These forums are dead. What happened?

I've been coming to these forums for years.....ever since the original Xbox days. Back then, these forums were alive with lively debate. These days it seems like these forums are ghost towns. What happened?

Gamespot is the Sega of gaming websites.

That's not a compliment.

Sadly it's mostly full of fanboy trolls and alternate accounts who just talk sh** nowadays... but there are still some real gamers around who have been on here for years, who still like to have some proper debates & discussions etc. Usually not in System Wars.

Mods, Sony fanboys, and trolls took over Gamespot. That's what happened!

I'm just a PC gamer, sitting back and watching GS burned to the ground for all I care!

The lack of competition form MS for the past few years. It looks set to continue. A lot of the fanboy posts from last gen were made by XBOTs but this gen there is little to boast about and the forum has been quite one sided for a while for the PS4 fans. Theres been a bit of PCvPS4 and "Switch + PC is best combo" threads but for the most part the PC gets shrugged off or hidden behind by the loosing consoles fanbase.

For the most part, Gamespot killed themselves with the site redesign and removal of community features a few years back. Nobody wanted it. GS went through with it. Things never bounced back. Seems the person or people making these decisions had no idea that most contributing members came to GS for the community and the features, not the content that GS produces.

Aside from that, just a ton of other things adding up. Gamers have a lot more options these days for chatting about games, getting gaming news, trolling and being fanboys, watching and reading reviews and previews for games that are either a whole lot more well done or a whole lot more entertaining.

Basically this sites forums are a bit of a relic and they did everything they could to make it unappealing to the people who still cared for said relic.

We used to have stricter mods. I prefer it now, only because it used to be addictive, now it barely matters. Discussions and topics used to be pretty awesome.

@pelvist: Yeah, a lot of Xbox fans jumped ship.

There used to be lively debate between the PS3 and Xbox 360 fanboys pre-2013 as they were both very similar in power with PC guys mixed into the debate. I remember countless debates between Xbox 360 vs PS3 fanboys debating over which exclusive had the better graphics including spamming the forums with screenshot comparions. Some even had the audacity to attack the PC about graphics, how dare they! ;) Once the Xbox One hit the scene it was all PS4 as it was clearly the more powerful console. So, there was no point in debating, hence, the less lively debates over the past 3 - 4 years. Also, many of the Xbox One exclusives games are starting to make it to PC more often thus less requiring of ownership of Xbox One or the new Xbox One X which added to the fact that there was less debates about which consoles had the best exclusives.

Also, it didn't help that GS made some decision with the site re-design that some didn't like and I personally didn't like it when they got rid of patches and fixes for older games which I used to come here to download when I play older games. On top of the fact that they got re-did of .5 designation ratings for games but that is a moot point.

And some of the veterans who used to be one the forums, including myself just don't show up on the forums as often. We all know by now that PC is the Master Race. ;)

And maybe someone can chime in, the number of quality of games seems to have gone down over the last 2 years. I can think of maybe 3 - 4 games over the past 2 years that I would be interested in playing, Witcher 3, GTA V, Rise of the Tomb Raider, the new Wolfenstein game, Doom (2016) and maybe the new Call of Duty WWII.

Whereas before there used to be maybe half a dozen quality games on PS3, Xbox 360 and with some on the PC every year. And now, many more games have gone multi-plat.

Also, with the mid-generation upgrade a lot of console people are moving over the PC. We can see it in the revenues of nVidia where their Gaming GPU division is now bringing in over 1 billion dollars in revenue per quarter just form selling GPU's over the last year or two. That's how much they would make in maybe a half a year. One kid I helped build a Ryzen build who was a console gamer said that if there is going to be an upgrade in the console cycles mid-way through a generation might as well get a PC, where I could just get a new graphics card every 3 years and it would still be more powerful than any new console instead of spending $300 - $400 every couple of years, they could spend that on a graphics card and get better performance and graphics. This is reflected in the astronomical number of people who have joined Steam over the past four years.

Lastly, a lot of us veterans has grown older and have less free time. I would rather spend that time playing games instead of just discussing and debating about games, graphics and hardware on forums.

Just as what Conan said, GS Staff had a really nasty attitude by cutting a lot of features GS offer to it's users, they didn't care about it's communities, they let there egos get the better of themselves. Ever since 2013 Revamp happened, GS has lost a lot of good members probably like over 1,000 users left because they cut a good amounts of features. The only forum that's still somewhat active if you can call it is here, System Wars, but even then, it's starting to show it's totally dying off and the current GS Staff aren't really trying to fix or improve this site at all. GS is really my last gaming site I come to and Staff can shut it down for all I care because I'm kinda done with gaming sites anyways should GS cease to exist.

The front-page is like a 50 year old mans concept of gamers.

I left the site

Can you really blame'em? A lot of Xbox fans were so pissed-off over Xbox One reveal, they jumped to Sony's side. Can't say I personally blame them, MS really hurt there loyal fans so badly, some of them would never forgive them.

A lot of newcomers started taking the shit too seriously, or they did not grasp that there was an underlying satire of sorts.

Also most of the people with any wit--ones that put effort in "debate"(lol at some of those pie charts) have been taken over by dim witted trolls/alts.

It can't be only myself noticing the over abundance of trash accounts popping up(lol).

I like to add that the surge of bad posts and threads also contributed to its decline.

I killed System Wars. It’s my fault.

When Gamespot stripped away much of its community lure, such as unions, Gamespot steadily became a less intuitive hub for gamer's and many left.

But then again, if I recall back to before 2008, people were saying these forums are dead, too.

All of the topics are the same, boring and generic. Most are about tech and crap only a small select group care about. Yawn.

Site redesign, perma bans, fired editors, clickbait reviews, trolls, movies coverage, ad-driven journalism etc.

You got that right.

Pretty much this^

Yeah, it's quite dead. It's more active during the weekdays but still basically dead. The most dead days of the week for this site are Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Especially Saturday and Sunday.

This is classic example of what happens when you don't cater to your main customers which is the Gamer. They should have focused on the gamer instead of putting all that side crap about TV and the Kinect. Xbox One should have been on par with the PS4 if not more powerful. The guy in charge of Xbox One was clueless about it's customers. I have seen that happen to other businesses as well with similar results when they don't cater to their customers.

This is actually true.

I stopped coming here since they changed the website and stopped having rules..now is a sh*t place full of trolls..i liked before when there was more control.

Because nobody here has evolved in any way, and most of us who used to love coming on here and having decent discussions got bored of the same people making the same dumbass arguments over and over and over and over again for years and years and years. Read the headlines and the OPs of the first page of SW today, go back three years, and you'll find the same people making the same posts.

Basically this. A shame since the forum was a lot more active and insane.

If GS is dead, where did the old residents move to? Links?

I blame video game journalism. Once we figured out we couldn’t take them seriously, the basis for the arguments was lost.

Gaming journalist don’t have basic knowledge of gaming as a hobby

Gaming journalist don’t understand game development

Gaming journalist have no clue how hardware works

Gaming journalist are some of the most entitled people on the planet, so their millennial b.s. is lost on a large part of the audience.

The general public now has the same amount of exposure to information as the journalist do. So there is really no need to get information from them.

So in the end, gaming journalism killed gaming journalism and took the message board communities with them. It’s a shame that a group of freelance writers making $25K a year ended up ruining it for the rest of us. I blame San Francisco.

Thanks for the good responses. So, now that it's been established that these forums are no longer relevant, which forums are good to go to in order to find good lively debate/discussions?

PC won. There is no more war.

Typically when 1 side demonstrably wins, the "war" is over for the most part. Hence the death of this forums.

Never study History?

Compared to what happened to OT this is a flurry of activity.........

Is it just Gamespot or gaming forums in general?

The site change along with staff change killed this place. I loved posting to level up, getting little rewards, emblems for watching E3 through Gamespot, E3 here was unbelievable with the comments section and forum moving faster than you could press f5, now you'd be lucky to get 10 pages for an E3 press conference.

It will never reach the glory of 2002-2007 imo.

the trolling is pretty solid though

Because we had insanely strict mods who did mass perma bannings over the smallest things.

No one bothered to come back. I know I left the site for a few years after getting banned constantly. It was just stupid.

Now the community is dead and the 2 mods we have left don’t mind the same 12 people that make the same post like “Xbone sucks” etc.

best description i read in awhile

Tryhard mods happened. SJWs happened

They took Iandizion away from me

that scrub? he still around

site change and the killing of unions

This! I used to check GS every night before this crap happened. I'm praying for another gaming collapse so we can get back to the way it should be.

I think it can be traced back to 2009 when MS did the unthinkable and dropped core to go upwards of 60% casual. Then we all know how current gen 8 went. SONY is unstoppable force and made MS shit can original Xbone. MS tried to catch up with SONY, with no way of catching current gen 8 console leader, the WORLD's first PROFESSIONAL video game console in the HISTORY of video games, the PS4 PRO.

Yeah, I agree , MS ruined the boards with their hyperbole and lack of exclusives.

Well you have left at LEAST 2X, and "i changed my password so I can never log back in" BULLSHIT. Power tripping 101 guys

MS shot themselves in the butt and there was a mass lemming Exodus after the Xbone flopped. The few lems that remain are under siege and always constantly getting owned so there’s really no system war just a system massacre. Sheep mostly don’t care anymore since Nintendo is doing their own thing with the Switch and Hermits are too cool to fight with peasants. The war between cows and lems are what kept this place alive and since lems are an endangered species this forum is dying/dead.

while I agree on much of that, the gaming community as a whole has an entitlement problem imo.

Much is said about the mainstream media in general. It is so bad that I refuse to watch or read anything from it.

Money, ideology, and media need to be separate from each other. It is a toxic mix that does not serve the people.