Poll of the Day > *sigh* I remember when Poll of the Day had tens of thousands of votes.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Like this one with over 55,000 votes: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1967-whats-your-pick-for-best-game-of-2005-so-far

Now polls get under 10,000 votes. What happened to everyone? Where did they go? Did they move from forums to social media and Reddit?

They didn't go anywhere. People nowadays don't care about voting in the Poll which is why the poll count is lower than what it usually is. No big deal.

im on mobile like 99% of the time and the poll being further down the page really brought a drop for me doing the poll. Im sure the lowering of convenience to mobile users hurts the numbers a bit.

the poll being consistent with its numbers is a very valid way of determining the actual user count for the website.

so there's two numbers you can look at. the total number of people voting in the poll, which is always around 7-9k people, and the active board users, which hovers around 700-1.5k depending on time of day

i'd say that the amount of total users on this website are around 10-11k.

what poll?

There is also the problem with the poll answers being stupidly worded. I abstain from voting about half the time because there is no accurate response.

My bookmark is the boards page so I rarely see the poll.

I used to vote in the poll all the time but I stopped like 5+ years ago

I vote whenever I remember it exists.

And I remember when a dime bag cost a dime... oh wait.

Molitheus posted...

They didn't go anywhere.

They absolutely did. This site has hemorrhaged users over the last 10 years (give or take).

Check analytics sites - you can see the downward trend of site traffic and active users on the forums. Every year the site loses more and more users, and the only new accounts being made at this point are mostly trolls and gimmick posters who've gotten their old accounts banned and just keep making new ones. Losing older users and failing to attract new users is the death-knell of any site.

GameFAQs actually used to be in the top 300 English-language sties on the Internet (almost in the top 100), now it's little more than an afterthought (it barely cracks the top 10000). It may be a long, slow, agonizing descent into oblivion, but the site's been declining for years and will likely continue to do so until it eventually becomes so unprofitable that it gets shut down. It won't be the first major popular Internet site to die that way. Or to eventually have to transition into something nearly unrecognizable to survive.

SBAllen generally uses the "people don't vote in the poll" argument to imply the site isn't losing users (or at least he used to), but that's because that's the sort of lie he has to tell to keep his job. Tell your employers that 90% of your customer base has stopped using your product since you've been in charge and see what happens to you.

The poll numbers are just one obvious indicator of the decline, though (and arguably the one most visible and easy to quantify). Activity on nearly every social board has dropped significantly from what it used to be, site traffic is down, unique users logged per month is down... and so on.



maniaxe613 posted...

What happened to everyone? Where did they go?

Other sites.

The only real value this site ever had to people was the FAQs (even people who stayed for the social interaction originally came for some FAQ or another, trying to figure out how to get past some difficult part or how to find some rare item in a game). But FAQs are pretty much obsolete in a world where you can go to YouTube and watch a video showing you the exact part you're stuck on, or go to a game-specific wiki where they go into far more detail about a given game than nearly any FAQ ever has. Not to mention sites like IGN or writing full walkthrough articles (with pictures) for a lot of games. There are much better resources out there now than anything GameFAQs has to offer. So the site no longer really attracts new gamers at all, because they always have better options.

As for the more social side of gaming, GameFAQs does a poor job at that as well. Younger gamers who want to talk about games will generally gravitate to other social media sites to do so - Reddit and Twitter scratch a lot of the itch that GameFAQs used to cover (not to mention stuff like Twitch chats or Discord servers). If they ever know GameFAQs exists at all, they're not likely to see the primitive message board tech of 20 years ago and be impressed enough to want to stay.

Most of the users here now are just older users who can't be bothered to leave. We're pretty much the retirement home for a certain generation of older gamers who will probably never really get into the new-fangled stuff "the kids today" are into, but there's fewer of us every day, as people lose interest, drop off, migrate away, or otherwise leave forever without being replaced.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

We're pretty much the retirement home for a certain generation of older gamers who will probably never really get into the new-fangled stuff "the kids today" are into

Why you gotta call us out like that.

Since when do we actually discuss the poll of the day here

Alpha218 posted...

Since when do we actually discuss the poll of the day here

Enough monkeys at enough typewriters, it was bound to happen.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But FAQs are pretty much obsolete in a world where you can go to YouTube and watch a video showing you the exact part you're stuck on

Yeah a 20 minute video of some moron yelling.

Revelation34 posted...

Yeah a 20 minute video of some moron yelling.

1) There are plenty of videos where the person doing the video isn't screaming.

2) There are a bunch of videos where the person doesn't speak at all.

3) Even if the only video you can find for what you need involves a shouting moron, you can usually just mute them anyway.

4) It's usually pretty easy to skim through a video and figure out the exact part you need based on the preview window, and is rarely any more time-consuming than having to skim through a FAQ to find the part you're looking for.

5) Regardless of all the above, it's almost always infinitely better to be able to see how to do something in a game visually than it is to skim through multiple pages of a FAQs to find the specific section you're looking for, only to find the single paragraph about the part you're on doesn't adequately explain what you're trying to figure out anyway. I can't even count the number of times where I've been pissed at a FAQ for using vague language or poor descriptions to try and explain what I'm looking for, to the point where it was pretty much useless in the end.


And that's before we even get into the fact that, based on which YouTubers and Twitch streamers are the most successful, it seems like most people under the age of 30 prefer the screaming morons anyway. Which is why those morons scream so much in the first place - it's how they attract an audience.