Activison-Blizzard Possibly Threatened And Shut Down A Blogger

There is a blog on Blogspot.com called “Digital Castration” that a friend of mine told me about a couple of weeks ago. Earlier this week he sent me a link to it. I glanced over it, and decided I would read it all later. The author “Daeity” had written a lot of extremely interesting information about Blizzard, including real WoW subscriber numbers, and its new MMO project. It was obvious that “Daeity” had done a extremely good job at researching information, and gaining access to formerly unknown public sources. Today at lunch my friend informed me that the blog had been shut down, except for a single post that implied that Activision-Blizzard had threatened him, or forced him to shut his blog down.

I’ve decided to re-post his blog entries here, before they turn to internet dust, in an effort to preserve his work. The few posts of his that are here, are all I could scavenge from the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine. I’ll title each one with “Digital Castration:” and its original title.

Daeity, if you see this, thank you for all your hard work! If you want, feel free to comment, or even contact me about making blog posts here.

Below is his final blog post in case that also disappears:

A little too much information..
Originall written by Daeity at Digital Castration.

Unfortunately, over the past several months I’ve been flying a little too close to the sun.

It’s still a pretty new blog (I started writing back in July ‘10) and I suppose this was ultimately fated to happen.

It’s fitting, though, that it happened at the 9 month period too: like a newborn baby it was ready to explode from the womb.. but with a huge amount of information as the afterbirth, rather than pieces of placenta.

There was just way too much information collected and researched thoroughly.. and it was scary for some (e.g. the real costs of services and devices, profit margins, real players and subscription figures, extracted sales data, uncanny future predictions, new games and their release dates, the return (or introduction) of a ton of content that everyone believed were gone forever, correcting a ton of misinformation in gaming news, unannounced games, next-gen game details, what things are really like behind the veiled curtain, etc. etc.)

There were two big projects I was working on in the past couple months (one was actual subscription data, the other, well.. it was a huge spoiler). By investigating publicly-available information (very hard to find, but it’s there), I had collected details about an upcoming next-gen MMO and even had concept art. It’s still a few years away, but due to this current situation it’s not anything that I can publish. Even where it came from, it would still be considered “private, confidential, and proprietary” to a certain corporation.

I hope you enjoyed the fun, dramatic entertainment, critical analysis, the information and data, and frequent sarcasm. It was definitely one-of-a-kind, but a machine that accurately predicts the future and reveals future business plans and game details should not be permitted to exist.

They did what they had to do, and I understand completely from a business perspective. I love all of the games I’ve written about, and will continue to support the companies.. but I just can’t research them in such great detail anymore.

On a related note, if you’re in the game development field: get rid of your entire global internet footprint. You shouldn’t have a Twitter account, a blog, a YouTube account, participate in any forums, play online games with people you don’t know, share art or pictures, take pictures within your workplace and post them online, have a Facebook account, share details with OPEN Facebook accounts, or even have a Google account w/out making sure your Docs and Buzz are completely disabled. I don’t even know where to get started.. I know way too much now.

Even when you have your “work” alias, and you create multiple new aliases and fake names across the internet (thinking that they’re safe), it’s still very easy to find out the new names and link them back to one person. Also, you shouldn’t be surfing non-business related webpages from work.

As for me, time to move onto new adventures. There are a lot of options available, and I like to keep busy with fun side projects.

You can’t know the future, though, without it’s stakeholders kicking your ass.

(P.S. My email address was just another throw-away account, like this one. Time to implement “Plan Alpha”.. see you all around.) =]