Farewell teamxbox
- Thread starter JamOnIt
- Start date
I never had any intent of talking about any fault in selling to them. I've always made it perfectly clear that without them or that deal happening, TXB was probably months away from being shut down anyways because I wasn't going to be able to maintain it much longer on my own. That's never been a secret nor have I ever tried to say otherwise. And like you said, I did hope nothing would have changed since IGN bought it. But things did change. Things I couldn't have foreseen or predicted.
It kind of started when Mark Jung, the guy running IGN at the time, who was responsible for approaching us and making an offer, left the company some time after the buyout, as well as the buyouts with GameSpy and AskMen and Rotten Tomatoes, etc. Once he left, new people came in and things changed. Sure you could say I should have known better, but oh well, that's life.
And I beg your pardon on the MSXbox thing...at the time we merged with MSXbox, they only had 20K or users to our 5K or so. We had a much better main page and they had a forum.
Sol didn't want to continue working the site or making it bigger. He was in college and wanted to focus on college and his career. He talked to me about taking the forums and bridging it with the main site we had going on.
What we did was a hell of a lot more than simply being handed a community and running wild with it.
We took that user base and grew it 10 fold, gaining upwards of 250,000 users by the time I was done with it. We also grew the main page from a site that got a few tens of thousands of uniques a month to more than 2 million uniques a month and at our peak we were doing 30 million page views a month.
If you think all of that simply came from being handed what MSXbox was, you are sorely mistaken...even Sol will tell you that if you asked him.
For one, we rebuilt a totally custom CMS from scratch that ran the site. Tony and I, along with Cesar and the other guys, contributed to building our database we named Divine. Tony then went on the be part of the internal team that rebuilt IGNs database from the ground up.
And if you think the money I got was only based on the actions of the forum users, again you are wrong.
I did a lot within IGN that people may not realize. I redesigned GameSpy (which I believe is still their current design that's years old since nobody is now supporting that site either). I worked on the Vault and Planet networks along with VE3D.
And speaking of money, one of the reasons IGN got so seriously interested in us in the first place was because the year prior to the buyout we managed to put together a booth at E3. That cost a fortune, and while we had a couple sponsors, I still chucked over more than $50K of my own money. Money which I had from other things I did professionally since at that time TXB had yet to make a dime over what it cost to maintain.
So while I can appreciate your opinion, you really don't have a full understanding of the events that went on, the work that went into it, or really how any of it worked or effected us.
So please, don't just assume that all I ever did was take over another site, kick my feet up and get rich off other peoples' work. Anyone who knows me even in the slightest should realize that is the furthest thing from the reality of it. Yes, I did eventually make good money selling the site and I did get a good salary to continue running it while working for IGN as well as salaries for the rest of the full time staff who worked on the site. But it wasn't for doing nothing and it sure as hell wasn't for just taking something else and doing nothing with it. We all earned it and I sacrificed more than you can know for it.
Bro you kinda over-reacted to that s***.. lol.
Wasn't it all under NotBehindYou and nothing to do with your real name?
CALL THE FEDS!
I'd don't recall I think my name was on it though because when emailed twitter they we're the ones that got me all riled up about it as a security issue. Looking back it was pretty clever of someone, easy way to put a bow on my dismissal. For a long time I figured it was Brent because he was trying to convince the otl to just let me go and drop it lol.
But yes, I was a spaz. I spent way too much time online back then. This is actually the first time I've really logged onmtomforumminna long time.
iPad...not fixingnthatberror.
Shockwave said:
Wasn't accusing you of doing nothing.. I'm accusing you of not being thankful enough for how lucky you are.
I just think you have an inflated ego and not enough appreciation for your situation and how lucky it was. I don't have a high opinion of the TeamXbox front page "content" so it's partly where my attitude comes from. It was good web design for it's time.. that's IMO, along with the domain name and being handed MSXbox.com's userbase where the "success" of TXB came from. It didn't last IMO because the content wasn't actually good. IGN realized that it wasn't worth paying for, so might as well just let the forum exist.. that's where the real revenue came from.. google anything gaming related and TXB's excellent SEO would bring you to the forums.
I read a TeamXbox.com review once that had a brief blurb about how the games co-op was fun.. I bought that game only to find out the game had no co-op. Just one of many LOL moments reading the TeamXbox.com front page "content".. it was not good.
And LOL at you not really appreciating being handed 20,000 forum accounts... and this hairbrained claim that you "grew it to 250,000 users".. that's exactly the type of "not really in reality" stuff that bothers me about you. If TeamXbox had 250,000 users it would have had millions of posts per month.
I never asked for the praise or glory or told people to kiss my ass. But why should I tell them to STFU? So you feel better about it? I'm sorry if you think I've gain some unwarranted notoriety for whatever I've done, but clearly it burns your chaps when people applaud me for whatever or say nice things. But I'm not going to come on and tell someone who says whatever to shut up about it. I just say thanks and move on. I don't bask in it or sit and expect it or tell people to do it. Come on man, you just seem bitter that I got anything out of this. It's not like I say worship me! People just react however they react, and for the most part I take it in stride and look at it as part of the fun and games. I doubt anyone holds me in as high as regards as they play it out here. It's just part of the fun of the forums and the nonsense we take part it. I don't walk around like some kind of king with his servants. Seriously lol.
I'm not sitting here trying to be a victim either. I'm just saying things that have went on that people don't realize maybe or understand and really couldn't have. But I never sat back and let people bash IGN or the TXB issues. That's what got me so worked up at times. Was trying to defend the things we were doing and the things that were happening. It was impossible to do because people just weren't part of the other side of things.
And the only real bashing I do toward IGN is in regards to the handful of people who came along who truly didn't care about TXB and weren't really part of IGN in the beginning but were hired hands down the road and never really understood what any of it was about anyways. You meet those people in all walks of life and in all career paths. But generally I didn't really slam on IGN as a whole. I'm thankful for what happened at the time and ya I'm upset how it ended and I do still feel there a few people who could have done more to make things better but oh well. Out of my hands.
And I never thanked you? Are you serious? I was always appreciative of the support. I always was humbled by the attention and the on going patronage of the site. And maybe you might not realize it but I put everything I had in that place, I worked 16-18 hour days regularly to keep that place alive and updated and active. Even when IGN had let go a few of our staff and cut our numbers back, I continued to work as hard as I could to try to keep things together and continue to create the best experience I could. For the 3 years before the site was bought, I put every dime I had in the site. I flew people volunteering the site to events and paid for their s*** so they could be there.
My thanks was also shown in how hard I tried to make TXB what it was. You don't get that?
Are you just mad because I personally never singled you out and said thanks? Ok, well thanks. Thanks from the bottom of my heart. I mean it. I'm glad you were part of the site and I'm grateful for your interactions on the site and your participation in the community it became. I thankful that you were one of the thousands who kept me going and helped me to find the determination and resolve to make the site a success while it lasted. And thanks for giving me the drive to have made it into something that I was able to sell and make a career out of for nearly a decade.
Do you have any idea how much this place cost before I even made a dime? Probably not. The E3 booth alone was 50K or whatever. Hosting a month was around 5K, on top of having to buy the servers, of which we had 6 at one time that were not cheap. Traveling to events and paying for airfare and hotels and whatnot. It's not like I just made a ton of money out of nothing. I put a lot into it. I invested a lot more than just money into TXB as well. And yes, part of that return was a result of the community and people like you who showed up and made it what it was. But it took a f*** ton of work and effort and sacrifice to even get you there in the first place.
So come on man, give me some credit at least for that. I hate that you just think I managed to score some kind of luck driven windfall. Do you think everyone who's made any money doing anything may have actually earned it?
And I don't get why you say I never said thanks or showed my gratitude. I thought I always did. Maybe not so much near the end, say in the last 6-8 months before the IGN mass exodus, but I've discussed that. But I think overall, I was always quite appreciative of the users and what we built.
Shockwave said:
Honestly sounds like you wasted a lot of money on that stuff. E3 booth for TeamXbox? lol
Either way.. I'm done with this conversation.. sorry if I riled you up
I think you perceive me as having a bigger ego that I actually do. I can't tell the number of times I've been at events in the past where people recognized me and I felt totally insecure about it. I actually sometimes felt somewhat silly when people would call me Shockwave rather than Brent. I'd make sure to tell them my real name so they could hopefully know me as who I am beyond the screename or gamertag. I wanted to be more personal with people I met than the whole Shockwave thing.
And I dont want to downplay luck. Sure there was some luck in things. Luck in the timing of things, luck in how we came to be, but there was a lot of work and dedication and determination as well. I think you blow that off.
And ya, you blow off the TXB homepage, but you still have to understand that 50% of the site's traffic came from that. You might have thought it was crap and that's fine. But we still had just as active a readership of the main site as we did the forums. In fact the biggest challenge we faced was trying to get those two to cross over. It was always 1 or the other. People were either regulars of the main site or the forums and we were never able to get a bleed through of that. So you should realize that ya, the forums were huge and a big focus of the site's personality and success, but the main site was equally as important in what TXB was. And the forums didn't just build themselves. If it were that easy, there would have been more that existed and it wouldn't have been as amazing as it was.
Also, the demise of TXB was not a result of the site being good or not. It really and truly wasn't.
It was a result of Fox News Corp, who bought IGN a couple years after IGN bought us, buying MySpace for $500 million and doing nothing with it. We all know the downfall of MySpace. That cost Fox pretty much all of that $500 million.
so when the bleeding started and Fox needed to recoup that money, they started thinning out the herd. When it came to looking through IGN, they did what made the most sense financially. Protect the core of the tree and trim the branches. Those branches include TXB, GameSpy, VE3D, Planets, Vaults, etc.
It wasn't because we sucked or GameSpy sucked or anythings else. It really boiled down to making IGN survive as a site, which was obviously the focus over keeping the extremities alive. And that was how they did it.
They cut all the extra branches off, and IGN carried on and has carried on.
And I never said I didn't appreciate the 20k users we got from MSXbox...why do you continue to draw staws where they arent? And what do you mean by a hair band claim that we grew it to 250,000 users? Look at the stats. I'm not making them up. But obviously not all of them were active at once. That was over 10 years of the site growing. People came and went. Sure some were bots and so forth. Also keep in mind there were times we went through and purged inactive accounts after sending notices that were not returned. This was to keep the database streamlined while helping lower the bot posts, etc. so the actual numbers would have been higher. Why do you think the current status of the site is so overrun by crap. They don't do those things anymore and couldn't.
Of course they weren't all active users at any given time. But so what? It still grew. You are just sitting there acting like MSXbox was some giant property at the time and TXB never really got much bigger.
Are you serious?
Anyways, it's clear you just have a bone to pick because I made some money on a site you think I didn't deserve. And that's cool. Just find it ironic you are calling me out for not appreciating you yet you don't see the parallel in showing a little appreciation back.
Accounts != users.
I have looked at the user stats at TXB over the years.
Pages upon pages of accounts with 0 posts... and it's been that way since way before the botsplosion. You always hid the "on by default" active user count too at TXB so one could only guess how many people actually posted there, but it wasn't 250,000 people.
edit: Just took a look.. over half of the registered accounts have 0 posts.
There's over 200,000 accounts with between 0 and 3 posts.
I have looked at the user stats at TXB over the years.
Pages upon pages of accounts with 0 posts... and it's been that way since way before the botsplosion. You always hid the "on by default" active user count too at TXB so one could only guess how many people actually posted there, but it wasn't 250,000 people.
edit: Just took a look.. over half of the registered accounts have 0 posts.
There's over 200,000 accounts with between 0 and 3 posts.
So the same I still go on TXB but not for long, this forum is my permanent home now.
Honestly sounds like you wasted a lot of money on that stuff. E3 booth for TeamXbox? lol
Either way.. I'm done with this conversation.. sorry if I riled you up
Not riled up. Too old and beyond getting overly worked up over this.
But look, the booth stuff was like this...
We were two years into TXB at the time. It kept growing and growing. I didn't now exactly where it was going or how, but I knew that the more I put into it, it kept growing. And I had gone to E3 and the other gaming events and noticed two different types of industry people there. The ones who were seen as established and legit games press/media and the ones who were considered fans.
I no longer wanted to just be seen as a fansite. the fansites were the ones running on geocities hosting or hoping for freebie games to be sent to them to review.
I had put too much into the site and I knew if nothing else, it was worth making into something more. The community and the site itself were too important to me to just treat like another fansite. At the time there were a number of other sites out there we competed with. won't name them but I'm sure you can recall some of them.
We were all considered fansites.
So I thought the best way to break that and pull ahead and instead compete with the likes of IGN and Gamespot and 1up, that we'd have to do something big. All those big names had their presence at E3 so I decided TXB needed theirs. To be a 'fansite' that managed to pull off a booth would be a huge statement. It would let everyone know we weren't just another fansite and that we were taking ourselves seriously. It let the industry, particularly the publishers and developers know we weren't just kids playing games hoping to get free s***.
And it worked. The site grew a lot faster after that show. We used the booth to hold meetings with publishers and developers and we managed to get some of our first big exclusives and we got on the regular mailing lists and we also got Microsoft to bump us to the next level of PR treatment because of it.
And the following year IGN approached us.
so you might say it was a big waste of money, but quite frankly without that booth playing a role in the evolution of the site, we probably would have just continued on as a fansite that was ignored by the industry and IGN probably never would have paid much attention to us and we probably would have closed up before IGN could have come along to make any such offer.
We should pitch in a dollar each for Bunz, for each post he made at TXB so that he feels appreciated for the contributions he made on the forum. Typical Bunz trying to rile people up for amusement lol.
I didn't think anyone actually ever thought we had that many active users at once to begin with. It was more cumulative. Hell the stat on the forum landing page would show how many active users were currently on and it was usually a few hundred or so at a time. I think the forum record was like 4000 around some Halo announcement. So it's not like I was trying to hide something? I thought it was perfectly clear that the overall total count of accounts was not actually the number of active users at whatever the present time was.
But the fact is, we DID get 2-2.5 million unique visitors a month and that was backed up and verified by IGN otherwise they weren't going to buy us for what they did. And if you think about that, that only tells you that a f*** ton more people went to the main site than ever signed up for the forums. So chew on that for a bit and tell me that the main site meant nothing.
Ya, this place is cool. I like some of the updated social features of these forums. It's cool to see how they have evolved. I'm just glad I don't have to moderate it
It's not really riling me up. I just don't like people thinking one thing of me that I truly don't believe is the case. If anything I guess my feelings get hurt if someone things I was outwardly trying to be a jerk or some kind of inconsiderate prick. Mainly because those are the types of people in the industry that I have a bad taste for myself and have caused me to shy away from it all together these days.
My point is it's not an accurate count of anything other than how many accounts exist in the forum software.
The forum was busy, but to claim 250,000 users is an exaggeration considering 100k+ of those accounts never really posted.
funny, there was a person who used to claim on my last site that he raised the user count from 60k to 280k users.. but at any given time, there were only 40-60 online. 1,000 active (posted in last 30 days).. the rest, one off or BOT accounts.
Total users registered is a useless metric
*sniff*sniff*
Smell that? It's jealousy in the air. haha jk
or am i?
LOL.. I'm not jelly. You'd have to trust me on that.
I'm also not a Shockwave "hater".. I'm partly the Shockwave devil's advocate because I consider him just a guy with a fairly lucky job.. and TXB in general acted like he should be some charity case because of "what happened to him." He sold the site..
It's not really a job I've ever REALLY wanted, so no jealousy there. If anything I'm "jealous" of Plainview's smooth transition to this place + decent ad deals in place. I'd have loved for WCG to be sitting at this traffic with good ads and a fairly cooperative user base that isn't causing him grief.. instead I ended up with a headache and having my ads pulled.. lot of it my own fault of course.
I don't do a good job running forums, I'll be the first to admit that. I get way too involved.
I'll back off @Shockwave.
Good job creating TeamXbox, it did make a pretty big mark on these here interwebs.. gaming is an under-rated part of the "web".. it's one of the first areas of the web that got big, and TeamXbox was a good part of that.
I don't think you were a jerk or an inconsiderate prick.
And perhaps my claims of "ego" are ill informed.. but there's something off about you that rubs me the wrong way. lol.. I rub most people the wrong way on the internet, so don't take too much offense to it.
The Nby thing bothered me for instance. I wasn't friends with Nby or anything like that..didn't really know much about him.. but he got thrown under the bus for making a joke about a toy.. and you actively turned that into a story about Nby "attacking your child." That's the words that were used during all of that.. and it made me a little ill. Victim complex.. and I'd seen it from you before. You took a lot of things way too seriously.
But perhaps you were under stress.
All water under the bridge now.
