| Kresnik said: As someone who's only a recent member of these forums, can you explain to me what happened late 2009 - early 2010? If anyone knows, of course. That drop off of PPD is staggering. |
Well there are a number of reasons... The very sudden drop off in mid 2010 was caused by the site re-design dubbed VGC 3.0 (which is when the site split up into different sub-domains you may have seen if you were a lurker for a few months before joining like gamrconnect, gamrreview, gamrtv and gamrfeed) The earlier drop-off in early 2010 I'm not sure about, I suspect it was caused by the earlier VGC 2.0 introduction (which happened in mid 2009 and was when all the graphing tools were taken down) but that residual interest through the Christmas period, and the expectation that we were going to get the graph tools back at some point kept the post count high until early 2010.
So:
The sharp drop in late 2008: I think there were a number of site problems in late 2008, including a 2 week long bit which started out with about 2 days of most people struggling to get on the website at all (as if it was really busy.. maybe some kind of DDoS attack) then about 10 days where a lot of people visting were getting virus warnings about the site.
The drop in early 2010: Probably a delayed drop due to the loss of graph tools and such from VGC 2.0 introduction, people were still holding out hope we would get them back so general discussion was still high.
The drop in mid 2010: VGC 3.0... I don't think it was neccessarily that it was a 'site-split' as such but more a few of the decisions made about features, and also not many people liked this bright green on white gamrconnect scheme (in fact someone made a user-script that changes the green sections of the site to red or blue) I actually quite liked the colour scheme, but there were plenty of other things that were dissapointing compared to VGC 2.0.
The slight rise after it stopped dropping: Perhaps because a few missing features came back within the first month or two of VGC 3.0, then people started to slowly lose interest until the recent reasonable 2012 rise. (Though the 3 users I mentioned in my previous posts account for a good chunk of that rise, about a 3rd of it I think)
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I think after the graph tools dissapeared as well as changes with 2.0 and 3.0 were the major factors, but a contributing factor (as well as a reason those who left stayed away) is that the sales race wasn't as interesting any more. the Wii had won and the PS3 and 360 were clearly going to be essential twins till the end of gen. The Wii's fall from grace could also be contributing to the slight rise in late 2010, though it was still clear the Wii was too far ahead to lose it's place, and without any graph tools no one who came back could do any serious analysis anyway.
With the next gen upon us, and with the final return of at least some graph tools I believe the forum discussion should have a slow climb from now on.
