A few days ago, gaming website Joystiq reported on the rumour that gaming website Joystiq was being shut down. Think about the absurdity of that, for a moment: a writer at a gaming website reporting on the possibility that his website was being shut down…after hearing a rumour about it on another website. It’s almost Dilbertian in its brutality, that reality…and it earned a much-deserved sassing from Penny Arcade:

Sadly, rumours proved true:

Sources tell Joystiq that the staff is aware of the closure, but corporate hasn’t officially told them, so they are unable to acknowledge anything out of concern that it will cause immediate shutdown. We’ve reached out for more information. We will update, as we always have, when we know more.

Update: It’s official. Thank you for reading, listening, viewing and supporting Joystiq all these years.

That’s a very brief sendoff, and as much as has been posted about the closure on Joystiq proper. Their sub-site Massively, however, published a longer, and rather more raw, note about the impending closure:

I would like to be able to tell you truthfully that this is an equitable and just decision that makes some sort of logical sense, but the reality is that our overlords’ decisions have always been unfathomable. I know more of what I know about corporate from reading tech and finance news than through my own job. We all suspected this was coming eventually a year ago when a VP whose name I don’t even know and who never read our site chose to reward our staggering, hard-won 40% year-over-year page view growth by… hacking our budget in half. There’s nothing to do in the face of that kind of logic but throw your hands in the air. It’s not about merit or lack thereof, and it’s not about journalism or gaming being dead or anything grand like that, so there’s no point in taking it personally.

But for me, it’s hard not to. This was a lot more than a job for me. I’ve worked as a lead editor at Massively for just shy of five years, half of that as its boss, and it seeped into my life and became more than a full-time job, even though none of us ever received any benefits. You know that two-week “maternity leave” I took last year when my daughter was born? That was my vacation for the whole year. And I wasn’t alone in that foolishness/dedication; the Massively writers, past and present, bent over backward for the site. I flat out love these guys. I came in here as a geeky copyeditor and am leaving with a fleet of good friends and a much deeper understanding of how and why my favorite genre runs the way it does, and it will forever influence how I play games and whose games I buy.

Massively’s writers are second to none in the MMO genre; I’ll so dearly miss the day-to-day, down-in-the-trenches collaboration with my team. People actually cared about this place. In a year when other sites were finally discovering ethics, we wondered what took them so long because our network already had a transparent ethics policy. We already didn’t play dirty pool. You might not have agreed with all of our opinions — I didn’t always agree with our opinions! — but our hands were clean, and you can’t say that about a lot of sites in this industry. Some sites out there actually employ industry PR as fan writers, out in the open, like it’s no big thing.

That’s your industry now.

We tried to rise above it.

Our whole network did.

And this is, largely, true. Joystiq and Massively were, for the most part, all about the games themselves, and didn’t often touch on the politics surrounding them. Their reportage tended to be fair, and reasonably accurate.

And I suppose, in some respects, it will continue to be: it seems that Joystiq and Massively will be merged with Engadget (because that makes sense). So we’ll still get some of the same reporting, and some of the same coverage. But with roughly 150 people losing their jobs at Joystiq alone, I very much doubt we’ll get as much of it.

And that’s a damned shame.

(Image credit: GalleryHip for the water backdrop)