GameFaqs missed their shot at maintaining a normie userbase when it refused to update itself back around 2012.
Internet use to be reserved for social outcasts, but Myspace came out in 2005, Facebook became universal by 2008, and by 2010 kids were making a lucrative career off of YouTube. Basically, the internet was now a place for normal people...not just social outcasts.
Between 2010-2012 was both when GameFaqs peaked, and when it imploded. By this time the medium age was 25, and for the most part these users did NOT use mainstream social media. They were from that bygone angefire/geocities era of internet.
However, this was also the time period in which majority of core users were now out of college and starting to integrate into society...as actual normal functioning human beings. As such they started gravitating towards more traditional social media platforms.
Had GameFaqs updated itself around this time period to become more modern via a mobile app, Facebook,Twitter, YouTube integration, loosened topicality...and other basic shit, these users probably would have stayed.
On top of that, because it lacked the modern applications of traditional platforms, the younger generation just gravitated elsewhere. Based on the poll from 2019 about age less than 5% are under 21, whereas in 2020 that was about half the userbase.
It's basically impossible to grow this place as is. I mean, the young hip TikTok & Twitch crowd doesn't want to come hangout on GameFaqs where 60% of the userbase are 30 year old virgins.
How do you market that?
Yeah that seemed like the problem with most megaforums before reddit destroyed them at the time.
A big thing that I noticed that destroyed mega forums was the moderation team. They dealt with an exponentially growing userbase by increasing the number of bans. I've seen other forums straight up ban Internet wide personalities. Zyzz was permanently banned from the bb.com/misc because a moderator was jealous. If mega forums had better moderator teams, moderator teams that weren't working for free, then I bet a lot of these forums would still be active.