Remember when this place was worth visiting?

The total site redesign, and getting rid of unions was the dumbest thing the people running the show could have ever done.

@sith_acolyte15: Even then i found the site to be a bit unresponsive. I will post in a forum and the last post was no longer than 10mins ago and i will never get a reply etc. I was gonna re name myself the thread killer. Seems to be a low reply rate on many topics that are not in immediate circulation! It is odd tho because like your current post i see this at the top or near the top of the currently listed threads! Yet i wonder if other plp are seeing what i see.

It could be worse.

...

We could be the Escapist Magazine.

@sith_acolyte15: it's an opinion shared by just about anyone who was a regular on the site pre 2013.

all i can think is that the redesign was purely to maximise the amount of ad revenue the site could generate. that and to make the site mobile friendly. the irony with the first is that the volume of users to expose ads to fell of a cliff after the redesign and the irony with the second is using the site on mobile is one of the most horrendously gimped user experiences out there

Wrong forum.

The irony is that we're still visiting it regardless of our complaints. I bet that we're also using it on PC.

Here's the truly pathetic part with how the site is now; this topic wasn't even meant to be posted on this particular board.

at least this place isn't as bad as neogaf

i got perma banned for simply saying the forum was dead in a reply to a thread about the forum being dead ...

those mods are just awful people

What happened to all those badges and emblems? on my really old account I had so many.

Count yourself lucky the forums even still exist. They're all going the way of the dodo, replaced by the pile of crap that is twitter.

what makes you say that? despite the recent character limit bump to twitter they're still two very different entities and experiences as far as i can tell

People complain about this all the time, but they don't actually want anything to improve so long as they can continue to bitch and moan. I actually went and built a site with a lot of what people were asking for with a much better mobile design and extremely limited advertising and in 3 years I'm still trying to figure out how to get people to just use the god damn thing. I built a foundation for Unions and emblems, built support for blogs and a 'blog of the month' option and just about every other 'feature' gamespot dropped. Can count the amount of people who actually used the site on my fingers and toes! lol

I think people just like to bitch and moan about something they don't like and nothing more. We want change just so long as you don't change anything. What?

Never saw you visit here.........do you remember visiting?

Social media has been syphoning users away from forums and chat rooms for a good while. Now there's Discord, but i don't see forums coming back onto the breach. Also they cost a lot of money to keep running, for very little return.

i agree people have flocked to social media at the expense of time on the forums, and compared to say ten years ago they do seem to be on the wane, but i'd argue against your last sentence.

hosting is cheap. serverless architecture that companies like amazon and ms are pushing is affordable, easy to set up, scale in line with your traffic volume and you only pay for what you use. the amount of ads dotted around the forum design (try disabling adblocker / ghostery to see the full amount) should generate a lot of money. pair that with the user data collected from the 45+ trackers on here, user signup data (email address signed up with - or if people login in with facebook / twitter / google - to link to externally collected tracking data) and then all the posts users make there's plenty of data to generate a reasonably accurate profile of a user's taste in gaming and generate targeted ads based off the back of that.

for a site like gs with the not insignificant number of daily forum users, that data should be pretty valuable to game devs, hardware manufacturers and anyone else connected to the industry looking for direct access to their target market. mods are volunteers. they probably have a small dev team that probably support a bunch of sites, gs being one of them, but their time is likely focused largely away from the forum portion of the site (the forum being largely the same since the redesign is proof of that).

that's my hypothesis anyway :)

@suicidesn0wman: what's your general seo strategy? i googled "gaming forum" and your site hadn't appeared by page 10. i stopped looking at that point

I come to this site to post and to read posts, nothing more. I don't care much for the site layout or GS reviews. I never made much use of the old site's features aside from the storage space I can use for images. I have that now. So, no complaints when GS switched to the new layout.

Most people do use adblocker though, it's the natural consequence of two decades of careless and malicious anti-consumer advertising practices; as a result, avertising on the internet is not the profitable venture it used to be and a lot of features which served as bait to show people billions of ads per day are now costing more to run than the revenue they generate (most notably: youtube).

Forums are, indeed, far cheaper to run than that, especially if self-hosted on corporate servers like these are, but if you manage to dig up the thread from several years ago where they explained why unions and private boards were shut down, that was the reason: they cost more money to keep online than they generated in advertising.

To broaden the topic: are adblockers evil then? Nope, they are a consumer revolt against an abusive marketing lobby that treated users like cattle for decades. They're a way to steer advertisers and platforms towards a more consumer-friendly business model. Now the war is at the "adblocker blocker" phase ("can't use our site with adblock on!"), which will backfire spectacularly, and as adblockers become more sophisticated and undetectable, that bastion will fall as well.

The solution is to go with a voluntary support model: Patreon for individuals and optional subscriptions and "visit our sponsors" pages for websites, where (static!) ads are unobtrusively gathered in one place and people can manually generate ad traffic and turn a profit for the site. Instead of illegal tracking cookies, have consumer surveys to know which ads to show to whom. If Patreon has shown anything, it's that people are ready to actively support something they like, and a minimal time investment is a far easier sell than a $1/month monetary donation. You could even have browser extensions doing that automatically and corporations would be none the wiser.

Do that, and you can run anything profitably. Even forums.

It doesn't look like you have any. I have quite a few here: https://www.gamespot.com/profile/ArchoNils2/trophies/

Money in ads doesn't come from us visiting the forums, it would be everyone else visiting the site for gaming news. We aren't making up a huge number of their unique visitors I bet.

I like Gamespot.

It’s a smallish community but that’s what makes it great. I’m a member of other forums, some MUCH bigger, and it’s hard to get to know anyone or what their personality is generally like. Here, everyone feels like an individual to me, not a number. It’s more enjoyable to have discussions with people you may have a history with.

It’s also laid back here. We can goof off, talk completely out of our asses, and no one really cares. GS has its downsides, but this corner of the net feels like my home for gaming.

This right here is basically the advertising model I chose when I built my site. Patreon for all the individuals plus affiliation with Amazon/Best Buy and others. People can support the site simply by buying the games they already plan on buying through our site so we can collect a small fee on it. Eventually the developers will figure out a way around ad blockers, I know I already did, so I'm already setup for when that happens.

The current business model is failing and GameSpot is only pushing it over the edge at a faster rate.

Yeah, you probably wont find my site through google, too much competition for a young site like mine to break through. I have a good SEO plugin for that but right now it's just word of mouth. I invited friends on here and other sites to come over, setup a discord chat, facebook twitter insta and YouTube to drive traffic towards the site but can't keep up with everything.

Just can't seem to figure out what i'm missing. I've literally had hundreds tell me how great the site looks on just about every device, but that's where it ends. Can't get anyone engaged, I'm literally talking to and writing for myself. lol :(

Actively advertise for your site in your posts again (apart from signature) and I'll start deleting them. Advertising isn't allowed here.

Edit: OK, thought had written more than a couple of posts mentioning it. Still the warning stands.

I miss the old reviewers that seem to have done a better job at critiquing games (Kevin was the best!). And no, before anyone says, it's not because they handed out more bad scores and agreed with my opinion. NO. I like when the reviewers just did a better job and seemed to remember what one game did that was similar to another and compared/contrasted. It seemed that there was more thought put into reviews years ago. One example of a bad review is MGSV getting a 10. Any other reviewer should have taken off just one point at least for the 10 or so late missions that you have to REPEAT on a harder difficulty (so exactly the same ones) in order to unlock the last part of the game as well as the flaw of the cut content and the game sorta just ending. That's not a 10. But hey, for the reviewer it was.

I don't know. I feel like sometimes the critics are too soft now. I loved it about Gamespot years ago and it was the reason I stayed so long with this place was because the critics were harder on games and pointed out flaws and in the end, saved me a good bit of money.

I still miss the old GameSpot days sometimes. I miss the unions, User-Created Boards, emblems, username color, smileys, etc. I'm disappointed on how this site was trying to be more like GiantBomb. I'm still here to see what a few friends are up to and such.

It´s not just the redesign it´s also the new culture, most get their news and debates on facecrap now.

i hadn't heard of patreon before tbh, just been having a read up on it, interesting stuff, i recognise a few youtubers i subscribe to who use it. according to wikipedia one of those whose videos i usually enjoy makes $20k/month. i'm impressed!

i guess my point was that through regular use of a forum you disclose a ton of data about your interests which is there to be mined, connected to other online data on you and sold to interested parties. it's unethical and raises privacy concerns but you waive your right to be outraged when you sign up to most sites these days.

@suicidesn0wman: what search terms are you trying to rank for? i won't critique your site on here but at a quick glance through there's loads of pointers i could give you

@Macutchi: I sent you a PM.

Or Neogaf.

This is still a good place to visit, but I do miss the unions thing.

It's certainly slow around here these days. We won't ever see the activity of the Unions era but it would be nice if the front page rolled just a little faster.

Tracking cookies are clearly in breach of existing privacy laws. The issue is that the lawmaking process is slow and always a decade behind any given problem. All it takes is one good court ruling to effectively send user tracking down the drain. Just look at the cookie disclaimer you have to click off on virtually every single website these days: that's the result of a European Union ruling, and it affects the entire english-speaking internet. We only need a similar ruling prohibiting tracking cookies and the whole castle of cards of anti-consumer practices will come tumbling down.

Yeah, this.

You'd think after four years of complaints and requests from fans, things would get fixed back to the way they were, even just a little.

Man, those were the days...

look, another person complaining about how great things used to be.

lol ya it reminds me of older people who sit and reminisce about how great things was back when they were young.

I never used nor ever cared to use private boards or unions, I only ever post in OT and I used to also post in SW and that's it.

Objectively speaking the pre-redesign site was far, FAR better looking and as far as I'm concerned also much easier to use as you could write html code directly into comments instead of having to rely on the very limited and glitchy html buttons that we have now. Also, the new site made it impossible to access some of the older comedy gold that were the SW threads made after a major ownage event happened (the reason why I got into GS was specifically because I enjoyed reading those so much).

no, I don't; gamespot forums have always been hot trash

though it's still fun popping in every once in a while and marveling at how much worse it's become, and how some people are still clinging on

And GB was formed in response to the Jeff Gerstmann incident. Cruel irony, huh? When that happened, that's when I knew this place would never be the same. I was quite the active user then, too.

These days I just come here out of force-of-habit. Unfortunately various things have prevented me from jumping in more often.

Yeah, the unions were what made this place stand out from other gaming forums, and were the main reason I came to this site for the longest time. I'm only still around sometimes, because I've just been here so long and everything.

Forums going away is a scary thought. I like forums over social media any day.

^

Rather than posting regularly here, try to be a part of a community, some old users like TC drops by to remind how GS used to be awesome and vanish again to never post again.

I'd rather listen to current users opinions than some random users.

I miss a lot of people that used to post here.

Me too :(

Haven't seen any forum last... I wonder why that is.