Joystiq

» see joystiq.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

joystiq launched in june 2004, the back half of my twenties for me, the front half of the modern console era for everyone else. peter rojas had built engadget the year before and figured games were too big a category to keep stuffing into the corner of a gadget blog. weblogs inc spun off a dedicated room. aol bought the whole network for about 25 million in october 2005, and joystiq became the games blog inside a media company that did not really care about games.

chris grant ran the place from 2007 to 2012 and that is when it mattered most. the joystiq podcast hit a regular cadence. justin and griffin mcelroy turned reviews and weekend coverage into a personality-driven feed before that was the obvious move. wow insider and massively clustered around it as sister blogs, with the engadget gaming feed running on the same weblogs inc cms.

in 2012 grant left for polygon and took justin and griffin with him. polygon was the longform-investigative version of what joystiq had been building toward, a designer-magazine project the format finally got room to make. ludwig kietzmann kept the lights on for another three years but the center of gravity was already gone. on february 3, 2015 aol pulled the plug. tuaw and massively went the same day. by then turkish games coverage was on donanimhaber and oyungezer anyway, and the english-language games blog era had migrated to youtube and twitter.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

a games blog with a beat-reporter structure rare for the category. e3 liveblogs and post-keynote analysis, review coverage spanning xbox 360, ps3, pc, ds, and psp. when a publisher leaked a slide deck or shipped a broken patch, joystiq was the place that wrote it up before the press releases caught up.

~ what got buried with it ~

the aol tech model of paying a small dedicated bench to cover one beat to the bone. polygon, kotaku, ign, and eurogamer absorbed the writers but the multi-blog network structure was already obsolete. tuaw covered apple, joystiq games, engadget gadgets, autoblog cars. that vertical-blog economy worked once. by the end of 2015 it was over.

~ the long tail ~

the mcelroys went on to build my brother my brother and me into one of the largest independent comedy podcast networks. ludwig kietzmann landed at humble bundle. chris grant is still running polygon at vox media as of writing. the joystiq archive sat at the original domain for about a year, then redirected to engadget, and is now intermittently accessible through the wayback machine.

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