. . Anyways, hey everyone, welcome back to the Massively OP Podcast, episode 505, and our very first podcast we've ever done live, at least that I know of. Maybe we were under the influence and did some things we should know. One of them. You did do one before. Did we? I blacked out. 200 or 300. It was a long time ago.
Well, okay. Welcome back to our second live episode that we've ever done. And here we are for the 10th anniversary of Massively OP. It started all the way back in February. 2015 um justin with me is brie and also mj is joining us we're very happy to have her as she's live streaming this all day uh the celebrations all day not our particular podcast
We are intruding on her space rather than the other way around. No, no, no. They were invited. They were invited. I'm very, very glad to be with you guys again and to be able to share you live. Really, this is a very special. treat for our viewers. No pressure or anything. Not at all. All right. Brie has a little bit of a hangover. Her team sort of won a little bit of a sports match last night, and she was out on the streets partying. Woo!
you need sleep you need to go back to bed and she's like no we won so congratulations you're making me sound so much more interesting than i am you're making it sound like we weren't shopping for eggs last night while nobody was out and uh video games. That's because that's actually what our Sunday night looked like. I am responsible for the Super Bowl victory. Did you get the loan in order to buy the eggs?
oh my gosh seriously they were sold out at costco come on with the eggs i i really need my eggs back Well, exactly. We need to stop yolking around and get back to the podcast here. Watch the numbers on that Switch stream go down. I'm not going to be walking on shelves around you. We're going to get into this.
All right. All right. Let's talk really quickly about the 10th anniversary. Why is this a monumental? Well, because we like numbers that are nice and round and 10 sounds like a good number. In fact, we're just saying before the podcast, we just feel like we're just. We did this a couple episodes ago because we were celebrating the 500th episode. Too bad. Now you get it twice.
So I thought maybe we can maybe walk down memory lane hand in hand in hand and kind of remember the trip that this past 10 years has been. A little bit of backstory and, of course, my faulty memory, which has already been proven on this. episode you can correct as we go but so let's go all the way back to the beginning all the way back to the beginning of old massively
And that's where we all started working at. So Old Massively came out of like this. It was an AOL weblog. And it was originally like a Second Life. Yeah, a Second Life blog primarily. Kind of gradually morphed into an MMORPG blog. It didn't actually start as a Second Life blog. Like the game Second Life? Yeah. Are you serious? Yeah. oh wow yeah that's why like the first year mass oh massively was around it's like every other post was on linden labs and second life and
what the Linden dollar value was at. There's a history y'all didn't share with me when I joined up. The secret archives of Massively, it's down there somewhere. This was basically before we were even there. Oh yeah, this was 2007. Ish. And so it became an MMORPG blog. And I think most of us started coming on board around 2010. I was 2010. You were 2010. Same. Yeah. 2010. I was a month after Brie. Okay. Yep.
and elliot i think was about that same time as well uh so yeah we came on board started writing about mmorpgs you know kind of rode that wave along the way uh brie and i started taking over the podcast it was a coup we managed it somewhere along the line and yeah tried tried A multitude of different columns and formats. Some of those columns have endured to this day. Some have been renamed or kind of morphed a little bit. And some have fallen by the wayside. Covered so many games.
over the course of old and new massively. But in 2015, actually toward the end of probably 2014, we started hearing that AOL... was going to shut down all of its weblogs. Do you remember when exactly? It was January. It was January? We had one month warning. Only because somebody very very kindly gave us warning instead of the hi. It's closing today, which As the story bree because this was a major thing and It was. This affected me. I remember when it happened because I was at winter camp.
I'm getting ready to have like all these teenagers come that weekend. And we were on the horn with AOL and all these other people and AOL itself was kind of that was after. Yeah, that was when they were telling us they were giving us the official.
news and that they were going to give us like a couple of months of yeah they were answering questions yeah when we actually found out it was before that because it came out at whatever event it was i don't know if it was a pax or gdc what happens in in january back then i don't even remember but like somebody leaked it out at the event so like all of the other websites
were reporting that Joystick and all the Joystick sites were shutting down. And so Joystick reported on it and we had to report on it. It was completely macabre that we were being forced to report on the rumors that our sites were closing down.
And then, yeah, Lady called me and said it was true. And I remember standing there in my office. We were we were living living on campus at the time and there was snow everywhere. And I just I remember bawling my eyes out. I was so upset. My boss, by the way, our boss at Joystick was super.
nice and that's who i believe mj was referring to he was the one that insured that we actually got a couple of months of like yes yeah the severance pay he made sure that happened no one else would have done that But no, AOL didn't care about us or the sites. Didn't even care if we knew.
But our joystick overlord was... Luddy was awesome. And he was always like that. He was the one who protected us when we had layoffs the year before that, too. Anybody else would have cut us completely and kept all of that money for joystick instead of... you know, just cutting us back. He kept us around. Sorry, I have so much respect for Luddy to this day. He's the best. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's the severance and just...
that possibility of getting a little bit extra is what kept a lot of tongues stilled on that phone call. Cause I just remember how angry everybody just incredibly angry. Like you were going to just not just take our job. I see. Yeah. This was something we had just poured our, you know, tons of years and hundreds of man hours into creating and they didn't care. They're just like, nope, we're just, yeah.
Bye. See you later. It was extra frustrating because when Justin says that, he's not just talking out his butt here. He literally means that. We had spent, like, I took over in 2012. That's how long ago. Like, we had already been running it, like, our way for several years, and we grew the sites.
So much that our bosses were coming to us like, what are you guys doing? And I'm like, well, I guess we're just that awesome. But no, actually, it was because MMOs were booming. The comments were booming. It was like a really great time. And then we're awesome. Yeah, well, that too. And AOL will reward.
us by basically cutting our budget in half and they were like oh yeah that's nice now you have to do all that on half the people and half the money and we're like come on and you know what we freaking did it we spent 2014 working our butts off only to get completely laid off in 2015 The whole thing was so infuriating and we just felt like, why did we even put our effort into that? We should have all quit.
We should have all quitted the layoff time, but we could have started our indie site all the way back in 2014 instead of having to do it in 2015 at the end of our ropes. Anyway. I know this is ancient history, but that's what I remember about that time. It's very pertinent to our anniversary because people who weren't around don't understand. This is the backstory of why all of a sudden...
we started a new site. So yeah, we, we got laid off everybody. You know, we had that one month warning. And so discussions immediately started among our staff. Like, what do we want to do? Like, this is, it's going well, like this is doing, you know, the sites. doing well. We've got a really good polished team of riders. We have the expertise. There's very little competition in the space in terms of other sites that are covering
MMORPG news and opinions on the scale that we were and the way that we were doing it. So we didn't kind of want to give that up. But at the same time, the question was, what do we do now? We could have shopped around. We could say, hey, was there another site that wanted to hire some of us or all of us? We talked about just maybe.
Only doing a podcast and going our separate ways. But the idea of kind of recreating massively as another site came into kind of started gelling. And maybe that was because we're all exhausted and angry. frustrated and a little bit insane, but that's kind of where we landed. And so the idea for a Kickstarter came up because that was kind of a hot thing back there in 2015. And it worked really to our advantage. So when did we start talking about the Kickstarter and why did we need a Kickstarter?
it was like right away it was within a day or so yeah it was it was basically like right as soon as we knew and we had done the post because we had we i know i know this because we started teasing it like in our very first memo to the the writers and that to the readers rather
And then at the very, the very last post we did, we were already like kind of teasingly linking to it that we were going to be starting something. We had to come up, we came up with Massively OP. I mean, you guys have been using that for a guild names for, for the whole site for years. That was like really easy to pick. I thought it was easy to pick anyway. I remember us kind of kicking back and forth a number of different names. Yeah.
But this really was the best name. This was perfect. It probably and yeah, it kind of retained that side identity. We didn't want to completely divorce ourselves from and have people go like, who are who are these guys? Where? Yeah. I tried to keep the social media, but AOL snatched everything back, except for like the YouTube. I still have access to the YouTube. They never put it for some reason. I guess I could do some vandalism, but I'm too nice. We had Twitter for a few weeks there.
before they grabbed it. And we used it. We kept telling people about the Kickstarter and about the new site. We were so bad. They left me connected to someone a long time. Yeah, they were paying no attention. They didn't even care at that point. They had nobody monitoring anything. Everyone was gone.
they didn't care at all they literally took all of our work years it was what seven years of work at that point just smooshed it into engadget it's still there they've changed like the domain like structure several times at this point but it's all still up there it's just messy now
that's frustrating i hated losing the history like our like chronological history like there's like a a weird moment in 2015 when like suddenly the site starts and like history before that is like a mess i hate that so much You can tell I'm a historian, right? That just bothers me more than anything else. No, it bothers me too. Anytime you go back and try to search for those old articles and stuff and the formatting is all thrown off or it doesn't exist anymore. I've seen.
holes in those so yeah we we got this you know we said hey we we do need some money for to get this site going it's not going to be completely free we're not just going to wander over to geo cities and start a little a little you know If we're going to do it right, it's got to not just be an official site, but an actual...
company it's got to be incorporated it's got to be structured there's got to be a way that we can provide money for the staff and and for the server hosting and all that you know all these all these things that go on the background you know and then you're thinking oh well you know the writing that's the hard part some days it's not no it's really not it's really just it's expensive but not yeah so we so we structured the kickstarter when did the kickstarter go live oh my goodness
It wasn't before the site got going? I think the Kickstarter opened first. Okay, I thought so too. In the Kickstarter, we talked about the launch of the actual site, which did not go to plan. I know we've talked about this before, too, because the site was supposed to go live. And at the very last minute, our tech guy literally couldn't get it off the ground and kind of left. in the middle and we were like well
But Jeff and I, and I'm sure there were other people, but I remember Jeff because we were going back and forth trying to find a freaking WordPress theme that we could throw together overnight with no sleep whatsoever. So we could try to launch the site the next day as we had. promise because yeah tech guy had kind of abandoned us that was not a fortuitous start but hey it got off the ground it did actually work we did manage to pull it off i think we had two posts that first day
I made Justin and Elliot write like two posts just so that we could get moving. And then there was a podcast. So I think the podcast got it going about a week ahead of time. Yeah. Sorry, we always knew the podcast was going to happen no matter what. We were going to keep going with that. So we decided to get it going, and that way we can start promoting the site.
I think one of the problems we had was not only were we struggling with recreating a new site, but all this news was continuing to happen, like MMO news. And we're like, we need to keep talking about this. We need to stay on top of it. We can't have it. this like month and a half gap in our knowledge of where the industry is and what's happening so you know it was time was a factor it was a such a severe factor and how fast we had to move and also you know
Different moving parts. Everybody was contributing in different ways. Like Larry was putting together Mo and some of the graphics and then that trailer for Kickstarter. Oh, yeah. Jeff did that. Which was really well done. Or maybe it was. No, I think Larry narrated it and Jeff put it together. Okay, there you go. I think. Yeah. So everybody's in, you know.
MJ was robbing convenience stores to get us some extra petty cash. We appreciated that. She had her giant duck costume. So we kicked off the Kickstarter and not really knowing how... what kind of response we were going to get. People were, I think on the whole, when old massively got shut down, people were upset. We had a lot of people, you know, talking about us and.
going into the comments and expressing condolences and supporting us on social media and all that. But Kickstarter was, you know, for an MMO news website was kind of maybe the first in the entire world. I don't know, but it kind of.
it feels like this was such a for an mmos i think you're right i think i know of like one other gaming site i'd have to go look it up but somebody told me what it was a mastodon like a year ago there was another like indie gaming site i want to say it was a french site
somebody somebody correct me if you're out there listening diehard fans tell me what i'm talking about but i know there was at least one other one before we before we got here but it wasn't like a joystick site no and we could have bombed it could have bombed Horribly. I know one of our fellow joystick blogs, they decided to go completely the Patreon route. Yeah, they went Patreon. But we went Kickstarter because we needed to get a baseline of funds and get some...
some money in advance so that we could have that cushion in order to start paying and keeping things rolling around. And it almost didn't work. Oh, I want to answer Catriona real quick. She said, didn't SOE decide to blow itself up right around this time? Same time. Yes. They gave the announcements for our last day. Yep. They gave the announcement to us for our last day. So if you go all the way back to some of the first posts on the site, we're covering the SOE daybreak.
debacle thing that was going on right then. It was nuts. Yeah, so what was our initial Kickstarter ask? Was it 20,000? I actually linked the Kickstarter in chat. I thought it was 50. And I thought, there's no way we're going to make, no one's going to give us $50,000. That's dumb. We're a video game website.
And the response was incredible. I think that was the first time I started feeling hope. Like it was such an emotionally draining month. I mean, we had all our normal lives going on too, but this on top of everything, it felt like just the rug had been pulled out.
from under us you know this thing that we loved and we had poured so much work and effort into was taken away and all of a sudden it felt like just the whole community rallied around us in such a powerful and noticeable like it was tangible it was his money in the bank and uh people just kept coming out to pledge in the first few days we got this sense that oh yeah this is going to be something like this is going to really do very well and in fact it did we got
what is it 75 75 yeah i still can't believe that it's incredible it got i mean it didn't just get us started it really helped to provide a safety net so that we could do the site right. Even after Twitch took its cut, that was still a nice chunk of change to get us going that first year especially. I know I've told the story of taking the check to the bank and whispering to the bank.
bank teller as i handed it over because it's like i've never seen that much money like in one place before it was absolutely bonkers Yeah, it wasn't enough for a down payment on a gold yacht, but you know. No, I keep the yacht, yeah, in my dock downtowns. Don't worry. There's an interesting thing in here I want to bring up because I didn't quite remember this. in the hundred dollar gold founder level um uh
There's a number of them, but one of them was, Justin will serenade you and all the backers in this tier in one song for the podcast. And I did it.
I didn't remember that. That's so wonderful. I remember the song I did it to, and it was just the most cringy thing I think I've ever done in my life, and that is saying something. Not cringy because of our... supporters but because i was terrified to mispronounce names which of course was going to happen because everybody's giving me like the you know they're
handles not just the real names but actual weird mishmash of whatever so yeah i used a um life of riley it was one of those no no copyright songs um and I just kind of spoke. You know, I like to spoke, sing-songy speaking thing. And yeah, it was, it was something.
But yeah, we were making all sorts of these Kickstarter promises. And that was kind of fun. All of us pitching different... What could we offer for different tiers? What could be some of our stretch goals? We had some fun ones we came up with. Ultimately, after a month or two, things did start settling down at least so that we could kind of get back to work. crank out the articles, crank out the columns. Brie lost the rest of the color in her hair. Yeah, no, that's fair. I'm sure.
And we've been kind of trucking ever since. I mean, we've had some really great years. We've had some lean years. But the staff, more or less, has been pretty consistent. We've had a lot of the same writers. We've had some... that have fell away and we've had some that we've brought on board but it is nowhere near the churn that we used to have for mass old massive oh my gosh it was crazy we were constantly bringing a new columnist yeah so
Kind of like we just established ourselves and maybe dug ourselves in really deep. And you're like, you're not getting me out of this sight until I'm 89 years old. I take it as a good sign that people want to stick around. Like people don't even really quit. They just go.
oh, I'm really busy. I don't have time. And then they show back up later and they're like, I have time again. That's fine. Whatever. I like that loyalty, honestly. It shows we're doing something right. Yeah. It's a pretty good place to work. We have a couple comments in here I just wanted to read out to you. We've got Blue Shift said, at the time all the gaming mags I subscribed to were dying so I couldn't lose another one.
Oh, we're so glad we're here still with you. And ProtoCub, I'm Happy Mop exists. It's one of the only gaming outlets I read on a daily basis. Here's to 10 more years. Proto Cub, is that Proto Bear? Is that Proto Bear's baby account? Because Proto asked before, too. He wanted to know how much of the podcast is edited out.
It's not. It's basically we don't edit it. We don't really have time. I know we joke that it would be really awesome if we had like, you know, $10,000 a podcast and we can do like the Radiolab treatment, but... It's not that interesting. That's not going to happen. I'm squeezing it in between doing groceries in the morning and doing meetings at night. Right.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry that the Wizard of Oz I've taken away. Now you've looked behind the curtain and you know. It is ProtoBear. See? Okay, cool. We've got some MMORPG luminaries here in the comments. ProtoBear is the... the head of the MMORPG subreddit, so blame him for all the stuff that happens on Reddit. I'm kidding, don't blame him. Blame him for anything good that happens on Reddit, okay? He's responsible for fixing Reddit.
One thing I wanted to talk about really briefly, I was talking before the show about this as well, was in creating the new site that we've had for the past 10 years, it was the opportunity to... rectify some issues from the old site that we kind of had to just live with and also kind of mold massively op in our image without
some of the previous baggage that we might have had in terms of formatting, style, columns, etc. What are some of the more significant changes that people don't remember the old site? Versus the new. Oh, man. See, I have a hard time with this one because I feel like I had two opportunities because I took over in 2012 on the old site and I changed a ton of stuff. Like I got rid of some stuff I didn't like. We got rid of the forums and the IRC.
chat sorry but that was me i didn't like that stuff i didn't want to maintain it or pay for it and nobody used it anyway we changed the stream team around a ton right around that era and yeah we tried to double down on Very, very good columns, not just columns, but I don't know, like...
I think we tried to automate more stuff with the new site. And to be fair, part of that was that we were switching to WordPress, which, you know, maybe that's seen as like low rent compared to getting a brand new professionally made CMS.
site was that we had a professionally made CMS and it was like 10 years out of date and getting anything fixed in it was like pulling teeth because we weren't really in control of it. We had to go to like multiple layers of tech at AOL to try to get basic functionality.
he installed like hey can our galleries work please but like with WordPress everything is a couple of plugins and you know a couple of hours of tinkering away and so like so many things were possible for making it faster for us to just do the basic post
basic post no longer took 25 minutes because he didn't have to hand do everything now it takes a lot less time i think to me that's the most important thing something no one on the front of the site will ever see but like for us we can just do more stuff faster With keeping the same quality, I like to think. My favorite, by far my favorite thing in the news site was auto-tagging.
and i know that's a bit of a crutch and sometimes we lean on it and we should always check and stuff but um having to hand tag every single post you know it just yeah it did it added a lot of time and Those, I mean, I probably at this point have purged a lot of those memories of how long and annoying those old posts used to be to format them. But they were. They were a bit of time. And especially like back in old Massively.
And even moving into the new one, I was writing a ton more news posts every single day. And it was just such a large portion of my day on top of my first job. And, you know, I didn't remember what my kids looked like. So it was really nice to have. To reclaim time. I know that we did experiment with some other things. Do you remember mini posts? Yes, I loved mini posts. I really wanted those to take off. If I could figure out how to make it work, I'll do it again.
Explain what a mini post was. Oh, instead of just doing like, you know, a three or four hundred word blog post or more, in some cases, we would literally just have a spit out. If you guys go to Game Industry Biz, they have something similar to that. I think they call it like something in...
they have a name for it where it's literally just like a sentence a headline in a sentence and then it clicks out to the actual whatever the thing is news and brief is what they call it it was kind of like that where it was little little tiny bits of news where we wanted to mention it but we didn't want to like
spend 20 minutes writing about it because it just wasn't that important. But we wanted to mention it because we're trying to cover like a little bit of everything. And now a lot of that stuff ends up.
in mop-up sorry justin no it's okay i was just gonna say it's basically mop-up just exploded i you know what but honestly i i look back at it and go i'm kind of glad that didn't take off i think it would have kind of cluttered up the site yeah i know that's the that's the downside so now we have to pick and choose between what's important enough but also sometimes we really want to cover those small random indie type things too finding that balance has always been a challenge but
also like that's our admit that's like our whole goal is to make sure we're covering the whole genre not just the big games not just like our pet games but like a little bit of everything yeah you guys have no idea like back in old massively sometimes we would all the writers would be like piranha swimming around a pool looking for a snippet of news to write oh maple story did something i gotta go because there was nothing like there was really a newsroom
to speak of at least for a while. And so it was just like, Oh, I found this news. Can I write about it? And there was just not enough out there or it wasn't happening fast enough or social media wasn't feeding it to us at a rapid enough pace. And now it's. Seems like we've gone all the way to the other side of that spectrum where we are just spoiled for news. We never get finished. Not even over Christmas did we come close to clearing out the newsroom. The newsroom just is a Sisyphean.
hill that just keeps building itself and we're always doing triage. You created the little triage tags where do this first, immediately or when you have time or whenever. If things are slow, which is always a joke because it's just never slow. So a post in If Things Are Slow might stay there for months and we're like, yeah, we should check in on that game someday. But there's always something more...
So it does become this balancing act. And I think it's one we've used in particular, but we've all had to kind of really navigate of what news do we cover? And in what quantity, like what's more important? What do our readers want to read about? What's more important for us to cover? What type of news? Especially where sometimes our genre kind of bled over into real world things like the Daybreak Columbus Nova.
thing that I know kind of consumed you. One of my most important, I think, articles. No one even remembers it. I think we all do. That was a pretty big one. Yeah. So it's been 10 years of some really lighthearted news stuff, some fun columns, a lot of great streams, MJ, and some really important and serious news posts as well.
There's, you know, we don't ever like writing about closures of games of studios and obituaries and those, you know, kind of the sad part of the news. But at the same time, there are always those delightful days where we are surprised. the blue by the announcement of a bold new game or reveal or something that just breaks in the fortune of the mmo industry and we're just like yes you know those are the fun days to write about
Can I share one of the things that I really appreciate, like that, that changed because we became up and that was back, back with the Kickstarter. Then Brie had even, um, broached the subject with the viewers the um the right the the audience okay and it was whether or not we should cover conventions and such And because AOL was very strict ongoing, and I get why. Also cheap. Well, the thing was, with AOL, you could only go to ones that they paid for.
And for them to approve... We weren't allowed to go on the studio's dime. We were never allowed to do those. I will tell you, the first one I went to, I went to GDC and met up with... uh, Crystal and Sean and Jeff and everybody, that actually, um, my friends got me the plane ticket. I got to stay in the room with Crystal that was already, you know, you know booked and and i did writing and stuff there so aol didn't pay anything of that
That was that was to get out there and to get to know. And of course, Sean was able to add me with the business card, you know, as a staff so I could get into GDC. But I mean, that wasn't even paid by OL, but you couldn't. go and cover things and everybody else was getting to go and do things now and but we could not allow studios
to pay for room or board or travel or anything to go to these events. And I mean, our audience said, please go get the news and stuff for us. We want to know what's going on. And all we do is, of course, we let people know exactly at the bottom of everyone that we go to that, you know, when a when a studio is paid for stuff. But I mean, I think it is really.
enhanced the site some and not just because i get to go to a number of these i mean i i will be you could probably write a fun book on all of your travels i yes i mean and and i look forward to them i mean And sometimes my family's all, you know, this is not a... People will ask me, oh, that's so awesome that you do this. I'm like, yeah, if you want to make money, this is not exactly the profession. This is not the way, yeah. This is not the way. But it does have some perks.
The funny thing, though, MJ, is that no one sees it that way but you. Nobody else wants to go to anything. And if I were flush with money, I could not pay people to take time off of their real jobs and their real lives to go to a convention. You're like the only one. That is so true. I love it. I mean, come on. I got to go to New Zealand. I know. I feel like a regular Canadian, you know, every July I'm a Canadian. I just.
And I love it. I love going to see, I love speaking with the devs face to face. I love watching the excitement of the player bases, you know. To me, that part of the interaction, maybe that's why I'm community manager. You know, that's, that's how that title got stuck over my head because I want to go. be with the community. I want to see the people. I really get excited watching fan bases get announcements for their stuff. It's very exciting to me. And we couldn't do that.
Yeah. At massively of old. We could not do that. That was not a thing. That was only. through MOP and because it's what our audience wanted. And so we were able to do that for you. And I mean, I'm kind of getting on in years. It's been 10 years and I kind of sometimes need some assistance when I'm going. into these things but my my first convention i think was pax east and
I went and I think Sean was there as well. And I was like, oh my goodness, I get to go to a convention. This is awesome. I get to be... media like i get a media card i get to go to the media room which by the way not that exciting it's just a room it's just a place with tables you can go and write your stuff okay some of them have really amazing food bars i'll just say that i've never seen one of those so that's
awesome um i remember sean had an official massively shirt and i was like oh cool can i have one he's like we don't have any left and so i i honestly i made my own yes And I brought it and it was probably the saddest thing I maybe have ever done in my life. But I wanted to feel like, oh, I'm sort of important. And so I went to a few that, you know, they were fun to a degree. I've learned this about myself. I get extremely claustrophobic in a lot of crowds and I,
I went to Gen Con once and I had a full-blown panic attack to the point where I had to go to hospital. So I don't really do conventions anymore for that reason. But it was a lot of fun. I think ultimately just getting to sit and talk with devs face to face. Yeah. And having.
real conversations and and once they realize like you know what you're talking about and you're not there to really kiss up to them yes they're so relieved aren't they like yeah they are they're like oh we can just talk about the game like okay cool And getting to see, like, some of the very first looks of games like Wildstar or Rift. And it was like, oh, this is, like, amazing.
that we get these first looks and so mj you were talking about perks and yeah they're every once in a while there is a perk there is like hey here's a free game here's a copy of this or but i've always thought the best perks are just being able to have
real good conversations with developers. I feel like it's something I used to get to do more often. Nowadays, it's a lot more rare. But it is really nice once you kind of cut through the PR bullet points layer and just... talk about games and find out like they love games and just like you love games and be able to have a real deep meaningful productive conversation that's that i live for that sort of thing
Yeah, I think that's more of a change in the way the industry approaches its own PR. It's not really anything we did exactly. It's more like, yeah, they would rather keep a tighter lid on their devs just so they don't say stuff. And also so that...
the wrong devs don't become like the focal point for you know toxic communities to like pile on and you know i understand why they have kind of withdrawn a little bit they don't all do that sometimes you'll still see them on streams and whatnot but for the most part it's probably in there interest to just draw back a little bit which kind of sucks yeah any other thoughts about the anniversary before we
Shuffle off. It's been like 43 minutes. Yeah. We spent a little. You didn't think we were going to have anything to say. I didn't actually, because I felt like we had done a lot of it on that other, that other podcast, but.
No, I guess we had some reminiscence here. The memories are there. I'll just say, you know, like, again, like we expressed a couple weeks ago, it's a real privilege to be able to write for the site, not just because it's fun and the staff is great and Bree's pretty. She's okay.
Yeah, but the fact that the community, you guys have been so enthusiastic and supportive. It makes such a big difference when you're putting out posts and people aren't ripping you to shreds. I mean, every once in a while you get criticism. That's okay. The community loves the site. You guys just love Massively OP. And that makes it a lot of fun to contribute to it because I know this is going to people who appreciate these games and appreciate the site. And so...
It's a big difference between, say, having a job where you're doing a lot of work, but it's for people who don't appreciate it. Don't like it. Maybe hate you. That's a huge gulf. So just thank you guys so much. That's why we've been doing it for 10 years. As Bree just said.
A lot easier places to make money. A lot easier places to make money. But this is a unique experience that I don't think any of us would really ever be able to find anywhere else. And it's such a pleasure to be able to do it. And I'm just happy to do it. Bri, would you like to share some of the comments? We have an interesting one up top. Justin doesn't tell that he keeps a few clones of himself in the closet to help him keep up with everything.
I don't have to pay them, right? No. They run off a sense of self-satisfaction, so it's all good. We have Big Mikey Ocho said, I started listening to the podcast well before the Brie Justin coup. And I've caught every episode since. Can't imagine my grocery shopping or driving without your voices. There you go. I can't imagine it without my voice either, so we're in the same boat. Oh, Tanix is, I think, aimed at Bree mostly.
When things are slow, just go on vacation for a day and the biggest news of the year will break as soon as you set foot out the door. On Friday night at 8 o'clock. Yeah, no, that's usually, that's fair. Although usually it's Justin. It happens to Justin. It was a thing for a while there. Like literally every time. He doesn't go on that many vacations.
Not anymore. I'm terrified. I think the one I always remember is when I went on a mission trip one year and the real IDE fiasco at Blizzard broke. Oh, yeah. That was a big one. And then the next year was like something with Mythic and Warhammer. maybe the closure of that or something. I'm like, I can never go on vacation again. Of course. The devs are watching. They're going to Bree and saying, has he put in any requests lately?
But yeah, Bree, you have seen like there is this rise of late week sliding things under the radar kind of news that happens and we'll roll our eyes, but pretty good at catching it now. Daybreak. He's talking about your Daybreak. But not exclusively. Occasionally Blizzard. Mostly Daybreak though. uh cat mentioned oh yes when uh for conventions i did get to go to a castle in france i mean hello that was that was awesome i'm gonna say that was that was a life bucket list kind yes
The Heidel Ball, that was amazing. And Dow Nomad, having lived that experience with being sold and eventually sold out, how does the group position itself to continue forever? As the principles grow and new brains are brought in and so on, perhaps not an instant ready set of answers to that self-governed groups are hard work. Yeah, there's no good answer to that because...
The industry changes every single year. And I know we always talk about how it's cyclical. Sometimes it's cyclical. It's always been cyclical before. I'm not sure it will always, the wheel will always come back around. Yeah, I mean, there's no promise that we will be around forever. Like...
I mean, like, let's be real about this. You know what I mean? At some point, we're going to be in our nursing homes and we're not going to be able to run this thing. And we will be passing whatever, you know, whatever form, whatever incarnation it has at that point down to another generation.
think you know I would really like to see this state of this this version of the industry like get over this hump we just covered this daybreak thing this morning where jiham was talking about who he thought you know 2025 was going to be the year for bounce back in the industry and i'm like oh i really hope you're right because
The way the industry turns is the way the ad industry turns and we are still pretty dependent on advertising if we the ad market completely collapses we would be completely then over onto reader funding and i'm not sure it would be enough to completely cover you know something anybody would read anymore. So, like, I'm like hoping...
The industry will recover long enough to stabilize the ad market again. And then we'll see what we can do. I would really like to hire more people, but it is completely dependent on budget right now. And yeah, we talked about this in the end of the year podcast. that last year was not a great year. Breaking even is not that great. But when I see major companies going under, I feel like we're doing okay because we're still here. But I'd obviously like to be doing a lot better.
a lot of that is just not within our control. Like we could double our output and it wouldn't double our income. So that would be a waste of our time. I guess, like I said, there's no real good answer to this. I would just at some point like to expand our team again. The last time we expanded our team was at 2019 when we brought in a ton of new people.
and that i think really injected a ton of like creativity back into the site not not that we were getting boring or anything but just you know we've been going for like four years already and we definitely needed a shake up we needed new ideas being like at us and coming from us I think that really helped us a lot and quite a lot of those folks were younger than our original generation and I think that helped a lot I'd like to do that again and then again but
I can't promise that. We're so dependent on the fortunes of the industry that I just don't know. Sorry, I would really love to have a really definitive, yes, we're completely secure for the next 30 years, but I don't even know if MMOs will exist in 30 years from now. I don't know what we'll have to do, but I have a feeling our team will be willing to do whatever it is.
I'll be sitting back talking about my memories back of old of them dark games we used to be able to play. And, yeah, they're not getting rid of me. I mean, I'm... just about the oldest here and i'm i'm the grandma of mo I don't think you are. I think Mia is the grandma of Mo. She has said that several times. Yes. She is. But I like that. I like that we have a nice range of ages. We have a lot of interesting perspectives coming out from the top.
and the bottom end of our age range but i just like to make it a little bit bigger and even bigger range because that's how we know that mmos are going to survive that they're actually going to be we've talked about this poor pass down to the next generation not just the site but the genre because there needs to be more games too because my most of my columns i mean i i reached a health point where i needed a break but then
My secret world column? I mean, what do I do for that? It's like the EverQuest 2 column. The... They weren't shelved because the games and content weren't there anymore for them. And that's been very sad to watch those cycle through.
but we've gotten some new stuff like a new world came out a couple years ago tyler's new world column is is one of our better performing columns honestly like you wouldn't think that you know we don't always get the comments that we used to um that's maybe something we can also talk about too another change in the
like in the internet, not just in the games industry, but in the internet in general, just comment. People don't comment on things like they used to 10 years ago. The conversations have switched, but the eyeballs have stayed, which makes it like really, we have like a weird like incentive shift.
going on like if we thought we were performing to commenters we're not really performing to commenters as much as we used to now we're performing to people who read but don't comment so that that to me has like been an interesting shift to watch and I try not to get demoralized by it because I know it's happening everywhere like it's even happening in some places on reddit
It's just one of those things that I try to keep my eye out for, as you know what I mean, in terms of like how things are shifting and how we react to them and whether we can get out in front of them or whether we should just let it, you know, roll over the top of us and focus on what we do best. So it's kind of somewhere in between.
You just I kill the games I my games are going but no things like fighter kite started in the and the Lawful neutral, you know, we did we've been able to introduce some very different And I think that's been really incredible. I love that. And I do, I still love that we have regular things that have been here all 10 years. We've the, the rock, the daily grind stuff that is. You know it's the podcast and it's million episodes that...
I literally thought it was 5,000 episodes for one. Don't ask me how I did that, but I added a zero in my mind because you guys are so amazing with that. And thank you so much. for allowing us to do a live one here for folks to be a part of this. So... Oh, yeah, Adawa saying conversations have shifted to Discord in a great part. Do you know how many voice programs we have lived through? Ventrilo, TeamSpeak. TeamSpeak. Roger Wilco, y'all. Roger Wilco. Ventrilo and Mumble.
I'll hit you guys all up on AOL and some messenger ICQ I still know my number still have those those noises in your head from people entering and leaving yeah Yeah, it's really crazy when you kind of step back, and I think we all have these moments. Maybe we don't want those moments where you step back and you kind of realize you've been doing something for a while, and you mentally step back. Like, how old was I back then?
when you know like how different was my life and there's a lot of life change that has happened in the past 10 years for all of us yeah i mean there's there's kids and families and moving new houses you know new jobs you know it's just Things have happened. And then there was that weird little blip of two years there where, I don't know, some pandemic, something happened. We're still soldiered on through that. I think it was because Moe.
his helmet already had a mask built in that's what kept us okay yeah yes so it's just it's it's kind of crazy to step back and go man i was such a young dude back then and now i'm like well you know what what it will be like in another 10 years when i'm uh nearing 60 years old and i'm gonna be like oh yeah i hope that i'm still playing games i hope i'm still excited to write about them and play but play them and whether it's you know professionally or just on my own yeah
I don't really want to fall away from this hobby. It's been a very good time, but I don't think I had a great point there. I just started. I know.
what you mean though i mean we we move around in games and we move around in our interests and it's actually kind of impressive that after 17 years you know a lot of the people who work for the site way back in the day are still here and still playing mmos like there is something like universally like compelling about this genre that just ensnares some people and will not let them go no matter how hard
try to get out of it and i feel like maybe we embody that and maybe maybe our readers embody that too a lot of people are like they don't even play anymore they just they care about the genre so much they want to read about it and they want to see what happens next
We provide that drama, I guess. It's good to stay on top of things. You can't play every game anyway. We give that whole well-rounded... i mean i still use the site in that way because i can't stay on top of everything but i'll scan down and all the news and like okay now now i feel caught up you know i feel caught up for the day so I'm going to have a choking fed, you guys. Yeah, okay. Don't do it. Yeah, there are some folks in the chat are talking about...
how they use games and how they use chat and Reddit and Discord and whatnot during the pandemic. I really think that's an important point. It brought a bunch of people, the pandemic did, brought a bunch of people into online gaming who weren't necessarily in this space.
before and i really think that's why 2001 2002 were such gigantic years not just because of all the money that was flowing you know from capitalists into the the gaming sphere for you know invest investment purposes but also people were flowing in you know because now they had this time they were at home and they were looking for socialization and mmos provided like we've been here this whole time we were always here so of course people came
to MMOs or they came to like MMO adjacent games, multiplayer games, not necessarily MMORPGs. I realize definitions have kind of... you know been fluid over the years but that's something we can talk about too like like the way our coverage has changed because I always see this every once in a while from people who either don't remember the old days or who have completely blocked them out because they weren't paying attention that much
But people are like, oh, well, you guys just recently started covering multiplayer games. And I was like, you mean like... 2011 because that doesn't seem that recent to me i remember when joystick was like yeah we don't want to cover these games they're too close to mmos you know things like smite and you know those kinds of games as they were first cropping up the legal
We don't really want to do that. We think you guys should do that. And we're like, those aren't MMORPGs. And they're like, yeah, that's okay. You should do it anyway. And we're like, okay. And so we like made our own column. That's where not so massively came from. And it kind of took over from there. Like, I don't want to say took over, but like we've been covering those kinds of adjacent MMO adjacent games for a really long time, almost as long as we've been covering.
morpgs and like justin said we started out as a second life site so like literally that's part of our blood i think and i think it just only made sense that we've continued to cover those games that are like just outside of the orbit of what we would consider true mmos right and so that's that's expanded only because those genres have kept expanding right they've lumped in online rpgs they've lumped in survival sandboxes
they've lumped in um battle royales like as those genres have taken off they kind of get mushed into this in my head anyway this lumpy subsection of like kind of close to us but not exactly the same and so we've continued to cover them but like that is it's not new the only thing that's new is that we're getting more like adjacent
subgenres which to me is really cool because a lot of times those subgenres aren't just multiplayer that's not the only thing they have in common with mmorpgs they often have something else like they'll steal our pvp system they'll steal you know our character design system they'll steal our
cosmetics they'll steal housing they'll steal pv you know like regular open pvp they'll steal something so there's parts of it that feel like mmos that have been like spun out a little bit like little satellites that got kicked out of orbit somehow into a different orbit And so, I don't know. I don't mind that. I like that.
covered a lot of like the rise of these sub genres too you know you mentioned MOBAs but you know battle royals and different different trends of course that we've seen come and go over the years it's really interesting to see what sticks and what what not only is spun out from mmos but sometimes what comes back to mmos like with these developers don't make these games in an isolated sphere they're they're often playing other games right and they shouldn't absolutely not some of them do
So that's been crazy. Like, I don't think 10 years ago we would have predicted the industry would be where it is today for better and for worse, you know, or some of these games would still be going and that we'd still have things to talk about. Like, I can't.
i've been writing about the rings online since 2010 and i think i would have gotten to the end of comments or you know things to talk about nope and you know mj you guys still streaming those games and still have fresh things to say about them because these games are developing there's they're always morphing there's always things happening with them i mean whereas go go to like a reddit this is a very interesting
experiment i noticed just the other day go to a reddit of just like a standalone game that released a while back never you know either had a little bit of dlc or maybe a patch or two or just was like a an old console game or something and you will see people always trying to come up with like something to talk about this game that was their favorite but they've run out of things to say because there's nothing new about them
there's just they get to a point like there's an end point to the discussion whereas in our genre there's no real end point because it's it keeps on going and even the games that died have you know such a wealth of material We haven't even plumbed it all yet. So that's another reason why it's so interesting to be able to do this. I like that comment, Justin, because I think we're always in that mood of, oh, have we run out of things to say? Should we move on and let someone else have this date?
you know what i mean that's something i always consider and then like you said every time i think that i'm like well i have like 500 things in my daily grind ideas subject bin these are 500 ideas i've had that i still haven't managed to write about and i've been here for 15 years so like
maybe we do have something to say and also on top of that there's the idea that there's like generational shifts going on like as as we're coming up on nearly 20 years of writing for the genre and way more than that for playing it like there are people who are just now showing up and don't know any of
at stuff like we're taking sometimes for granted stuff we saw happen in the early aughts or even in the late 90s and like just working it in casually and people are like wait what what happened and so like i feel like we're also kind of teaching we're like passing down that institute knowledge about things that happened when we're actually writing like
updated things too. Like we can add contacts that I think maybe brand new players couldn't necessarily add. They add perspective that we don't have, but you know what I mean? We have contacts and I think we need both. That's the other reason I really want to see more people entering our genre from the...
younger side and not just us leaving from the top i don't want it to feel poor i don't want it to lose all of that perspective and all of that you know that wonder that we we had a long time ago when we were new i don't want that to drain out of the the game because out of the genre because then the games become very rote. So I don't know. I think it's really important that we keep doing that and we keep remembering that...
Sometimes we have to repeat things we said 10 years ago. And that's okay. We're not being boring. Most people never read that. Most people don't even know that. It's okay that we mention a dead game and something that happened there. no one else is going to know about that. That's literally our job. It's our job to communicate that into the future.
All right, we got speechy on this podcast. Sorry. Look at, no, both of us. Look at that. It's Dao's fault, by the way. Dao, are you the Dao who used to be in my guild city in Star Wars Galaxies? I bet you are, because you've got Nomad, and I know Nomads was their guild name. Dao. It's his fault. He made me feel very philosophical here. That's what I thought. Dao is really cool. He's a good player. Yeah, so ProtoCub thinks we need an MMORPG history book written by Mob.
you know there are so many so many out there already i feel like i would just be redoing work that already exists there's a couple of great eq books there's a ton of great eve books there's a star wars galaxies book costa stuff yeah oh my gosh already out there the guy who did mud um oh bartle yeah there's so much stuff out there already about the early history it's like it's there if you go looking for it but like i don't
I don't want to write a book. From the mop perspective, that's the clincher there.
I think every unique job has a lot of interesting anecdotes. And if you are very good at writing them down, maybe you could spin them into a book. But if you're not really on top of that, or you have a fantastic memory, which is not... my case but um yeah i don't know i think in terms of preserving the memory of the site you know like and and news that's kind of what the site is it's kind of this growing developing history book of what's happening in our
genre and we try to do the best we can to catalog and keep it organized and you know as cover as much as possible but knowing that it is an impossible task so We just have to do what we can. It always tickles me when I see modern influencers on YouTube.
bringing up pictures of our site to like prove that something happened it's like oh my god we're the paper of record i don't know how this happened but we somehow became the paper of record for mmorpgs and that just floors me that's like that's like the dream right there, honestly. It's when other people cite you. I'm serious. Oh, no, I get the same feeling. I see it on Wikipedia. I'm like, oh, they linked my name to the website. I'm like, what? I'm not a trusted source. Don't do that.
I love it. It just makes me feel like, oh, this was worthwhile. Like this will stand. I don't know how long this will stand until the Internet melts down and who knows. But you know what? For now, it stands the test of time. We are we have made some history here. Thank you.
Well, thank you for letting us do some navel gazing today on the episode. We appreciate just being able to kind of walk down those memory lanes and talk about this. And we'll get back to our normal format next week when MJ is not holding a duck to our head.
and making us do some crazy things but MJ thank you for letting us come on on your stream today and we want to encourage everybody who is listening live right now hang out with MJ for some more she's going to have a lot of fun she might even play a game we don't know chris coming on this afternoon too right he's gonna stream chris will be starting up yeah i just okay so right now and elliot is part of this problem too
Queen of the last minute ideas. We thought of playing Warframe when it was time for him to go. I should have been playing Plastic Placid Duck Simulator this whole time. Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. No, yes, Chris will be coming in. And starting up, I know he's got headbangers. all prepared and and he told me the other game but i'm not remembering he is sitting back waiting to take over so two hours into our big mega stream and we'll start a game
All right. Well, and if those of you who are just listening to this as a normal podcast, go ahead and make sure you send us in some more of those podcast questions and topics you'd like us to talk about on a future episode. What is wrong with my throat? Talk, Brie, talk. Send us cupcakes and also email, but first cupcakes. I can't breathe. No, we actually have a bunch of questions that none of which we got to do today. One, two, three, like five or six questions.
So you can send us those, anything you want us to talk about in the reader mail section. Also, if you have suggestions for topics for the one topic shows, the specialty shows that Justin and I have started doing over the last year or so.
I've got a big list of them, but I'm always taking more because sometimes we just don't want to talk about the news because it's depressing. And we'd rather talk about, you know, housing or crafting or something. So send us some of those too. Those are always really helpful.
And as we just talked about, you heard our whole story of the Kickstarter. And the one thing we didn't really... push on too much is that we needed continued revenue as the site kept on going kickstarter only got us started and kept us going for a little while and while ad revenue definitely does help also patreon is
been a huge backbone of the site in terms of our financial pillar and we just thank you for all those people who have been supporting us through patreon for the past 10 years maybe in part maybe in whole maybe just a buck here and there you know whatever it is thank you like you
Thank you so much. And if you want to check that out and see how you might want to support Massively OP and independent... mmojournalism check out the right hand side of the site there's a link right to our patreon program and just as little as five dollars a month you get the podcast a day early so if you liked hearing this live on monday
That's what it's like for those $5 people. Oh, yeah, they're living the good life. They are the 1%. All right. That is all that we have for time for today, but keep on listening to MJ, and we'll talk to you guys again in another week. Later, everybody!