest is just bug guts on the windshield.
If the developers of these games want to truly strike at the hart of RMT purveyors they need to engage this 95% of players in the fight. Make RMT, farming and the associated behaviors something REAL to them beyond tell-spam or junk in their mailbox.
about 3 years ago
Hellfire wrote:
If the developers of these games want to truly strike at the hart of RMT purveyors they need to engage this 95% of players in the fight. Make RMT, farming and the associated behaviors something REAL to them beyond tell-spam or junk in their mailbox.
Bah, just stop writing gameplay that make it too easy for the RMT industry to make a lucrative living off it. “Engaging the 95% players etc.” is like determining what colors to paint the barn doors after all the horses have bolted.
about 3 years ago
One of the primary drivers for RMT is boring gameplay…
about 3 years ago
Honestly, I’d think a decent number of WoW players would care, at the very least. The spam was hellish for a while, it pissed a large number of people off.
As for caring who owns what site though, no. If it gives useful information in an easy format to use, it’ll be used. The best fight against that seems to be the armory, if it could scale well enough to support the number of hits it gets without coming to a thottbot style crashing halt.
about 3 years ago
For some odd reason, Hellfire, it doesn’t strike me as a bad thing if the majority of players don’t care. I presume they want to play WoW to play WoW, not to engage in some meta-game crusade against “gold farmers”.
Blizzard’s goal should be to ensure that the players have the freedom to not to care about the existence of gold farmers. Just like players should not have to care about the hardware configuration of the game servers.
As a side note, I find it disturbing people would rather have a fansite run by the Game Company than by Affinity. The conflict of interest of a gold farmer to an item site is a bit less than a game company to an item site. At least Affinity represents a third party.
about 3 years ago
[blockquote]The conflict of interest of a gold farmer to an item site is a bit less than a game company to an item site.[/blockquote]
How? The game company is encouraging people to pay money to play their game by providing easy access to information people want about the game. Where, exactly, is the conflict of interest?
I suppose the game company is less likely to tell you about possible exploits, but that’s about it.
about 3 years ago
Argle. Never try to do HTML tags before coffee.
about 3 years ago
Game companies publish (licensing or get a cut of) “how to win” guidebooks all the time. Fact is, some single person games are virtually impossible to complete without these guidebooks (ref the Toy Story 2 joke).
Is it such a stretch for a MMOG company to do a spoiler website (paysite even) to their own game? Its another revenue stream that games company management is leaving for the RMT peddlers.