Joystiq

About Joystiq

Joystiq is a video gaming website founded in June 2004 that has since become one of the most successful sites within the Weblogs, Inc. (WIN) family of weblogs. It is the centerpiece of WIN's own network of video gaming blogs, which also includes blogs devoted to specific gaming hardware (such as Xbox 360 Fanboy), as well as a blog dealing with the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft.

As of early 2004, Weblogs, Inc. was seeking to add a blog to its repertoire for the sole purpose of covering news related to video games, as evidenced by the now-defunct The Video Games Weblog, founded 2004-02-27. On March 12, WIN CEO Jason Calacanis announced two spinoff projects: The Unofficial Playstation 3 Weblog and The Unofficial Xbox 2, both of which are now similarly retired, though they would set a precedent for the launching of Joystiq's Fanboy blogs in 2005. However, none of these three initial weblogs were ever aggressively marketed,[citation needed] and The Video Games Weblog made its final post on May 18, 2005, amassing 175 blog entries in total (a rather scant amount by Weblogs, Inc. standards). All three blogs are now listed as "On Hiatus/Retired" in the Weblogs, Inc. directory. As an interesting bit of trivia, David Touve, the primary contributor to these early blogs, would later act as Joystiq's features editor for a short time in late 2005 before resigning due to the birth of his child.

Later that year, following 2004's Electronic Entertainment Expo, Peter Rojas, the founder of and lead contributor to WIN's flagship blog Engadget, formally introduced Joystiq to the masses, positioning the blog as an extension to Engadget's Gaming subdomain. However, being a separate and wholly video game-related entity, Joystiq allowed for much more in-depth analysis of the video game industry than the primarily consumer electronics-oriented Engadget. While Joystiq had featured content as early as April 2, the blog is not officially considered to have been launched until Rojas's public revelation on Engadget on Wednesday, June 16, 2004.