Ahmed Farooq, a gentleman who we believe in explicitly, just e-mailed the Robotipophone (yes, I’m making up new terms for it every day) to let us know that Wowhead, one of the preeminent World of Warcraft information sites, has been purchased for a cool one million bones by a group known as Affinity Media.
If that’s all Greek to you, the skinny is that Affinity Media is the company behind the scurrilous IGE, a group specializing in the sale of virtual goods through EULA-prohibited black market trades. IGE — or, as it’s known to many MMO patrons, Beelzebub — makes literal assloads of cash on the sale of items no more real than the unicorn I’m currently grooming, and since the launch (and unprecedented success) of World of Warcraft, have taken to buying up every site operating within the periphary of the game, including Allakhazam, Thottbot and Tubgnome-dot-com. Many consider this a rampant conflict of interests as the sites themselves seem to exist solely to aid players within the massive worlds of the various MMOs, and, at best, IGE’s habit of not exactly disclosing the nature of their acquisitions has led many to picture them as bathing in the birthing fluids of aborted fetuses under a blood-red moon.
On a personal note, this news is depressing to me. As a strong proponent of my generation’s stereotypical anarcho-communist leanings, I’ve had to jump from site to site in order to get my in-depth WoW info as IGE assimilated them faster than Kel’Thuzad on a coke binge. Wowhead had become my most recent bastion of information, so to hear that they’ve turned to the dark side illicits feelings of betrayal on par with that time I found out my gorgeous Night Elf paramour was, in fact, this guy.
