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Pineapple on 26 March 2012
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RolStoppable said:

The drop in overall forum popularity unsurprisingly coincides with the introduction of the worst version of VGC. It happened in the middle of 2010. VGC IM got removed. Wall posts were limited to about 250 characters with no ability to make paragraphs. PMs didn't allow you to use paragraphs, everything became a wall of text. The plus sign wouldn't show up in forum posts. A lot of stuff that was easy to do previously had to be learned to be done differently.

In other words, the means of communication between members were greatly reduced and/or limited which meant that a lot of members left the site. That's why the amount of time it took for 500k posts suddenly doubled.

As for the sales forum specifically, 2008 was the peak year because the generation was still fresh and a lot of possible scenarios could be discussed, but from 2009 onwards most trends were set in stone and a lot of historic sales analysisses had already been done. A decline was bound to happen eventually. If you look at 2011, the second half was lower than the first half, even though the holiday season should spur more discussion. But the seventh generation is old, so nobody really cares anymore. Almost everything that could have been said has been said.

Of course, VGC taking graphs and other stuff away from us didn't help, but looking at the number of threads, the sales forum would have remained stagnant at best.

Do you (or anybody else, for that matter) have any idea if the reasons for the changes actually panned out as expected?  If I remember correctly, the reason for starting removing graphs and such was to be able to sell them to companies interested in sales data. If I'm right about that, did it work out well for ioi? Are companies buying VGChartz Pro data, or did the entire concept fall apart?

Considering that VGChartz is apparently going to get more sales data again, it seems to be more likely to have been somewhat of a failure. If it was a giant success, giving more data out freely would only serve to lower the amount of VGChartz Pro data sold.