Board 8 > GameFAQs lost lots of visitors/voters/users over the years.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Contests

wikis were a massive flop here so I don't think that ever would have actually worked

th3l3fty posted...

wikis were a massive flop here so I don't think that ever would have actually worked

Yes but what if they were done well

good joke

Lost a lot of users to shitty youtube-type guides.

Honestly GFAQs has a door to success again if they wanted to commit to in-depth guides with accurate information like it used to have.

So many sites when I'm trying to find information on current games are full of incomplete, inaccurate, or honestly just "10 minute video for 5 second answer" content and its a pain in the ass. I miss when there was a site like GFAQs with a dedicated userbase that made easy to navigate concise content.

Updating the interface to something more modern and shifting to a Video x Wiki x FAQ format could have helped a lot.

Ultimately the problem was just not using the footprint the contests had at their height to accomplish anything. Accompanying the contests with some bold new site features so people who are drawn in each year see an evolving site could have saved us from ruin

I voted the video thing but it's more nuanced than that imo

Lopen posted...

I voted the video thing but it's more nuanced than that imo

Yep. Honestly it feels like the whole GameSpot merger never leveraged us properly when you look back on it.

It's not even video, really. How long did it take them to implement imbeded images in guides? The top thing many people use guides for is secrets/collectibles and text-only collectible guides kind of suck.

I use IGN Wikis from time to time and it would have been nice if the GameFAQs ones were done that well. And video walk through would have been great if they were moderated - none of the shitty ones with that label that are just somebody playing blindly and calling it that when it's a Let's Play. Honestly, the UI of this site still looks largely the same as it did in 2008, with only a few changes. The site is stuck in the past for better and for worse.

Contests as a draw would have been great, but like Lopen said, you need to keep those people by drawing them here through well-timed new features. With contests gone, a lot of people just forgot about the place. And this site is too afraid to ban toxic people, though thankfully the worst of them left on their own for a new pasture.

Yeah. I actually agree there is still a market for FAQs.

Instead of just text dumps structuring all guides in a sort of wiki format and having a video with clickable stuff to send you to the right areas as you get to that point in the video, and vice versa where you can click a link on a wiki to send you to a certain spot in a video? It could absolutely work and be better than either one on its own. But at this point GameFAQs is almost an anchor than a brand that can drive anything.

The idea of character popularity contests to draw people in to then was actually pretty smart-- the problem is the site never evolved and for people who only came for those contests it became obvious "oh it's the same website as it always is" every time they'd visit each year.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1617-division-32-64-round-1-final-fantasy-vii-vs-suikoden-ii

I'm pretty sure you're misremembering and it happened during this match. Check the match after. Vote totals completely tanked!

Sorry I meant this one

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1613-division-16-round-1-the-legend-of-zelda-a-link-to-the-past

Look. Votals completely tanked on the next match!

I blame L-Block turning our site into a joke

It's a mix of things

Video walkthroughs have made tons of people have no real reason to ever go to GameFAQs.

Games themselves have been designed to need guides less and less as time as gone on. Lots more handholding.

Ownership changes over the years probably also didn't help

And while I do think good contests/contributor awards could've continued to provide some sparks to site traffic while the site was still doing pretty good (Character Battle IX is the reason I'm on this board in the first place, and definitely caused a ton of interest), I would imagine that the biggest reason that site traffic died down is just because people don't need written guides as much and this site was never built for video guides. Unless we have stats that show otherwise, I would wager that over 50% of users at this site's peak never became frequent forum users. The primary reason people used the site were the guides, not the forums, and now this site has no competitive advantage with the guides.

Moderation style has very little to do with the long-term trend of site traffic decline.

Solioxrz362 posted...

the biggest reason that site traffic died down is just because people don't need written guides as much and this site was never built for video guides.

This is the reason.

Anyway my tongue in cheek point I'm making is I don't think that particular website redesign did anything terrible for vote totals-- they'd recovered by the end of the contest and were stronger in later contests

I think we had plenty of time to reinvent as late as 2008 and still be in a good spot to be honest. Heck you could argue Draven or Undertale contests (whichever those were) were also opportunities but yeah the website just continued to do nothing.

An additional minor reason: Discord probably sucked a good amount of forum traffic out. I know it certainly has done so on this exact message board.

I want GameFAQs merch

HaRRicH posted...

GameFAQs could not have done any better retaining people in the 21st century.

"Could not have done any better" are strong words I wouldn't personally use, but this option feels the most right. Plenty of bigger, more modern websites with lots more money behind them have come and gone during that time, so it's hard for me to say there's any one fix, even with the benefit of hindsight.

I feel like wikis are the biggest answer due to needing a stronger base of central content...but I'm gonna pity-vote and make a case for stronger social media instead.

FACEBOOK:
GameFAQs.com (not official?) - 20,000 followers (last post was 5/1/2020)
Giant Bomb (not official?) - 40,000 followers (last past was 1/16/2023)
Markiplier - 3,600,000 followers (last post was 12/17/2021)
GameSpot - 5,200,000 followers (fourteen posts today, one paid partnership)
IGN - 6,600,000 followers (forty-seven posts today, all partner-posts)

INSTAGRAM:
@gamefaqs and @gamefaqs_official (neither look official) - 11,372 followers and 1 post between two accounts from 6/13/2013
@giantbombdotcom (not official?) - 26,300 followers and 557 posts
@gamespot - 1,000,000 followers and 6,610 posts
@igndotcom - 4,500,000 followers and 21,800 posts
@markiplier - 11,600,000 followers and 1,100 posts

YOUTUBE:
GameFAQs - n/a
Giant Bomb - 248,000 subscribers and 8,300 videos
GameSpot - 5,300,000 subscriber and 38,000 videos
IGN - 17,500,000 subscribers and 156,000 videos
Markiplier - 35,200,000 subscribers and 5,400 videos

TWITTER:
Giant Bombcast (is this their main Twitter account?) - 1,700 followers
GameFAQs - 6,500 followers
GameSpot - 5,200,000 followers
IGN - 9,800,000 followers
Markiplier - 14,000,000 followers
(can't check their post-counts, feel welcome to add)

Where does it look like GameFAQs has skin in the game? We haven't noticed it much because we're here already, but there is no presence at all on Meta or YouTube. I don't recall there being much Twitter activity in the past, and that is a dying divisive website in recent times.

Anytime a game releases, GameFAQs had an opportunity to post and say they either have a FAQ for it or are looking for someone to make the FAQ. Every game that's released, someone who doesn't visit GameFAQs yet hears about the game from somewhere else instead. Every contest if not Poll of the Day is someone that could be shared and therefore an opportunity to be in the broader conversation and invite people in. These are fifteen years' worth of opportunities that are still being missed daily.

It didn't seem like much of a thing to care about fifteen years ago to be getting involved with social media, but it's clear GameFAQs has chosen to focus elsewhere and that is a negative in hindsight.

We gotta put the logo on r/place right now to reach these kids

UltimaterializerX posted...

I am not misremembering. The vote totals sucked for the Xenogears match because of a poll glitch where only registered users were able to vote, so the poll was restarted to very lukewarm numbers.

IIRC, you're both right. The new site design kicked in before Xenogears/Pokemon, but they were doing construction on things during the whole contest, so the regular design went back up temporarily for the first two matches of the 128 Bit Division.

The main problem with the site redesign is that it pushed the poll down from the top of the page

the additional issue with the 2004 Games Contest in particular is that CJayC decided to occasionally run POTDs during the contest, for some reason, which pushed the poll down the page even more

HaRRicH posted...

TWITTER:
Giant Bombcast (is this their main Twitter account?) - 1,700 followers

how did you miss the account that's literally just "@giantbomb"?

Wikis by far.

The entire reason I even came to this site in the first place at age like 11 was because I wanted to find a guide for a game. Nowadays, if you want to find a guide for a game, you go to the wiki. You will never go to gfaqs.

WazzupGenius00 posted...

how did you miss the account that's literally just "@giantbomb"?

Twitter won't show me anything without an account, so I went with the first close-looking name and follower-count on a Google search. It not like every company's handle is exactly the same as their name on each site anyway, so I ran with that.

My serious answer though is archiving the message boards in '08, and to an extent the proliferation of stickies on game boards. Both were obviously efficient ideas, but at the same time very anti-social.

They were meant to stop people from asking the same handful of questions over and over again, but it turned out that asking those handful of questions was the principal driver of people making accounts, and then joining the community. If you don't need to make an account to find what you're looking for, most people won't. Shutting down 90% of the conversation on a given game board didn't cause people to come up with new topics of conversation; it just meant that 90% of the conversation was gone.

Yesmar_ posted...

My serious answer though is archiving the message boards in '08, and to an extent the proliferation of stickies on game boards. Both were obviously efficient ideas, but at the same time very anti-social.

They were meant to stop people from asking the same handful of questions over and over again, but it turned out that asking those handful of questions was the principal driver of people making accounts, and then joining the community. If you don't need to make an account to find what you're looking for, most people won't. Shutting down 90% of the conversation on a given game board didn't cause people to come up with new topics of conversation; it just meant that 90% of the conversation was gone.

100% agree, been saying this killed the boards for years before Discord did

To be fair, almost every time I type something specific about a game into Google, I get GameFAQs somewhere in the top results. There's nothing more annoying than having to watch a video with some guy's commentary where I have to manually skip to the 3-minute mark before I actually see what I'm looking for. GameFAQs is far more immediate and efficient in that sense. Sometimes I get a Steam thread instead, which is basically the same thing. Wikis are basically impossible to navigate on mobile; fandom has to have the worst and most obnoxious ads I've ever seen in a site.

Well considering this website was owned by CBS, who sold it for pennies to... a collection of fandom-specific wikis, it would be pretty hard not to pick the wiki option.

A full early commitment to wiki-style community guides.
Shifting toward video-walkthroughs during their rise.

A combination of these two, really
The major use case of this website (video game help and guides) has mostly been replaced by wikis and YouTube guides

I think it's a few things:

• Generally being a bit stuck in the past. I personally like that, but if this website was quicker to push out certain features it might've been more competitive with gaming Wikis and subreddits. #4 and #5 are good examples of that.
• There should be more incentives to get people to write guides. This website has a lot of great info for older games, but oftentimes it's very lacking for games from the last 5 years. Just compare Super Smash Bros Ultimate's guides to SSB Melee's guides.
• Advertising more would probably would've helped at least a little. There's likely a ton of newer gamers who don't know about this website at all.

Also...

Yesmar_ posted...

My serious answer though is archiving the message boards in '08, and to an extent the proliferation of stickies on game boards. Both were obviously efficient ideas, but at the same time very anti-social.

I'll agree that being the #1 thing that killed the message boards. BUT, the boards didn't contribute as much to site traffic as the game help, so overall I'll stick with my Bad Wiki Execution vote.