adjl posted...
Except, of course, it's a given that Fandom's efforts to make that shift would inevitably just make the site more like the wikis they already have (which is... bad. Very bad.)
I'm going to be honest, some of those wikis are part of the reason why I haven't used a FAQ on this site in about 15 years.
The problem with FAQs is that most of them here are kind of shit. And even the good ones are usually more awkward to navigate than a wiki. Between wiki sites and YouTube walkthrough and tip videos, you'll generally get all of the info (and more) that you would ever get from a FAQ here, in a more efficient form.
It doesn't help that most of the really skilled FAQmakers of yore (like A_I_e_x) aren't really making FAQs anymore, and they haven't really been replaced by anyone of comparable skill. So GameFAQs is already mostly coasting off of decades old FAQs as-is.
As designed the system is supposed to supplement well-written FAQs with a message board system where you can ask more obscure questions that aren't answered in a FAQ. But with most FAQs being substandard and most game boards being incredibly antisocial and unhelpful, GameFAQs doesn't really offer
anything
anymore that can't be gotten elsewhere better and more efficiently. Even Fandom's wikis are generally better.
And all of this probably isn't helped by the fact that the younger generation generally just looks on Google (or uses Alexa/Siri/etc) to ask a specific question, then follows whatever the first link they find to the answer (I know my 20-something nephew does this), which generally just points them to wiki pages or YouTube videos. So even if the answers
are
here on GameFAQs, the target audience they're looking for is never going to find them, and never going to care.