Bah, I'm still able to follow Other M's path to oblivion so I'm cool.

Most of this has been discussed previously but a few general points:

• VGChartz is a business not a charity. Monthly costs for the business are now in the tens of thousands of dollars so we need to monetise the site effectively. Ads work well for news / reviews / forums but we have been making a huge loss for years now on the data activity.
• Of those who view data - 95% are doing so casually (top 10 games, check a few game totals), 4% like to view the data in more depth and examine trends and 1% are using it for financial gain. The 1%, although a small number in absolute terms, is still significant and are obviously willing to pay a lot for a professional service to aid their business activity.
• The 4% of "in-depth" users (you guys) haven't really lost much if you look at the big picture. Many of you are speaking as though we've gone and removed all data from the site. The key with VGChartz Pro is that all data on the site is still free, we just charge for easier access to it (seems like a subtle difference but it is significant). You can still see the topline sellers each week, you can still see the weekly sales for any game in any region on its game page and we will be releasing regular analysis articles which delve deeper into the data and show trends that are not immediately accessible. The move to limit filtering by publisher and platform on weekly charts is to make the data more secure. With the old setup, it would be pretty easy to crawl the site and quickly pull in most of the weekly data - with the new system we protect that data and make it only fully accessible to paid subscribers.
• VGChartz Pro is just about the data - it has nothing to do with forum access or any other area of the site. On a side note, gamrConnect 2.0 is nearly ready now and we are planning to launch by the end of the month. All major issues with the current site will be fixed along with a ton of new features. Development costs and time for gamrConnect 2 are larger than for the rest of the network combined so it represents a major body of work  and will finish up this round of major developments.

You have to look at it from the other side - VGChartz has for a long time provided far more data than any other source for free and we continue to do that today. It is hard to find a top ten with numbers nevermind a weekly top 40 with full data on game pages for each title. I'd love to be able to make the site totally free for everyone and fully accessible but then I'd also like to be able to walk into a shop, pick up a nice new HD TV and walk out without having to pay for it. People shouldn't expect to get something for nothing - even on the internet.

As long as I am not charged with posting off topic, I am cool with the change.