How have forums made you a different gamer?

[Michael-5]

Otakumegane said:

Starting to cultivate a deeper interest in the workings and the politics of the industry. And even after realizing the crap Nintendo did for a while, still finding that I can't help but love their legacy. Meanwhile fueling my disdain for certain company actions that I didn't quite like. Example being Blizzard and Starcraft 2.

Man, I really like you guys. Some of ya'll can be a bit...unwelcoming, but this community has really grown on me. And you all know which games are good. Screw Metacritic. I go to VGchartz and Neogaf for reviews now.

I have also stopped going to IGN for some reason. Huh.

That too, I never really disliked a company, mostly because I never really payed attention to who developed a game before, but now I have a group of devs which I buy games from no questions, regardless of review score, and others I avoid.

I really hate MS and EA now, MS for basically adandoning the core, yet still giving a lot of focus on $$ makers like XBLG and Kinect, EA for Online passes, Porsche licencing, and a few other things.

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But you really trust VGC reviews over IGN and others? I find that the opinions given by reviewers at GameTrailers tends to reflect my opinion very accuratly. Not always, but usually they do.

Bruxel said:
this forum for one open'ed up a whole new world of gaming i did not pay attention to before, sales and marketing it is. Before i never cared how much a game sold or what it's weekly rankings on the charts were, not that it matters as a gamer but intresting to see how the mass amount of consumers takes on a game.

Really? I find that I care less about how a game sells now. Especially when games like CoD sell over 20 million units annually, meanwhile other great games like XenoBlade, struggle to break 1 million.