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."

Comments

Another conspiracy theorist blogger

[FireballX301]

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.

Re:Another conspiracy theorist blogger

[klingens]

So it's OK to do bad things if you don't see them?

So it's ok if the FBI uses illegal means to snoop on citizens phones cause they also hunt serial killers, just as long as it's properly compartmentalized? Hezbollah can kill as many Israeli civilians as they want as long as they keep their soup kitchens for the poor Lebanese and build social housing for them?

If it's true that IGE is still owned by ZAM or involved with them, then wowhead is in the same position as an italian restaurant owned by the Mafia: while the restaurant itself does nothing wrong and might not even cheat on taxes, it's still part of an illegal crime operation.

Also: ZAM did own IGE in the past which means the money ZAM paid to wowhead owners was earned with chinafarming. It is "dirty" money.

Re:Another conspiracy theorist blogger

[Funkcikle]

Wowhead provides a LOT of content. More crucial is what it doesn't provide - pages of lame comments full of crap from kids. It has genuinely useful and informative WoW-related information, written up by intelligent players. The dross sgets very quickly moderated down by the site users.

It also has a very powerful and customisable search tool compared to other sites.

Re:Another conspiracy theorist blogger

[PhoenixAtlantios]

You sound somewhat biased towards the secondary market there, I'm curious to know if you have any (reliable) sources for the claims you are making? Specifically the "hired former Blizz execs." Anyone can make wild claims based on pure speculation and rumour, but you really need to be able to back them up when trying to dismiss an argument.

My understanding of the secondary market is that it encourages the exponential creation of game currency in order to have currency to spend. As the amount of game currency on each server increases, it's value decreases. When you lower the value of a currency, the only logical options to choose are to either replace it with something more valuable, or increase the cost of items in the various player trading areas (auctions, direct trades, etc.) The players of the game are then compelled to spend more time acquiring more gold to buy items that would otherwise have been less expensive, making the game become slightly tedious. When the game becomes tedious, people leave the game or complain excessively, damaging the reputation of the company that owns the game.

I do not and will likely never understand those who actually take the time to look into the effects of gold farming and still come out believing it's harmless. I haven't really seen an argument backed by examples of places where it hasn't negatively effected those that do not purchase gold, in terms of their progression through the game.

I'll use World of Warcraft as an example since it's the persistent entity game I am most familiar with, and point out that a lot of the best gear is actually crafted so you don't necessarily need to do 'work' yourself to acquire good items. What does said crafted gear require? Some items only you can collect, but mostly a bunch of items that anybody can collect and sell. An example of acquiring decent gear purely through buying items would be tailoring; you can acquire three of the arguably best pieces of gear available exclusively through buying items off the auction (Primal Mooncloth, Spellfire or Shadowweave), and another two if you pay another player to craft gear for you (Spellstrike/Battlecast/Whitemend). That's five out of nine slots filled with some of the better gear in the game purely through buying items off the auction, so in World of Warcraft at least your statement about having to do actual work on your character to get the best gear is somewhat flawed (if we exclude raiding, and even then only the latter dungeons provide upgrades for some items).

My point is, no matter which game you're playing you'll find the economy is negatively effected by those that add inordinate amounts of currency to it. If I printed sixteen trillion United States dollars tomorrow and used said money to purchase various goods, businesses, and property tomorrow would it negatively effect you? Do you think it might decrease the value of United States currency a little? I have not studied economics closely, but I understand that money is being printed constantly as it's required so that comparison hopefully isn't too much of a stretch.

If you can give me one scenario where having people pay money to acquire game currency that was generated via illegitimate means ("Gold Farmers" are on the fall a bit in some places, whereas using trojan viruses to steal accounts and sell the proceeds is on the rise) I'll be, well, surprised.

I don't personally oppose two people trading accounts, or one person selling theirs to another for some form of compensation. A gamer would want compensation for the time invested and if someone is prepared to pay for that then so be it. It really is the people that take simple trades to the extreme and focus solely on creating goods for said trades (high level characters via bots, gold via stealing accounts, etc.) that could potentially damage a game (and company's reputation) irreparably.

dollars?!?

[doxology]

how much is that in gold?

Removing the word rumor always helps

[niceone]

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...

Re:Removing the word rumor always helps

[Timesprout]

I have a tendency now to mentally apply the suffix 'Allegedly' to all slashdot headlines in the best tradition of HIGNFY. I find it makes the vast majority much more accurate.

Send in the clones.

[Funkcikle]

The reason Wowhead is, in my opinion, the best WoW database around is the quality, depth and range of the content followed by the actual design of the site. Compare it to Alla's/Thottbot's/etc hideous design and swollen out-dated information, filled with crap comments, spam and overloaded with adverts. It's a bit like how Google was a few years ago compared to Yahoo and Alta Vista.

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.

Re:Grammar check on aisle 5, please.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't you read? They have to ZAM, at least if they want the million dollars they do.

English?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Can someone translate this article into English for the rest of us please?

WoW? WoW Database? WoWHead? Database site?

Rich.

Re:English?

[1u3hr]

From the attached icons, something to do with "role playing games", whatever they are.

Re:English?

[Anonymous Coward]

WoW: World of Warcraft

Wow Database: A database which contains information useful to players of the game. This information includes items usually obtained by killing monsters in the game, recipes obtained from vendors and also from monsters, character classes, races, locations, quests, etc.

WowHead: Located at www.wowhead.com it has become the most popular WoW Database site since Thottbot, www.thottbot.com was sold to IGE. IGE is a site that sells in game gold for real world money. The virtual economics of doing this are beyond the scope of this post, but it generally ruins the complex virtual economies of the games. WoW is by far not the only MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game) to have virtual currency being sold by IGE and others for real world money.

Database Site: A web site which is primarily used as a database. This could be for an online game, an inventory checker, values for your collection Beanie Babies, anything. Just raw data that can be searched and compared with other data. In a gaming database such as WoWHead, this would allow you to see if your "Sword of Ultimate Doom" has an upgrade available, and which monster you'd need to kill or quest you'd need to complete in order to obtain this upgrade.

Rezzah
70 Priest of Radiant Dark
Windrunner Server - Alliance :)

Re:English?

[eht]

If you don't know, telling you won't make you care.

Re:Amazed

[MysteriousPreacher]

No, your brain really does have to adjust. It reminds me of when I tried to play Counterstrike a few years ago after having played a lot of Counterstrike: Source. While I was able to play it with no problem when it came out, returning to it after several years was difficult because it no longer appeared to have depth to it. It looked like a flat cartoon with no dimensionality. It was a strange experience.

I have to see that I never thought this a problem myself, it looks and feels like a 3D environment to me. When I frst started playing, I saw a lot of similarities between WoW and WCIII and that is probably why I continue to play WoW - I like the Warcraft universe and those graphics are what I expect. I suppose people will have differing opinions though on the graphics - some people prefer the more photo-realistic approach.

I like the cartoony approach because it doesn't look odd. With fantasy worlds, there's difficult decision to be made. Cartoony graphics can work very well because it's easier to reproduce fantasy monsters. If you go down the photo-realistic approach, it becomes tricky because it can end up looking bad or just plain freaky. I'm probably not doing a good job of explaining this but I've seen rotoscoping used to recreate human animation and it just looked freaky. It wasn't a photo, it wasn't a drawing - it was a strange hybrid.

I hope the wowhead thing works out, they have a nice site there. It's true that interest in all games will wane but WoW seems to be going strong at the moment. Besides, there may be more to wowhead than the site itself. I'm sure there is some expertise and technology that comes along with it - stuff that can be applied when the next big MMO comes along.

Re:all my mod points...

[ringbarer]

FACT: ZAM now own the three most visible sites which support players of World of Warcraft. These sites provide in game support, listing rare in-game items, as well as locations of rare spawns. Combined, these three sites could provide a goldmine of information about what is popular and what will sell well at the moment.

FACT: ZAM once claimed ownership of a Gold Farming and Selling business, IGE. These businesses thrive by attempting to gain a monopoly on popular and rare in-game items which are then subsequently sold for real world cash.

FACT: Both Alkhazam and Thottbot were recently 'compromised' by an Internet Explorer vulnerability that installed a keylogger. This Keylogger gathered WoW login details from unsuspecting visitors, and used these details to dissolve the players' virtual assets - transferring them to Gold Farming and Selling businesses. This occurred after ZAM claimed to have sold their stake in IGE.

SUPPOSITION: WoWhead will find itself similarly 'compromised' in the future.

Re:Another conspiracy theorist blogger -- No

[Snaller]

He worked for them.
He bought thottbot for IGE.
He has more cred than you.

My son's experience trying to sell a WoW character

[ortholattice]

I am not into WoW and barely know what it is, but my son has is trying to sell his character and has gotten several offers of $200-$400. But selling them has so far proved impossible due to fraud. Since he is underage, he has been using my PayPal account, so I know what's going on there. So far, he has been scammed no less that FOUR times trying to sell his WoW account - each time the payment was reversed after several days by PayPal because the payment was "unauthorized". Most recently, he thought the problem could be solved by selling only to a PayPal "verified" account; the money actually went through and I successfully initiated a transfer to my checking account. No go - a couple of days later, the transfer was reversed by PayPal because the transaction was "unauthorized".

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"?

Re:My son's experience trying to sell a WoW charac

[Fex303]

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?

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.

Re:My son's experience trying to sell a WoW charac

[BrerBear]

I am not into WoW and barely know what it is, but my son has is trying to sell his character and has gotten several offers of $200-$400. But selling them has so far proved impossible due to fraud. Just so you know, what your son is doing is against the Terms of Use(Section 8) of the game. So you shouldn't be too surprised to encounter shady dealers in the process.

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. Somehow, I'm guessing the phrase "the person we sold our account to never paid up" did not occur during these Blizzard support calls.

As a former employee of ZAM

[loki_ninboy]

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.

Man, their FAQ team works fast:

[sabernet]

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?

Conspiring much?

[Vandell]

There's so much misinformation being spread, it's sickening.

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?st ory=14235

Prove 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.

Re:Amazed

[Holmwood]

I partially disagree with parent and Grandparent.

You guys are talking about two different things.

The graphics for WoW are fairly primitive, with low polygon counts, and, yes, cartoony.

The art for WoW is fantastic.

The decision to go with great art and fairly modest graphics was brilliant. The game stays fresh as parent says, and also (importantly) runs well on older hardware.

I started playing WoW about 3 years ago during one of the betas. I was struck by how well it played on my aging PC. I tried EQ2 at release (around the same time as WoW's general release), and lasted about a week. With WoW I'd get 30-40 fps. With EQ2? Maybe 10-15 fps.

Worse yet, though EQ2's graphics were more 'sophisticated', the game (IMHO) just didn't have the art that WoW did.

Now Vanguard, which someone above mentioned?

Yes, much better graphics than WoW, though seemingly quite poorly implemented. Art that's as good as WoW, perhaps even better in some places (and worse in others). (They had the late Keith Parkinson as Art Director, and it shows in parts of the game).

Deeper game play than WoW, though less elegant and less tested. (The entire sphere of Diplomacy is a great example).

And generally horrible performance on release and even today. Frequent crashes, framerates slowing to 0.2 fps and even freezing up for seconds at a time on high-end machines with the latest graphics hardware.

Result?

WoW, with its cartoony but endearing graphics that run on any half-decent machine sold in the last 4-5 years has nearly 10 million players with fairly modest churn.

Vanguard hit perhaps 200,000 subscribers, and lost perhaps three quarters of them after people had played for a month or three.

Everyone coming out with an MMO is going to be looking at those numbers, for good or ill. Delivering a polished title that runs well on the actual base of hardware that's out there is what matters.

-Holmwood

Re:Hmmm

[Kabal`]

The reason that quest item drop rates are particularly inaccurate is because it counts ALL kills of that mob - yet only people killing the mob WITH the quest have a shot at getting the item. Therefore the drop rates reported on thottbot are much lower than what they are in reality. How much lower depends on how popular that mob is to kill (while not having a quest to do so).

Hm

[jfodale]

Why all the speculation? They've got a FAQ about the acquisition already up.

Important new info about Affinity Media

[Vandell]

I've recently come across some important new info that has shaken my entire argument.

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:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brock_Pierce (Possibly Outdated and/or Biased)
2. http://www.itweek.co.uk/vnunet/news/2120349/dotcom -founders-spanish-jail
3. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/1999/11/32 267