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WoW Database Site Sells For $1 Million
MattHock writes "Wowhead (a WoW information database) has been sold to ZAM (Affinity Media) for the price of $1 million. ZAM is the owner of several other WoW databases, including Thottbot and Allakhazam. Until recently Affinity was also the owner of IGE, a highly controversial company that sold in-game wealth for real life money. Affinity recently sold IGE, which Wowhead claims as the reason they allowed the sale to go through. But did ZAM really sell IGE? The blogger who put this story online doubts that IGE and ZAM have actually distanced themselves. He believes that the supposed sale was just actually a means of restructuring to hide the relationship, similar to how IGE's relationship to Thottbot was hidden for a number of months through a convoluted set of parent companies."
From wowhead's press release, they were explicitly told that neither ZAM or its parent companies controlled IGE or other gold-selling operations, and that no gold-selling ads would appear on wowhead.
Ultimately, as long as no gold selling ads appear, the wowhead user won't see a difference, and the wowhead staffers pocket a good chunk of change. Whether ZAM in fact does own IGE or support chinafarmers isn't relevant as long as it's properly compartmentalized away from wowhead.
how much is that in gold?
sigfault. core dumped.
Wait how do they make money?
Then what the hell did my doctor prescribe me? I'M SO ANXIOUS.
The rsit like of TFA:
There's a lot of buzz in the World of Warcraft fan site universe this morning, with reports and rumors flying about fan sites being sold, about $1 million sale prices...
not quite as exciting as the slashdot headline I guess...
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
this is just an attempt to suck someone else into buying into it. no wow site is worth 1 million or even CLOSE
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Wowhead (a WoW information database) has to ZAM (Affinity Media) for the price of $1 Million.
Has to what? WHAT?! DAMN YOU, MattHock! I NEED TO KNOW!
The World's Worst Webcomic!
but 'just' goes after 'actually' and you can't remove the verb 'bought' from the first sentence just because it's in the headline. I hate to be this guy, but that blurb was just about the most painful read I've experienced in recent memory.
This sale is probably a bad thing, in terms of quality of the site as it currently stands. Thottbot was used to launch that .ani vulnerability a while back too. I expect more adverts, changes in the design to accommodate more adverts, a flood of new users filling it with crap and spam just like all the other sites...
Still, not bad money for what is essentially a pretty front-end to content other people have created for you! What a shame that something about the whole deal just seems...suspicious. The press release is cringeworthy - full of "We're sure these guys are HIP and COOL!" and "We'd NEVER do anything EVIL! We're not GOOGLE!" crud.
Can someone translate this article into English for the rest of us please?
WoW? WoW Database? WoWHead? Database site?
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
"Wait how do they make money?"
Simple. They just buy it!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
He worked for them.
He bought thottbot for IGE.
He has more cred than you.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I first parsed the title as "DoD Database" and wondered why it only fetched $1m. And then I saw that it was this boring drivel.
That's 50 VW beetles. ... ow, you wanted it in gold?
.. as the best gnome I can be .. I will tell you for a price, how about that?
That's 500 arcane crystals please!
or no
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I contributed to that database, as did many other players. Where's our cut of the profit for the sale of our game data?
I don't get the "money" tag.
Is it used to tag stories that are about money? Obviously not, because this about the specific sale of a site, not about money itself.
Is it used to tag stories that involve the transaction of money? Possibly, but so many things in our commercial world involve the transaction of money, the tag would become useless if applied with any consistency. Besides, the "business" tag is far more appropriate.
Is it used with a negative connotation to demonise certain parties in certain mutual transactions? Probably, but I hope someone will contradict me.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Each time he has given the WoW character to the buyer when the payment came through, and each time he was able to get the character back via Blizzard. But they must be getting tired of this, and I don't know how long they will keep giving him back his "stolen" WoW account.
I told him to wait for a week (or two?) until the money has finally cleared before giving the WoW account to the buyer. He says no buyer would go along with this - how do they know he's not just scamming them?
Overall, this has been a unpleasant experience. I have no idea if these fraudulent transactions are threatening cancellation of my PayPal account, hurting my credit rating, or whatever. Another mysterious thing - someone (unrelated to any purchase) deposited $0.01 into my PayPal account.
Each one of these buyers, when contacted via email, simply didn't answer. If their accounts had been stolen - say via all those PayPal phishing emails - as PayPal suggests, one would think they would at least have the courtesy to reply that "yes, my account was stolen, and I didn't authorized that transaction" - but no, silence. Weird.
So, I have no idea how he can sell his WoW character reliably. As an outsider, to me the WoW community looks like a den of thieves and scammers. How do other people sell their characters? How does the seller insure the buyer won't reverse the payment? How does the buyer prevent the seller from taking it back, claiming it "stolen"?
I have no idea what you just said.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I used to work for Allakhazam, and I was employed around the time of the Affinity Media/Allakhazam merger, and I can tell you, before the owners of Allakhazam.com signed any papers to sell the site, they wanted to make sure that the site was as far removed from the IGE portion of the company as possible. Their stance has always, and probably will always be that the selling of virtual currency degrades the experience for everyone. There was a huge uproar on the forums about this merger just for the possibility of there being gold selling ads on the site, and the site lost a few subscribers based on the fact the Affinity would be involved somehow. But it was always the stance of the admins and owners of the Allakhazam site that RMT ads were not tolerated in any way, and worked hard to stamp out those ads.
Anyway, perhaps I should give my son a "timeout" for doing something shady. Too bad he's grown bigger than me.
And now in Yiddish, please?
Oy, you better record this. This is going to sound soooo good.
How can I believe any of this is true? I read on another site that a former employee says this is all false.
John: I would strongly caution people not to believe all the rumors they read. For example, it came to my attention that the individual who leaked the story about the Wowhead sale supposedly not only owns competitive content properties but also is the partner in a successful RMT site. Like all Internet rumors, it is just that, but please consider the source when you hear damning stuff. Why not take a free shot at your top competitor. If the rumor above is true about the source of these comments, it is of course the height of hypocrisy.
So you are sure Wowhead will not have gold ads now?
John: 100% sure. Neither Wowhead or the ZAM Network have ever had gold or powerleveling ads, and they never will. We sold IGE. We are clearly separating our business from those practices. Why would we start running gold ads now?
My understanding is that Blizzard leases with you the right to play with their "toys", that Blizzard, rather than the player, owns the character, and that the items within the game are not considered goods as such, any more than the score of a baseball game is a salable good.
I do not find this completely convincing, myself, but it is consistent in its way.
Sweet I have cred :)
IGE has done this before. People keep falling for the same trick.
Wowhead had an april fools joke on their front page about being bought by blizzard for 7 million. Funny that their joke is now reality.
Blizzard itself now has a WoW Database online. It has a lot of functionality and unique aspects.. the only thing it's missing is exact percentage of drop rates. I wonder if a third-party database is worth anything outside of advertising for gold sellers. I'm guessing Wowhead owners saw this as their chance to get while the gettings good.
Lastly, after thottbot was bought out, you would repeatedly see gold seller advertising in the _comments_ themselves. Which was at a minimum irritating. Thing is, the comments are able to be "rated" up or down.. raising up would add 0.1 points to the score. Most informative posts would have a 3 or 4 at best. All these gold seller comments were rated 12-15. Nearly impossible to vote out of sight. Which means the gold sellers were all bumping their own posts up, or the admins themselves were giving bloated scores to keep them visible.
It's going to suck if a well-designed site like wowhead is dragged through the mud in the name of profit.
So, I have no idea how he can sell his WoW character reliably. As an outsider, to me the WoW community looks like a den of thieves and scammers. How do other people sell their characters? How does the seller insure the buyer won't reverse the payment?
One word: Cash.
Okay, listen carefully. Affinity Media owns ZAM, and once owned IGE. Semi-recently they have sold IGE to a private investor, since others were complaining and the company was hurting AM's image.
But, you ask, why aren't they announcing anything? There's two reasons:
1) The sale transaction between IGE, Affinity Media and the private investor that bought IGE is, well.. PRIVATE! IGE does NOT want to be known as a 'notorious company', and have very likely bartered for privacy. So if anyone asks a suit from IGE, it is an all likelihood that they will deny saying a word about it ON PURPOSE. Also, IGE is now solely based in Hong Kong, and doesn't have really have an outlet in North America or the United Kingdoms.
2) Affinity Media is undergoing reconstruction. Go to their website, AFFINITYMEDIA.COM, for more information.
Also, I'd like to point out something - if you go to any website affiliated with the ZAM.com network, you will not find a single RMT-based ad, at all. I DARE you to try and find one.
Gamasutra.com: When we first met, you said, 'Oh, I bet I know what you're going to ask me about.' What did you think I was going to ask you about?John Maffei (senior vice president of Affinity Media, owners of ZAM.COM and WOWHEAD.COM) : Oh, just everyone has been so interested in the IGE thing, because IGE is a controversial business. Very controversial, and we'd always kept this incredible differences between the businesses.
If you go to any of our sites, you'll never see a gold-selling ad. The guys who founded our business, guys like Jeff Moyer and Bill Dyess, they've got absolutely nothing to do with that other side of the business.
So for us, it was a positive, in that we thought, for the people who cared, that's no longer an issue. Since it's a private company, a private transaction, we're not releasing actual news on terms. But we're no longer in that business.
Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?sProve that the VICE PRESIDENT OF AFFINITY MEDIA is lying. (See my gamasutra.com snippet above.)
Seriously, do you all think that every company on the face of the earth is just one big corrupt entity? Lighten up, people. The marketplace is constantly, CONSTANTLY changing in order to adapt to the changing consumer. All of the websites on the ZAM.com network no longer have any RMT advertisements anymore. AT ALL. And this includes Wowhead.com.
I honestly don't see any reason - and I'm going to bold this now, again - for THE VICE PRESIDENT OF AFFINITY MEDIA to flat out lie to everyone, only to have people scrutinize his statement with a fine-tooth comb and then have someone explode it as controversy and bad business practices. That doesn't make money.
So, you know who has more cred than some junky blogger with a 'he said she said' news story? The vice president of a company. Shut your yaps and at least attempt to get your facts straight.
I'm getting redundant now.
Tis a pitty really that people are citing Ahmed as a reliable source when he is actually a partner in lewt DOT com (link broken deliberatly), one of the biggest spam happy RMT sites out there. I post on allakhazam and we regualrily see spam posts from them, shortly before the administrators remove them from the site. If we're seeing them, i'm guessing there are alot of them http://img479.imageshack.us/my.php?image=ammohn9.j pg
I posted on his blog, but Mr. Ahmed doesn't want you to see the truth. He didn't even bother trying to refute it, he just nuked the post entirely. Unfortunatly for him as you see above, I took screenshots. Including screenhots of my second repy.
http://img352.imageshack.us/my.php?image=ammo2fu1. jpg
The dirty little truth here is that Ahmed is trying to slander a perfectly good and decent website to draw attention away from his own RMTer sins. Ahmed is a partner with his friend Andre Marcelo-Tanner in the incredably annoying lewt empire. See him here defending RMT: http://www.pinoytechblog.com/archives/world-of-war craft-farming-in-cebu
Check out the Whois data for Lewt and
And whats this? domain data for a gil selling guide? http://www.aboutus.org/FinalFantasyXiGil.org
This couldn't be the same person who also owns MMO Guru could it? the same MMO Guru that Mr. Ahmed is deeply involved with?
The hypocrisy of his attack is truly absurd. Say what you will about Allakhazam and crew, they have never had Gold/gil/plat ads on the site, and they did get rid of IGE. Ahmed on the other hand has been outed as a dirty rotten RMTer. But don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself...
Even then (from what I've read in the WoW forums), you can revert the info on an account using the original credit card it was signed up with in the first place... at least I heard there of a couple of cases of people that bought a character, and after the payment went trough and they changed the account details, later found it reverting back to the original owner and password changed.... so it's really a two way avenue, you can't really insure you'll get the payment anymore than the buyer can't assure you'll not take the account back.
I guess it's kinda like in game when you want someone to craft you something/enchant an item... you give the materials, and then if you don't know the person it's a leap of faith that they won't just run away with them and ignore you (which is why when I've done it, and so far has gone good all the time, I tip generously)... and at least on the european side, according to forums, the GM's see it as "working as intended".
So, I have no idea how he can sell his WoW character reliably.
Selling an account violates the terms and conditions of playing the game in the first place (as does buying gold). So I wouldn't hold your breath looking for a reliable way.
As an outsider, to me the WoW community looks like a den of thieves and scammers.
Well you are dealing with a section of it that runs scams (i.e. T&C violations). So that isn't surprising.
BTW, how can you stand to use a 'payment' provider that just takes back money that is in your account already, after the sale has already been accepted?
I sign up to services like this with a particular format email address, usually something like "wowh_nospam@mydomain.com". I like to see who then turns around and uses my email address for either spam or as a return recipient.
Pretty much as soon as I signed up for wowhead I found it being used in said return recipient field in a lot of spam that has come back to me since then.
They're useless, dirty, dishonest, thieving wankers.
The Armory started off as simply a way to get character profiles, but in the latest major revision, they added a functional item database. Now you can click on an item in a profile (or directly search for it), and get info about where it comes from. If it is a drop, it will tell you what NPC drops it. If it is crafted, it will tell you what is required to craft it. If it is a quest reward, it will tell you what quest you need to complete to get it. It displays this in a fashion very similar to Wowhead, etc.
What is lacking from this (right now) is that you still can't search directly for an NPC or quest, or find out the location of an NPC. I wouldn't be surprised if these features are added in a future revision. (You can find the entire loot table for an NPC, but only after clicking on an item that drops from it.) There are also no direct comments for each item, but that may not be necessary with the WoW forums a few clicks away.
It makes sense for Blizzard to do this, even though these services are added by a 3rd. party. By keeping players directly on the WoW website, they won't see ads related to commercial gold farming, power leveling services, and so forth.
How much is that in Linden dollars?
Orignator of the Miserable Failure Googlebomb
Evil evil game. I haven't had this much fun since, well, dialing-up with a friend in Warcraft II.
Why all the speculation? They've got a FAQ about the acquisition already up.
Waiting for Warhammer Online.
Gold farmers don't simply farm gold. While they are killing mobs they are also accumulating drops. So while they are increasing the supply of the gold they are at the exact same time increasing the supply of uber rare items. Whenever supply is low enough for an item the gold farmers see the higher prices as a chance to make a profit and farm those items to sell for gold that they can then trade for $$$. I remember back when I played WoW and certain essences were impossible to buy off the auction house, when the gold farmers realized the market was there they started farming them and you quickly saw prices drop by half.
In short, gold farmers increase the amount of gold in the game while at the same time increasing the supply causing a net effect of essently zero on the market (gold farmers would only be increasing market prices of items if they were buying them.)
Assuming I have any ;-)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
It's not that WoW is a den of scammers. The character buying and selling is where the scammers are. You're dealing with a bunch of people who want to buy a character and pretend that they did all the work for it. By definition, these people are somewhat dishonest.
I think it's unreasonable to jump to a claim of dishonesty.
I've had an account since the day of release, and I haven't reached level 60 with any character, although many people I know have several. I simply have neither the time nor the inclination to reach that level.
That means I can't play with them. However, what I DO have is a lot of discretionary income. I've considered buying a high level character so that I can experience the higher-level content with my friends. I haven't yet because I also lack the time to do raiding, not because there's anything "dishonest" about buying a character. Those people leveled the character - really I would be funding their time.
I'm a grown man. The idea of investing hundreds of hours into something that never leaves the confines of a digital environment seems silly to me. So if I just feel like entering a cheat code to unlock cars in a racing game, or using one to open up every course in a golf game, there's no dishonesty involved. Assigning morality to this kind of scenario is just retarded.
Sure, there'll be a small minority who buy high level characters so they can stand around in Orgrimmar flexing and being admired, but exactly how does this hurt anybody? How sad does somebody have to be for this to bother them?
Your son is attempting to sell something that does not belong to him. That is where the fraud begins.
Think about it this way - your son could have sold his account four times, kept the money, and had Blizzard give the account back to him every time, doing exactly what ya'll have done thus far (if he could have found buyers who would not cancel the payments). Doesn't that sound a little fishy? The ripped off buyers couldn't complain to Blizzard because buying an account is against the ToS anyway.
The Chairman and CEO of Affinity Media is actually Brock Pierce, a major shareholder of IGE (though the source is possibly not updated) [1]. In the past (at the age of 18) he has been closely linked with the trafficking of minors for use in child pornography [1 and 2], though has been excused from these charges for undisclosed reasons.
My opinion still stands about the company Affinity Media and that they're actually trying to make a good name for themselves, but so long as the CEO and Chairman remains to be Brock Pierce, I don't think I'm comfortable with the recent Wowhead transaction.
SOURCES:m -founders-spanish-jail 2 267
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brock_Pierce (Possibly Outdated and/or Biased)
2. http://www.itweek.co.uk/vnunet/news/2120349/dotco
3. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/1999/11/3
Reality is for people that can't handle drugs. So do your part, just say no to reality!