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Faceless, were you the dude who won that DOA tournament at the Xbox launch event in NYC? I think you also modded an Xbox for me years later in Brooklyn.
I saw this shut down of TXB as an inevitability because it was a major duplication of efforts with IGN Xbox and the unpaid editorial staff (whoever was remaining) probably wasn't going to last very long. I suppose both IGN and TXB's founders got what they wanted out of the sale because TXB's folks got paid and IGN got more traffic to add to their ecosystem when bundling space to advertisers. Passion got TXB to that point of being attractive for IGN to buy but the ironic part is that the transfer of control is when that passion went out the window. It's similar to when big publishers buy these once productive developers and they end up closing a few years later.
I founded msxbox when I was 18 and it did well early on and actually brought in some decent advertising cheddar in the 1st year before the internet advertising bubble burst. The front page was like VE3d for Xbox news and the forums were a bit like NeoGAF (albeit nowhere near as popular), but a year later I had to decide between focusing on college or sticking with the site. Had internet marketing matured a year or two earlier, I may have done both, but because the income and my free time had both dried up, I decided to basically hand the whole thing off to the TXB folks who seemed the most passionate of the rest of the Xbox sites. I can't lie, if I stuck with msxbox and built it up, I would have probably sold it to a conglomerate like IGN's parent company as well and cashed in too unless I was able to figure out a way to monetize it better on my own before then (like Evilore haha).
It was definitely a fun experience, though. Some cool cats like Dopey, Speevy, Statham, Nvidiot, Cesar, Nate etc., etc. were huge parts of the TXB community and I'm sure all have great memories of their time there. The TXB folks did a good job of expanding the merged site and having it compete with the big boys like IGN and Gamespot, which is not easy to do when you compare the vast differences in budgets.
Shugashack, VE3D, Bluesnews, etc. and even sites like TXB were the early independent giants of internet gaming sites but like the dinosaurs before them, their extinction/downfall was almost inevitable, but can sites like NeoGAF carry the torch and learn from their predecessors?
I saw this shut down of TXB as an inevitability because it was a major duplication of efforts with IGN Xbox and the unpaid editorial staff (whoever was remaining) probably wasn't going to last very long. I suppose both IGN and TXB's founders got what they wanted out of the sale because TXB's folks got paid and IGN got more traffic to add to their ecosystem when bundling space to advertisers. Passion got TXB to that point of being attractive for IGN to buy but the ironic part is that the transfer of control is when that passion went out the window. It's similar to when big publishers buy these once productive developers and they end up closing a few years later.
I founded msxbox when I was 18 and it did well early on and actually brought in some decent advertising cheddar in the 1st year before the internet advertising bubble burst. The front page was like VE3d for Xbox news and the forums were a bit like NeoGAF (albeit nowhere near as popular), but a year later I had to decide between focusing on college or sticking with the site. Had internet marketing matured a year or two earlier, I may have done both, but because the income and my free time had both dried up, I decided to basically hand the whole thing off to the TXB folks who seemed the most passionate of the rest of the Xbox sites. I can't lie, if I stuck with msxbox and built it up, I would have probably sold it to a conglomerate like IGN's parent company as well and cashed in too unless I was able to figure out a way to monetize it better on my own before then (like Evilore haha).
It was definitely a fun experience, though. Some cool cats like Dopey, Speevy, Statham, Nvidiot, Cesar, Nate etc., etc. were huge parts of the TXB community and I'm sure all have great memories of their time there. The TXB folks did a good job of expanding the merged site and having it compete with the big boys like IGN and Gamespot, which is not easy to do when you compare the vast differences in budgets.
Shugashack, VE3D, Bluesnews, etc. and even sites like TXB were the early independent giants of internet gaming sites but like the dinosaurs before them, their extinction/downfall was almost inevitable, but can sites like NeoGAF carry the torch and learn from their predecessors?
