Hmm...

[Markus]

wow.azzor.com/445/truth_about_IGE.php

[Markus]

Wow, IGE owns Allakahzam

[Ody]

Yep, sad but true. I refuse to use alla now.

[Sosa]

The official thread they used for announcement was an entertaining read. Allah makes the announcement, gets 20 posts asking for a confirmation... says exactly the following:

The ownership issues here are convoluted. This is how deals like this get done. The size of this is pretty amazing. This is just the announcement for our own users, not the actual corporate announcement, which will likely come much later. We are now owned by a company that owns a bunch of stuff, including IGE. They bought both of us (and several other sites as well) and then split us into separate divisions so that there is no interaction between them. You know my stand on gold selling. Before agreeing to anything like this, I wanted to make sure that there would be no interaction between those divisions and that I would have complete control over the new network, including the sites that used to be part of ogaming. So this means that the Ogaming sites and Thottbot have been split off of IGE and into our network and no longer have any connection with them.

Let me translate it for you.

IGE paid us a shit load of money. This is the way the real world works. We're going to fuck our subscribers in the ass and steal their content in an effort to monopolize online resources so you have to pay us money to use the sites you're used to. It's ok, because we're using another company as a front to excuse our aquisition by IGE. By different divisions, I mean to say that we're a division of IGE now, and will be selling the content on our sites through premium subscriptions. I'm totally in favor of online trading in the MMO market, because I put lots of advertisements to the companies on my website, even though I don't really support them. What this basically means is that we now hold a monopoly on every major archive of player knowledge in popular use, and will begin charging you content fees to access them, even though every single piece of information is player submitted.

What was really funny to me about this statement is that immediatly after posting it, there was about 9 pages of posts consisting almost entirely of quotes like "Nice going, been a long time member and am cancelling my subscription now, sellout." They're going to lose a VERY large segment of their premium subscribers.

Fucking. Brilliant. It was only a matter of time. Sadly, people will continue to go to the sites... but I personally will be boycotting them from this day forward. Player knowledge is owned by the players. It stands to simple logic that for the same reason these sites became popular by being cheaper (ie: free) alternatives to other sources, another site will likely spring forward and take their place.

Good bye, and good riddance.