TeamXbox

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

~ the goodbye ~

console fan sites were not my crowd. i was on the pc side across most of the 2000s: half-life mods and cs 1.6 in the ankara internet cafes. the doom 3 install came piece by piece over ttnet dsl. the original xbox never had a serious footprint in turkey. the console-specific fan communities that grew up around it in the us and uk were part of an ecosystem i read about but did not join.

teamxbox launched in 2000, around the run-up to the original microsoft console. brent "shockwave" soboleski and steve "bart" barton built it as a fan hub for news and forums. by 2001 sol najimi's msxbox agreed to fold its forum community in, and the combined site was one of the biggest microsoft-console communities on the english web. ign entertainment acquired teamxbox on 21 october 2003, then ign itself was bought by news corp in 2005. the site kept running as an ign network property through the 360 era.

the news desk stopped updating in august 2012. the site was left as a static archive of previous content under teamxbox.com. on 1 march 2018 the domain went offline entirely. by then ign had been consolidating its network properties into ign.com for several years, and teamxbox was one of the ones that did not get folded, just abandoned.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the model was archetypal 2000s fan-site: preview coverage of upcoming xbox games with review scores tied to release calendars, plus big active forums where members argued over hardware revisions. there was a video production side by 2010 with previews and a social-media integration layer that let members cross-post to the newer platforms. at various points in the 2000s teamxbox was one of the largest english-language xbox communities on the web.

the position was awkward once ign bought it. teamxbox was one of a stack of platform-specific ign properties covering the same games as ign.com. gamespy was the other big-ticket acquisition on the ign side, alongside various platform-specific fan communities that ign accumulated as it built its network.

~ the decline ~

by 2010 the staff had shrunk to a small team of volunteers doing preview production and community moderation. ign had been through waves of layoffs. traffic on platform-specific fan sites was moving toward twitter and reddit conversations that ign could not monetize the way it had monetized banner-heavy 2005-era pages. the consolidation logic was straightforward: fold the network properties into ign.com, keep the strongest brands, retire the rest.

~ the postmortem ~

in august 2012 teamxbox stopped publishing new content. no shutdown notice, no farewell post. the archive sat at teamxbox.com for another five and a half years, still queryable through google and still linked from old forum signature blocks across the internet. on 1 march 2018 the domain became inaccessible. by then ign had moved everything that mattered onto ign.com, and the archive was one of the pieces that did not get migrated.

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