Who finances spoiler sites?

As mentioned by Martin in a comment on my WoW Journal from yesterday, the internet is abuzz with news of a merger of Allakhazam with Thottbot and other gaming sites, financed by IGE, the worlds biggest virtual gold selling company. Good summary at Grimwell.com. Great writeup of the history of IGE at this link.

I just didn't bother to report it yesterday, because I wasn't really surprised. The slightly paranoid "the gold farmers are grabbing power over the internet" stories are exaggerated. Honestly, who do you *think* would be financing MMORPG spoiler sites?

Small gaming sites, like this blog, don't need financing. Just one or several guys willing to work for free on them. But if you want a site with a database listing every single item, monster, and quest in a huge game like World of Warcraft, you can't expect it being hosted for free and run just by volunteers. Advertising, if you exclude ads by gold farmers and powerleveling services, won't get enough money to finance a site like Thottbot or Allakhazam. Getting people to pay for "premium memberships" or financing with Paypal donations doesn't get you far either. And the game companies like SOE or Blizzard aren't interesting in running spoiler sites.

Gold selling companies like IGE have a natural interest in advertising on spoiler sites. Gaining control of those sites is a logical next step, as they are relatively cheap, and you end up in better control of your advertising. Spoiler sites are not only offering the highest possible concentration of players of a specific game, they are also naturally increasing the desire of players to get hold of all the nice items listed there. Which, if the item is hard to get in-game, but available on the auction house, might often mean that the quickest way to get hold of the Sword of Uberness is a visit to IGE.com.

Of course using bought gold to equip yourself in a game, instead of earning the equipment yourself, is cheating. People react differently to other people cheating. Some people, me included, think that MMORPGs are not competitive, I don't care what gear somebody else has and how he got it, thus IGE only evokes some mild curiosity in me. Other people get royally angry when they spent considerable effort to reach some achievement in the game, and somebody else gets to the same point much faster using cash, and thus they think that IGE is evil incarnate.

It is ironic that people complain about IGE financing spoiler sites, argueing that gold selling is evil, and buying gold is cheating. Because if you think of it, what is a spoiler site if not cheating? Sure, it is a widely accepted form of cheating, but using spoiler sites to solve your quest instead of searching for the solution yourself is not in the intent of the game developers. So cheating sites being financed by a company earning money on cheating seems like a good fit to me.

Now I'll unpack my crystal ball and tell you about the future of spoiler sites in 10 or 20 years: There won't be any left. Spoiler sites depend on bad game design, people given insufficient information on how to solve a quest, on where to find a specific item or monster. It would be perfectly feasible to make a MMORPG in which you can talk to NPCs in-game, or visit in-game libraries to find out more information about quests, some fabled sword, or some dragon to slay. And a MMORPG which doesn't *need* a spoiler site would be more interesting to play, so sooner or later some developers will come up with that concept, and it will spread. So the current outcry is just a temporary storm in a teacup, and not the end of gaming information on the internet.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:28 AM Permanent Link