RolStoppable said:
What drove this site's activity during its heydays was console warring which naturally means a lot of trolling and flaming. Picking fights was what this site was about, with a minority being here to discuss things in earnest. People getting banned was something that made the site more interesting and desirable to be on, not less. The loss of weekly hardware and software estimates played into the decline, but the decline started already before that. When the site had turned 10 years old, there was hardly anyone left on the boards who put enough stock into the weekly estimates to discuss them, because it was common knowledge how frequent adjustments could be, and said adjustments would just make most people in previous discussions look stupid for arguing over something that was never true in the first place. The loss of the console wars themselves is what's really driving the dagger in. By 2016, which happens to coincide with the site turning 10 years old, it was clear to pretty much everyone that Sony wasn't going to make another handheld to compete with Nintendo. The handheld space was significantly less fought about on this site than the home console space, but it had sparked a lot of activity nonetheless. Only one generation later Microsoft threw in the towel, so we are down to Nintendo vs. Sony and even that comes with a major caveat: Development costs have risen to a point where virtually every third party publisher will soon support PC, PS and Switch 2 alike, making console sales rather unimportant. These circumstances will lead to InstallBase inheriting the remains of the VGC forums eventually. Console wars are closing in on irrelevance, so the state of the video game industry as a whole is more meaningful and interesting to discuss. And when it comes to that, the moderation team on IB has beat the VGC team handily, because they curated the place from the get-go to protect it from trolls and discussions in bad faith. The important difference here is that IB was built by users for users whereas VGC was taken over by users to keep a site with an uncertain future alive, and I can't blame these users for not being motivated anymore. I myself hardly care anymore since years, so the erasure of my vast posting history wasn't something that made me feel bad, it was just "whatever." |
And that's only half the issues! Lol.
And I think none of it can even start to change unless the site comes under new ownership, not until we have an owner who actually invests and shows they care. But it's likely too little, too late. I actually felt deeply embarrassed by that hack, and pissed off that it happened in the first place, annoyed that it was let to get to this state, upset for the community. I'm losing a lot of my heart for VGChartz over the past year or so though, I've tried to fake it, I've tried to reignite it here and there, I'm still trying to help where I can, but I don't think I have long left.
InstallBase is definitely going to gobble the rest of VGChartz up, not me though, because I ironically don't really care much for sale talk, Lol.
Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 13 September 2025
