WarCry Network

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

~ the obit ~

Every game WarCry covered wanted a card. A real one, billed monthly in dollars, held by somebody a foreign payment processor would accept, and in Turkey in the early 2000s that was a genuine obstacle rather than an inconvenience. My own time in a persistent world went to Ultima Online private servers, which asked for nothing. That has a consequence nobody talks about: a game with no publisher has no news. Nothing is announced, no patch notes arrive from a company, no expansion gets a release date. There was nothing for a site like WarCry to report on, because the whole apparatus that generates gaming press did not exist on the servers I was on.

WarCry itself started as something else. Alexander Macris founded WarCry Corp in 1997 to develop and publish online games, and the portal at warcry.com only went up on 21 May 1999. In 2001 it bought the assets of Crossroads Gaming Network, known as XRGaming, which had been drowning in the dot-com collapse. The merged company kept the WarCry name and dropped the game development entirely, keeping XRGaming's specialty instead: coverage of the massively multiplayer genre.

What it became was a network in the older sense. Not one site but a cluster of them, each dedicated to a single world, with its own forums and its own reference database attached. At full extent it ran dedicated database pages for no fewer than twenty-nine online games, from World of Warcraft and EverQuest 2 down to titles whose own publishers barely maintained a site. Developer interviews were the house specialty and studios linked back to them from their own official pages.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a network meant then ~

Before a wiki could be spun up for any game in an afternoon, a database was labor. Somebody had to record drop rates and item stats by hand and keep them current across patches, and somebody had to pay for the bandwidth serving them. Sites like WarCry did that in exchange for advertising against the traffic, and for a decade the arrangement held.

Its contemporaries were Stratics, the Vault Network under IGN, Coldfront, and later Ten Ton Hammer. Most of them are gone in the same way, which is to say not through any single failure but because the labor stopped being worth what it cost once official wikis and Reddit and the games' own in-client browsers absorbed the work for free.

~ the corporate chain ~

Macris and Thomas Kurz set up Themis Group in August 2001 as a consultancy for studios building these games, and Macris sold his stake in WarCry, so for a while the two were separate concerns. On 12 July 2005 Themis launched The Escapist as a weekly online magazine with Macris as publisher. By 2007 WarCry and The Escapist were running on the same software with the same layout, sitting inside a division called Themis Media, and in October 2008 the consultancy side was folded in so the whole company pointed at the two websites.

Alloy Digital bought Themis Group in 2012, and Alloy became Defy Media. From there WarCry was one property among dozens inside a digital media roll-up that had raised money against the belief that online video and young-audience content would keep scaling. It did not.

~ the day the parent went ~

Enthusiast Gaming bought The Escapist in July 2018 and the deal did not include WarCry. That is the moment the outcome was fixed, four months early. Somebody looked at the two sites and valued one of them, then left the older one inside a company that was already running out of road.

Defy Media closed in November 2018, abruptly enough that staff learned of it the same day. WarCry went offline in the liquidation. There was no farewell post and no attempt to hand nineteen years of interviews and databases to anyone who might have wanted them. The last full capture of the front page is from 13 May 2018, and warcry.com now returns a 404 from a server that no longer knows what used to be there.

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