Category: Rockstar Games
After losing out on “Game of the Year” crown, Activision doesn’t renew domains: gameoftheyear.com [More]
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”.
The list of names includes: gameoftheyear.com, thegameoftheyear.com, computergameoftheyear.com, pcgameoftheyear.com, and game-of-the-year.com.
Gameoftheyear.com, which was originally registered in 1999, expired on February 2, 2011. Now the domain name appears over on the Pending Deletes List provided by Pool.com, an online service that offers its’ customers access to a list of thousands of daily deleting domains. If a person is lucky enough to find a name they want in the Pending Deletes List, the person can obtain the domain before it becomes available for public registration.
Thegameoftheyear.com, according to Whois records, expired on February 18, 2011 and is still registered to Activision, but the status of the domain is set to ”Redemption Period”. According to GoDaddy, RedemptionPeriod means the domain name expired, and the registry is waiting for 30 days as a precautionary measure before releasing it.
Computergameoftheyear.com, pcgameoftheyear.com, and game-of-the-year.com are all in a Redemption Period status.
No love at the Spike Video Game Awards for Activision
Though Activision didn’t win “Game of the Year” in 2010 announced this past December, it did win in the “Best Shooter” category. And the company has won the distinction of “Game of the Year” by other blogs, magazines, and gaming sites — just not necessarily by Spike, which holds one of the biggest events each year.
However, the company just hasn’t had much luck winning a coveted Spike Video Game Award.
In 2009, Activision’s, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 lost out to Sony’s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. In 2008, Activision wasn’t even a contender for Game of the Year. Grand Theft Auto IV, another game published by Rockstar Games took the crown. 2007 went to Bioshock and 2006′s title went to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
Going all the way back to 2003, Activision has won in a number of different sub-categories, just not for “Game of the Year”.
UPDATE: Activision’s social media guy, Dan Amrich, who tweets using @oneofswords, has posted an insightful follow-up to this story.
Dan writes, “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.”
As I mentioned yesterday on this site’s sister domain blog, “…while one has nothing to do with the other necessarily, had Activision won “Game of the Year”, renewing the domain probably wouldn’t have been overlooked.” Either way, it was good to see an Activision rep do some outreach and respond to clear things up.
And for the record, Call of Duty: Black Ops should’ve totally taken the “Game of the Year” title in my opinion.
