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kitler53 on 30 March 2012
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RolStoppable said:
Pineapple said:

Good point! And It's not that hard to do. Shouldn't be much of a problem at all, actually. I'll have to use posts instead of threads, so it's not a perfect comparison, but this way it's really simple.

(...)

In other words, there's been quite a drop just lately in the VGChartz popularity, but not a drop that coincides with the sales forum popularity. Most of the sales forum drop happens before 2010, while virtually all of the overall popularity happens after. 

You definitely had a point though. Personally, I didn't at all expect VGChartz forum popularity to be as low as half of what it was during its peak. 

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.


rol speaks the truth.

..but i'd also add that with some of the massive adjustments in excess of 1m units sales general in data isn't trusted much to begin with.  maybe it's just me but i dont even look at the sale thread anymore, well not the vgchartz one.  i looked at npd for a while now that sucks too.  media crate and quarterly numbers are the only sales thread i look at anymore.

if it wasn't for some of my favorite members like rol, seece, ect i'd be gone too.