A blog recently posted about the expiration of five domains, all of which were permutations of gameoftheyear.com. The blog’s opening lines state:
What happens when you don’t win Game of the Year at the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards?
Well, in the case of Activision, which saw its best selling game in U.S. history, Call of Duty: Black Ops, lose to Red Dead Redemption— the company has decided not to renew several of its domain names surrounding “Game of the Year”.
My only concern with this statement is its complete and total inaccuracy. I posted my comments to that effect on the article, but people are saying they can’t see them — maybe they were removed, maybe it’s a glitch. So I’ll post it here.
Truth is, there is no link between the expiration of these URLs and the Spike VGAs. What’s more, there’s barely a connection between these URLs and Activision. These URLs were registered by Vivendi/Sierra, and were used to promote the Game Of The Year editions of Half-Life in 1999 and Half-Life 2 in 2005.
If you check all five URLs listed in the article (one two three four and five), they all point to the same Half-Life promotional website. As you can see from the Wayback Machine archive graphs, this site has been inactive since the Half-Life marketing campaign concluded in 2005.
If you needed any more proof, you can see the “gameoftheyear.com” URL on the back of the Half-Life GOTY box itself in this eBay auction photograph:
It's a bit blurry, but it's there, under the Mature black box. Yes, PC boxes used to be this big. Higher res in the link above the photo.
So if gameoftheyear.com belongs to Half-Life, where does Activision enter into it? Well, Activision merged with Vivendi in 2008 — three years after gameoftheyear.com was last updated. Activision has never used those URLs for any of its products; it seems Activision merely inherited those domain registrations as part of the merge.
The statement that Activision would not renew these domains because Red Dead Redemption won at the Spike VGAs suggests a cause-and-effect situation which simply does not exist, no matter how catty and emotional the blog’s unnamed author might want to make the situation seem. There is no evidence that Activision is letting them expire out of spite. Or Spike, as the case may be.
That said, if you have big plans for your next game project and you’re looking for a hot URL…act now.
