1. This site has been extremely sluggish, cluttered, and difficult to use since 3.0. There have been efforts to improve this, but for every step forward there are two steps back. It just isn't a nice site to browse. Badges? Points and ranking? Who cares about this stuff? Every other site that I visit on a regular basis has a cleaner design than VGC.
2. The site was fractured in 4.0. The forum, game database, and sales data used to be nicely and easily tied together. Now everything is buried in menus and links to other sub-sites.
3. I think VGC lost focus on what it wanted to be. It started as a site where sales data could be posted, analyzed, and stored for posterity. It was on track to becoming the premiere site for discussing the business of video games. When VGC started pushing to cover every aspect of gaming news, providing reviews, screenshots and trailers, the business and sales focus started to suffer.
One by one, the people who were interested in the business of video games just left. They'd been cut off from the interesting data, frustrated with the clumsy website, and alienated by a community that cared less and less about the business of games. Those were the people who made interesting posts on the VGC forums.
"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event." — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
*Image indefinitely borrowed from BrainBoxLtd without his consent.
