Rumor: Joystiq Shutting Down

First, a quick PSA: you can get the Dragon Age: Inquisition tavern songs for free on the Dragon Age website, between now and February 9^th.  Get on that.  I would make that a separate article but that’s all there really is to it, so.

Now, onto the real—and less happy—news.  As reported by Recode, Joystiq, a ten-year-old gaming website, is looking like it’s going to be shutting down in the near future.

This news is hardly official at this point; in fact, it’s little more than a couple of whispers mashed together to draw a conclusion, but it’s convincing nonetheless.  See, Joystiq is owned by a parent company, AOL, which is predictably having some serious financial issues at the moment, and it’s been revealed by people within the company that it’s planning on undergoing a radical restructuring.  While AOL didn’t specifically state it was going to take down Joystiq at any point, it’s understood that Joystiq is going to be one of the victims of that radical restructuring.  It's also been understood that despite the website's possible future, AOL would retain the name for future branding purposes.

Joystiq, you see, has been having a hard time lately itself.  Despite being one of the bigger, more popular gaming websites on the net, in recent years it’s been losing readership, down eighteen percent over the past year alone.  When contacted for information by Kotaku, Joystiq editor-in-chief Ludwig Kietzmann declined to comment… but Joystiq later posted that they were aware of their inevitable closure, in a somewhat tongue-and-cheek manner.  

There’s no date on when the website will be shut down, or, heck, if the shutdown is final. But the talks are still bothersome.

This sucks for a lot of reasons—Joystiq had a big community, produced quality news, and has been around along time—but it’s not exactly Nintendo Power levels of tragedy.  Still, it’ll be missed.