Massively

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

~ the obit ~

massively was the english-language mmo press, and i played mmos on turkish private servers when i played them at all. ultima online on sylveria and other turkish-hosted shards while donanimhaber and oyungezer carried whatever opinions on a patch or a server move actually mattered to me. massively existed for me as the place that wrote up wow expansion reviews in english when no turkish coverage was around yet. i read maybe one piece a month.

the site launched on november 2, 2007 inside aol's weblogs inc network, as a spinoff of joystiq's mmo coverage. the editorial format was daily news plus weekly columns for each major mmo. eve and wow stayed at the top of the rotation. the rest of the sony online entertainment and ncsoft catalog cycled through the column slots. the bench ran beta access for new launches and covered every mmo shutdown of the period.

aol shut the site down on february 3, 2015 along with joystiq and tuaw. wow insider went the same day. the staff had a kickstarter ready by the end of the week and relaunched as massively overpowered on february 10, 2015. that successor site is still publishing as of 2026. the original site at massively.com is gone, and the archive lives on whatever scrape the wayback managed to capture before the redirect went up.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the beat ~

massively had the mmo press beat in a way that the bigger gaming outlets did not. polygon could write an mmo piece every other month. massively wrote four a day. they covered ncsoft layoff news and mmo subscriber number leaks before the bigger outlets noticed. the depth was unmatched and unmonetizable, which is roughly always the shape of a beat that gets killed for budget reasons.

~ the day it died ~

the shutdown was a single email on january 30, 2015. four days later the lights were off. the bench was laid off as a unit. the team published a goodbye column on january 30 and a final coverage round on february 3. then the site froze.

~ what it became ~

massively overpowered launched on february 10, 2015, seven days after the parent site died. the writers ran a kickstarter and hit the goal and kept publishing. massivelyop.com is still active in 2026 with the same beat. the wow insider bench did something similar with blizzard watch. the staffs survived. the aol tech corporate parent did not. verizon folded what was left into yahoo and then sold the whole stack to apollo in 2021.

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