ioi said:
| Carl2291 said:
I could understand where you were coming from if the problems were only recent. Aside from the odd thread, the sales forum has been abysmal for the last Year and a half. We have a new generation of HW and multiple games that can/will sell 5-10 Million+, yet conversation doesnt pick up.
Im not asking for a top 1000 chart. Im asking for the sales tools that were removed. The articles that we no longer get. They were great, they (along with the free data) made the site unique. They added something for users to interact with. It made sales topics interesting It was such ease of use / accessibility that made VGChartz so popular with people.
Other unique features / articles have also disappeared with the sales team. Publisher totals, Japan Preview, Prediction League, Monthly charts, Graphs. Things that encouraged sales chatter. They were brilliant. I understand that were coming swiftly to the end of the console generation, but were also over a Year into a new handheld generation. The 3DS broke records. The Vita tanked. The possibilities for comparison are huge, yet it seems nobody other than the normal forum goer gives a shit.
If the extended charts, graphs and comparison tools didnt go to VGC Pro, then where did they go? Speaking of Pro, btw. How well is it doing? Are we allowed to know? According to the page its still "Coming soon".
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Sales discussion has been on the decline ever since 2008 when it was at its peak. What made the sales discussion so important and obsessive in the early days was the console wars - which platform would win? The previous generation was dominated by PS2 and suddenly we saw Wii and to a lesser extent 360 doing better. Wii did some phenomenal numbers in 2007 - 2008 on the back of some enormous games and that drove interest in the console wars. In 2009, things settled and through 2010 -2012 things have been extremely predictable and dull. As the person who runs the site, I don't even have much of an interest in things at the moment - what does that say about the state of the industry? All of the excitement at the moment is from emerging game platforms - Facebook, iOS, Steam, XBL, PSN - games are becoming less and less platform-based now and therefore the interest in whether Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft will "win" doesn't really mean a lot in today's market. The last exciting thing we had from a sales perspective in the console space was Kinect vs Move and that drove a ton of interest for about a month until Kinect emerged as the clear winner. I can't control the industry trends - we can't create excitment around industry trends out of nothing.
Which articles did we have that we no longer get aside from the Japan preview (which was hugely flawed and inaccurate)? The data is still "free" - just limited in how much can be accessed, you can still see the top 100 games each week which is more than enough for 99% of readers. Of everybody who looked at the weekly charts, less than 1% of people ever read beyond the basic top 50 games (either via filters or by going to page 2, 3 etc) so clearly this was of minor interest to a select few (mostly professionals who needed this specific info). The prediction league went about 4 years ago and again the popularity was waning - we went from 120-130 participants in early 2008 to 20-30 by the time it was removed.
The graphs and tools are coming back and are great for comparing two or more items back-to-back - this is about the only feature that I consider is currently "missing" from the site, and even those I don't think would make a great deal of difference to the amount of discussion.
Following the order of the points in your post, the "handheld wars" - nobody cares about. Nobody cared with DS vs PSP, and 3DS is hammering PSV so it is just business as ususal. If it were the other way around and PSV was selling double 3DS then we'd be seeing a lot more interest and discussion on the subject. Who is going to bother discussing Black Ops 2, we all know it will sell a similar amount to BO and MW3? Same with Halo 4, same with the NSMB games. Nothing on the horizon is really that interesting from a sales analysis point of view, hence nobody has anything to say about it!
So again, it is nothing to do with Pro or any other decisions made by the management of this site - sales discussion is quiet because sales are slow, the market is very predictable and there isn't much to talk about.
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