ioi said:
It seems to me that a lot of the people who complain about Gamewise and who complained when we created the VGChartz Network must be people who don't like going on multiple different websites.
All of the best sites have a clear purpose. You don't go on Tripadvisor to talk about movies. You don't go on LinkedIn to invites friends to your birthday party. You don't use Facebook to look for a movie review. You don't go on N4G to find a game walkthrough. No one website (as much as Facebook and Google often try) can cover all bases and in fact the more you try to do the more confusing the site becomes.
Looking at the total December pageviews for VGChartz (including the gamrConnect, gamrFeed, gamrReview subdomains when we had them) we have:
2012 - 5.87m
2011 - 5.28m
2010 - 5.96m
2009 - 6.89m
2008 - 6.60m
2007 - 5.11m
So for everything that has been added and removed over the years, the hits have remained steady. Compare the site now to how it was in 2007 or 2010. The reason for this is because the hits are (and have always) been broadly split into 3 equal contributors - 30% from the homepage, 30% from the charts and game sales pages and 30% from the forums with the other 10% from everything else. All of the things we tried - a full news team with gamrFeed, reviews with gamrReview, adding more content to the game database, gamrTV, the social aspects of gamrConnect (status updates, better game collections, wall posts etc) - none of those things worked and not because they weren't good ideas or because they weren't executed well but because 95% of the people that come to VGChartz weren't interested in them. The homepage, chart pages, games sales pages and forums are what makes this site what it is - they have always generated the majority of the hits and haven't really changed in 5 years - http://web.archive.org/web/20080509085000/http://www.vgchartz.com/
Going back to a simpler VGChartz in 2012 was the right decision. gamrReview is now thriving and developing an audience and a writing team of its own and Gamewise is about to be launched onto the world later this month in its full glory. What has always been at the core of VGChartz is still here now - better than ever. General news, reviews, video content, game wikis, game collections, gaming social networking - they were all good experiments that we tried as the site was developing - some worked better than others and have resulted in new projects but ultimately none really had a place on VGChartz which is why they have gone.
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Hehe for a guy that hosts a sales site the analysis is a bit... well okay, let me put it in a game sales metaphore.
You know how Super Mario sold less and less over time as the series progressed, up until the NSMB series, which now is also being affected with the sequel syndrome to sales? It also happened to pokemon and other series. Most things usually lose popularity over time. So the fact that the vgchartz pagevisit numbers are steady could be seen as a good sign, meaning that they didn't drop, possibly thanks to those efforts :)
I could be wrong, but it's at least a possibility. Anyhoo I'm just chewing the fat with you because honestly I think you took the right direction with gamrReview et al.
