Hi all. For further context, please see the hyperlinked thread. (“Discuss the state of the forum and finding solutions.”) In short, VGChartz needs new users, and an effective means to attract people is through community engagement via exciting, enticing, and varied threads.

That said, I have created this thread to (i) raise awareness, (ii) provide my formal pledge to contribute at least two new forums every week through the end of October, and (iii) provide others an opportunity to make a formal pledge to contribute at least [X] new forums every [Y] through [Z]. If you want to join me, I encourage you to make a formal declaration below. I will be sending reminders at the start of every week for anybody who makes a pledge.

All users who stay true to the pledge (for at least 3m) will be given recognition here: [TBD].

I'm doing my best; I try to post topics on game reveals or news that interest me, as well as various topics to spark discussion, recently:

https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread/249570/greatest-game-worlds-and-why/1/

https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread/249558/tokyo-epdepd-8s-best-game-and-why/2/#6

https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread/249561/can-one-game-win-a-console-war/

https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread/249573/greatest-acting-performances/1/

https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread/249575/favourite-music-media-format/1/

I didn't mean like a formal thing even though this could work. I just meant if people thought of one interesting topic in the week, no pressure and no forcing it cause that would result in some stiff threads and most people would end up with the same ideas.

That said, where the hell does one put Science, metaphysical or philosophical threads on this forum? ... General?

Curl-6 carries this forum. I wish I had interesting things to post about, but no one cares on Kirby Air Riders. Though it is my most wanted for any game since StarCraft 2 (which I still play to this day!)

Thanks man. :)

I am really keen for Air Riders myself, it looks awesome, I'll be updating the thread as more info/footage comes out.

Do people have a preference for when making a TV Show related thread if it's based on the entire series for example "Severance OT" or a thread per season for example "Severance Season 1 OT" and then a follow-up question, what do people think is the most ideal length of time before spoiler tags have to stop being used for recently aired episodes?

Anyone around here learning/speaking japanese? I could imagine a thread about it, but I didn't bother until now as I came to the conclusion no one would pay attention to it anyway.

Other than that my life is quite boring. I don't even have time to game all that much. I still haven't finished DK Bananza, far from it. I can play for an hour a day if I'm lucky, but on many days I can't game at all. Which is why I'm a little out if touch with things. Often I don't even notice some big game until it gets released or something. So yeah, can't talk about stuff I just don't know anything about. I could write a whole bunch about economics and stocks. But I do that all day for a living and I really don't want to spend my free time for that crap. =D

Anywho, if anything comes to mind, I'll try to make a thread about it.

We have a Spanish speaking thread, I don't see why we can't have a Japanese one which doubles as helping people to learn the language, although I'm not sure how many Japanese users we have here, but I do know of a few users who have moved to Japan...Except I don't think they're around on the site anymore, Lol. But uh, build it and they will come? Maybe.

General but with rare exceptions, a philosophical debate could be political.

I’ll try to contribute, I used to make threads all the time, can’t remember the last time I did though.

As for bringing in new users, I’m not sure this will work but could make existing users more active and slow down the decline.

Edit: this piqued my interest and I had to go look up my thread creating history. I joined in late 2012 and made a lot of threads during my first few years, with a gradual decline after that and I have only made one thread since 2019.

Looking back, a lot of my activity was around either predicting, reporting or analyzing sales data and for various reasons that is a lot harder to do now.

The appeal of this site for me was always the weekly sales charts. We were able to speculate and talk about how well a new release would sell or how much of an impact it would have on hardware, it was always exciting to look at the new weekly data and discuss it, that simply doesn’t exist anymore.

The rise of digital made this sites software charts increasingly unreliable to the point where they were abandoned and the industry in general has gotten more secretive about sharing sales data which has led to monthly hardware charts rather than weekly.

Weekly estimates is what differentiated this site from other sales based gaming forums, without them this site is just NeoGAF/ResetERA/InstallBase with a significantly more outdated/less mobile friendly format.

As much as I would love for this site to get more users and more activity, that’s just never going to happen because the thing that made it unique doesn’t exist anymore.