Board 8 > The fact that GameFAQs is dying is depressing the hell out of me

(+) Yeah! (+)

I need to go to bed

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Iamdead7 posted...
I need to go to bed

RIP GAMEFAQS

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Gamefaqs will die in your sleep.

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http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=t&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=2y&u=gamefaqs.com&

At least there has been a little bump in traffic. Unfortunately, this has not at all coincided with increased poll votals, which suggests that Rivalry Rumble is actually, for the first time in contest history, driving voters away instead of bringing them in.

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http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=800&h=440&o=f&c=1&y=t&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=2y&u=gamefaqs.com

A larger graph of the one that yoblazer posted, which makes it easier to see how much the traffic levels have changed.

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it's just not a good contest. another game contest or a fictional character contest would probably get almost double the votals

also if gfaqs as a whole is dying so what? I only come here for the board 8 people - especially the music guys and they won't be affected by the popularity of wikis/youtube guides.

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Video walkthroughs and built-in walkthroughs (Super Guide etc.) will eventually replace this site.

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All that matters is B8

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[This message was deleted at the request of the original poster]

truth hurts.

But to be honest, a lot of big named message board communities of the early/mid 00s are dying. Tribal War is another large message board that has been dying since about 2006.

Times change. Some of these communities are linked to a certain generation. Ones like Gamefaqs will be linked to generation Y (people born from the early 80s to about 91/92)

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From: PartOfYourWorld | #004
At least there has been a little bump in traffic. Unfortunately, this has not at all coincided with increased poll votals, which suggests that Rivalry Rumble is actually, for the first time in contest history, driving voters away instead of bringing them in.

When it ends up being the same winner each and every year, nobody cares anymore. Character contest, Link wins. Game contest, OoT wins. The end.

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Not that bad.

PartOfYourWorld posted...
http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=t&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=2y&u=gamefaqs.com&

At least there has been a little bump in traffic. Unfortunately, this has not at all coincided with increased poll votals, which suggests that Rivalry Rumble is actually, for the first time in contest history, driving voters away instead of bringing them in.

Honestly, I doubt there's any correlation with the contests. That spike in the graph strikes me as being nearly exclusively due to all the November release.


WalrusJump posted...

also if gfaqs as a whole is dying so what? I only come here for the board 8 people - especially the music guys and they won't be affected by the popularity of wikis/youtube guides.

The problem is that B8 can only survive so long on its own. I mean, I've been a part of thriving internet forums in the past that have died and while the biggest boards do stay alive, especially as people increasingly congregate there as their smaller communities die off, in the end the board dies anyway, just over an extended period as people try to keep the thing alive just for the sake of doing so. Even on-site, I think you can look to the secret board community as an example of how this has already begun to happen. Once thriving along with the site, it is now beyond dead. It spawned out of a desire for more social boards to create the more intimate, friend-inclusive feel that B8 now has. Then the site gradually began getting less popular and those people left and once the ones who were left finally gave up on their boards, they too either left or merged into other, bigger boards on the website that were now less populated enough to be desirable for them. I think just how much B8 and other big site social boards have shrunk from their former standing as behemoths with a consistent 1-2 day purge rate where you'd have new posts coming at you at all hours of the night is very indicative of how this has already begun to happen.

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What are the "big" boards these days, anyway? Unless message boards as a whole are dying, people must be going somewhere. >_>
Obviously 4chan is huge but there's pretty much no sense of community there due to the anonymity.

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From: WalrusJump | #006
also if gfaqs as a whole is dying so what? I only come here for the board 8 people - especially the music guys and they won't be affected by the popularity of wikis/youtube guides.

i dunno

i've been thinking of going to wikia for the next iconsience topic


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Xiahou Shake posted...
What are the "big" boards these days, anyway? Unless message boards as a whole are dying, people must be going somewhere. >_>
Obviously 4chan is huge but there's pretty much no sense of community there due to the anonymity.

I don't think there really are many websites left that have such board-centric communities as GameFAQs does (did?) . Like, various official game forums are still popular such as LoL, WoW, SC, and Minecraft, as are many of their fan/news sites, ex.. MMO-Champion for WoW. But beyond official and/or single game specific forums like those, I don't think there are any websites that really have independent forums that are THAT popular; at least no more than GameFAQs. I mean you've got your Gamespots and Escapists, but I don't think they're any more populated than our site is. I have no idea how Somethingawful or Fark's "paid members only" forums are doing these days either.

Other things I can think of, you've got-
Reddit-Not really so much a forum as we're talking about here, but can function in largely the same way.
Team Liquid-I have no idea about the history of the website, and they're pretty popular these days due to being fueled by SC2's popularity and their association with that game.

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Metal_DK posted...
truth hurts.

But to be honest, a lot of big named message board communities of the early/mid 00s are dying. Tribal War is another large message board that has been dying since about 2006.

Times change. Some of these communities are linked to a certain generation. Ones like Gamefaqs will be linked to generation Y (people born from the early 80s to about 91/92)

gen y ends at around 93/94 imo

aka people who weren't immersed in the internet through elementary school slash remember dialup/aol

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iGenesis posted...
Video walkthroughs and built-in walkthroughs (Super Guide etc.) will eventually replace this site.

Why doesn't Gamefaqs allow user-submitted video guides? Maybe not for the entire game, but for certain parts/topics?

i mean if you really wanna be that picky, fine. But the point is generation y ends in the early 90s.

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Pride. Passion. Excellence. Metal_DK
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To be blunt, GameFAQs is losing users because games are becoming easier and easier to play. Nobody gets "stuck" in a game these days, because the games always have a difficulty setting that removes all the challenge from it.

Everything is becoming more spoon-fed. You don't really go 'hunting' for stuff in games anymore.

edit: There's also the fact that in-game guides are becoming more popular, and anyone will take a guide from a developer/well known player over a guide from a random nobody.

GameFAQs' guides can't really compare to stuff on playdota, smogon, teamliquid, etc.

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maybe, lol

I really don't care about gamefaqs losing users, although I kind of hope this user decrease will also lead to a stupidity decrease on most of the boards.

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DON~!

Silverliner182V posted...
To be blunt, GameFAQs is losing users because games are becoming easier and easier to play. Nobody gets "stuck" in a game these days, because the games always have a difficulty setting that removes all the challenge from it.

Everything is becoming more spoon-fed. You don't really go 'hunting' for stuff in games anymore.



This is a really good point, but we can't forget that the main reason this site seems to empty now is because the jp has left and we have so much more empty space.

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From: Silverliner182V | #019
To be blunt, GameFAQs is losing users because games are becoming easier and easier to play. Nobody gets "stuck" in a game these days, because the games always have a difficulty setting that removes all the challenge from it.

It's not just that, but also because the most popular games right now are not games that lend themselves to FAQing. If you get stuck in Call of Duty, are you going to look at an FAQ that describes where you're supposed to go / who you should shoot, or just watch a video where it all gets conveyed a hell of a lot faster?

FAQs work better for RPGs, but for action games videos are winning out.

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wikis are really common too

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Pride. Passion. Excellence. Metal_DK
Currently playing: Sengoku Rance, Starcraft II

What the hell just happened on that giant negative spike?

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005
Nope...that's not it

But really what the hell happened this is too much strange :S

Entropy at work on the GameFAQs message boards.

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Well, I personally have not been on GFaqs much ever since...what 2007?
I rarely ever login and only come by from time to time, mostly for looking at stuff for older games.

Still, I believe GFaqs would never really die out, simply because of the FAQs/Walkthroughs that have already been made and those that will be made for future games.

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"If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I'm convinced that these two are blind."- Phoenix Wright, AA:T&T.

Tribal War is another large message board that has been dying since about 2006.

when you build a message board around a game, it still feels the pain of incredibly bad sequels, even if it's not really about the game anymore

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when you build a message board around a game, it still feels the pain of incredibly bad sequels, even if it's not really about the game anymore

agreed, but tribal war stopped being about a video game and became a social board as early as like...2002

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Ness26 posted...


FAQs work better for RPGs, but for action games videos are winning out.

That does seem to explain the site's genre bias aside from a few classic System Mascots.

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