massively

In Mourning

by

So It Happened

statesman_dead A couple of days ago I talked about the present rumor that AOL would be shutting down all of its enthusiast press websites… as far as we are concerned that was Joystiq, Massively and WoW Insider.  Yesterday I first saw that it was officially in reading Brianna Royce’s touching announcement on Massively.  I have to saw that as well written as it was… it was breaking my heart to be reading it.  At this point I am not really sure how much of meaning I have to say about it.  It just flat sucks, and seems to follow the model that everything AOL lays its hands on goes to shit.  The most frustrating part is that it seems so senseless considering that from what I could tell all of the publications were doing swimmingly, in spite of draconic and ham-handed budget cuts.  I feel bad because I really did not follow Joystiq at all, but I did however read Massively and WoW Insider on a near daily basis.

While I didn’t always agree with every article, I felt like the site needed to exist.  There is a blogger that I am not even going to dignify by naming, that seems to be dancing on their grave with their “I Hope Massively Shuts Down” post.  I am done with that site and anything associated with it, and I think it was the last straw for a lot of people who had long only half heartedly followed it.  In fact I am officially done with rant blogs in any fashion.  But all of this is side tracking me from the purpose of today’s post.  I feel strongly that all of these writers will find homes either in community work or on another gaming website.  Today I compiled the list of twitter accounts for the writers that had them, for Massively and WoW Insider.  I figure this is the best way to follow people and see what they end up doing over the coming months.  February third will be the final day of all of the Joystiq connected sites.

Massively Cast

WoW Insider Cast

Pax South Panel Rundown

I had happy things to talk about in Final Fantasy XIV… but quite honestly after writing the first part of today’s post I am really not amped up and prepared to write them.  Instead I am going to close out today’s post with something I have been working on over the last few weeks.  One of the cool things about the age we live in is that sooner or later most things end up on Youtube.  For those that did not have the benefit of travelling to San Antonio for the inaugural Pax South show… or if you are like me and missed a bunch of the panels because you were doing other things…  I thought I would compile a list of everything that I could find online.  I did not record any of these and as such I do not take any responsibility for the quality… but this is the best of what I could find.

Game Panels

Conversation Panels

I am still missing a LOT of panels, but as I find them I will try and update the list to include them.  One of the big problems that I saw was that Gearbox and Bioware were pretty much doing their own things… and NONE of their panels were listed on the official Pax South registry, making it really hard to catch them.  I am really hoping I can find recordings of some of the ones by Bioware, but for those I don’t even know the name of said presentations to go off of.  If you know of any obvious ones that I am missing, I would appreciate a comment below to let me know.  In any case, I hope you have an awesome weekend and that you go out and do awesome things…  to help us forget that our gaming ecosystem is suffering a loss.