So apparently MMO-Champion is being sold off by Curse and getting bought up by Magic Find.
Now it seems that one of the investors is the original creator of MMO-Champion:
I won’t be involved in the website, but for full disclosure I am an investor in Magic Find, and the team includes people who have worked on MMO-Champion since 2007.
I’m extremely grateful that Fandom helped us preserve the community and I’m sure the team will have more updates soon — Bouboille
which does make it seem that this will be a good change. I personally wasn’t a huge fan of Curse gobbling up so many gaming properties especially since some of their sites like WoWDB are just poorly functioning alternatives of better sites—Wowhead in this case. To be fair, competition is good and I was actually hoping that WoWDB would be good since Wowhead has some nasty history with the ads they serve, some of them being particularily loud or obnoxious—now on the other hand apparently the same can be said for MMO-Champion so maybe gaming sites just can’t afford to be too stringent about the ads they serve. But for me at least, when that competition can’t even manage proper responsive design and more importantly localisation of the different item it becomes kind of useless—I actually wanted to try to use WoWDB as my primary information source once but that attempt was instantly stopped by me having the game client in German and WoWDB only supporting English which was really unfortunate. I would still have probably missed the years of comments on Wowhead at some point but the faster loading speed of WoWDB would have probably kept me using it over Wowhead if it had remained an option.
Still, I hope MMO-Champion remains a relevant resource for World of Warcraft news since while Wowhead does provide similar content and even at times better and faster, the signal to noise ratio of MMO-Champion posts is much better. I have watched both feeds and Wowhead often includes to me irrelevant content like some contest or different announcements about the site; meanwhile the only non-relevant content I get regularily from MMO-Champion is the weekly summary of active world bosses and the weekly event quest—I generally don’t have a need for this content so which boss is up doesn’t really matter to me. Another reason I prefer MMO-Champion is simply the nostalgia I think, it’s the website I’m used to going to when I need to know what’s going up with World of Warcraft since it was pretty much the best alternative back in the day, sure things like WoW Insider existed but from memory they had the same problem as Wowhead has now: too much non-news content. It’s really nice being able to have an actual notification for new articles on MMO-Champion and be reasonably sure that it’s something of interest, like changes on the PTR or announcements of new features or interviews of Blizzard staff.
Now thinking back, I did also enjoy WoW Insider content—especially some of the columns there—and I haven’t looked at the successor Blizzard Watch in a while. Sure the focus is broader these days but I believe it is still possible to filter the content by game which would allow me to just view the World of Warcraft content, that might be something I want to start doing more regularily again. They even have a podcast I remember enjoying for a bit, so I guess there is a decent bit of content for me to catch up on.
In the end, I guess there’s nothing really to be worried about since I haven’t noticed any decrease in quality during the previous acquisitions and maintaining a pure news site is pretty simple as long as you can get the news out there quickly enough.