Gaming Signal: Wowhead is sold for $1 million!!!

Wowhead is sold for $1 million!!!

I first saw this news over on ForeverGeek which links to a much longer version of the story, but it has now been confirmed by multiple sites. The interesting thing about this sale is that it now puts the three major item/quest/information databases (Thottbot, Allakhazam, and WOWHead) in the control of a single company. Furthermore, there are rumors that the company that now own them (Affinity Media) is still in ownership of the gold selling company IGE. This gets all very strange and the whole story is somewhat laid out in the ForeverGeek link, but that was not what intrigued me about this sale. The thing that intrigues me is that somebody paid this much money for an online database that is populated by data gleaned from players. The folks that created the database and the user interface do get some props for building a fast site (in the WowHead case), but the content itself is not something they created. I also know that for my gaming time - I use this information to plan quests and determine if I am in the correct location to find a given quest mob. This metagaming truely has changed the way players approach the game and often allow players a means to tailor their raids/dungeon runs to focus only on those monsters that drop the items they are after.

While I cannot say what this will mean for the online community in WOW or other MMOs, but maybe with this sale there is an opportunity for another ambitious developer to come along and create a similar system. But who knows - since these sites seem to do a pretty good job already. Although, an independent site may offer things a corporate backed site may not...

Update: Turns out the story was initially posted over at TechSoapBox by Ahmed Farooq. So for our own journalistic integrity (which will lead to no small amount of ridicule from my friends), I have updated the post.

Supposedly Affinity Media sold IGE off to a private investor - specifically one of the original IGE founders, John Yantis. Of course, since these are private companies there is no way to know for sure how they are related. The fact that AM sold it to Yantis and the fact that AM still owns IGE (indirectly) might both be true.

What is to stop some enterprising developer from starting an alternative site yet again? All it has to be is fast with a good commenting system and it would work. If you promoted yourself as being 'gold seller free' you might draw enough traffic to draw ad revenue and ultimately get sold. And I wonder - could you seed your site by pulling content from Wowhead? After all, the content is technically owned by Blizzard, not any of the database sites.

I often wondered by Blizzard didn't shut down Thott and Alla - so here's a conspiracy story for you - what if Affinity Media is owned by Blizzard? Wouldn't that be awesome - Blizz playing both ends!

Posted by scottsh on Monday June 25, 2007 at 6:11 PM

Ask and you shall recieve: WowDigger was just announced today as a site for all those metagaming needs and a strict policy against gold selling or real money transfers. Personally, I think that the game providers don't care about this data since it helps drive subscriptions since players can demonstrate what cool loot they have acquired. Now Sony does offer something like this for EQ2, but I wonder if it has been as successful for them as these sites have been...

Posted by Tim on Monday June 25, 2007 at 8:16 PM