The databases are connected - add a game / release / box art on Gamewise and it will push through.

In terms of interconnecting the sites more (pulling more Gamewise stuff through to VGC, showing VGC data on Gamewise etc) - this is all being worked on.

Once Gamewise is out of beta and we start promotional activity, the userbase will pass VGChartz pretty quickly - it has a huge general appeal and does what it does better than any other site. VGChartz will still feed off Gamewise and can leverage the huge amount of data it will collect - I don't see what is dumb about any of this personally...

I still don't really know what people mean by "disconnect vgchartz from the db". VGChartz still has a game database, you can still view any game page and see the top-level information such as developer, publisher, genre, release dates, and the important stuff - the sales data. You can still add sales-related comments and discuss the performance of the title - how has the database been "disconnected"?

Gamewise is a new site that has duplicated the VGChartz database and built on top of it. Gamewise has characters, franchises, game credits and detailed pages on a game including plot, levels, tracks, vehicles, weapons etc. Gamewise goes far beyond the amount of information we ever had on VGChartz - it has added, not taken away!

Every game page on VGChartz is linked to the Gamewise page to go and find out more general information about the game. It would have never worked trying to combine what we are doing with Gamewise with the old VGChartz system - the database structure was too outdated, the VGChartz brand wouldn't have fit the brand / message that Gamewise is providing and the site would have been a mess trying to combine all of these things (sales, charts, forums, industry info, news, reviews, articles, games, characters, people, franchises, platforms, levels, weapons, items, vehicles, tracks, galleries, user reviews, cheats, achievements, walkthroughs) into one site. VGChartz is about sales and industry stuff, Gamewise is a reference site / social network for general users documenting all aspects of the videogame universe. Two totally different purposes. Gamewise has been built from scratch on a totally new platform that allows us to take user-controlled-content to a whole new level and create complex relationships between gaming entities - it goes far beyond anything we have ever done with VGChartz. Finally, Gamewise is built in a game-base rather than a game-platform-base (or sku base), so has one entry for Black Ops 2 (that covers everything relating to that game) rather than 4-5 for different platforms which is another reason why it wouldn't have worked on top of the existing VGChartz platform.

All that has really been lost on the VGChartz is general news / reviews (which now resides on gamrReview) and the ability to create a game collection (which is done far better on Gamewise) - it hasn't been "disconnected from the db"...

So we have two different systems, and the user to game following system is different in both cases. Here, you add a certain sku to your collection (even going as far as chosing which regional boxart you want) which was the right idea when we developed it and worked well. On Gamewise, tracking a game is a different thing - if I track Crysis 3 I am joining a group with everyone else tracking that game - regardless of whether I am getting it on PS3, 360 or PC. I am a Crysis 3 fan rather than a PS3 fan. Platforms aren't significant on Gamewise. We are encouraging the game profile image to be a generic box shot of the game like Wikipedia and other wiki sites use instead of a platform-specific version. When you follow a game (or indeed a person, franchise, character etc), you will be notified (via your dashboard feed) when someone edits that entity in some way (i.e adds a new section - Weapons - with a list of available weapons, or adds a new release date etc) and you will also be notified when someone adds a discussion item / article or review relating to that entity.

So, as I keep trying to point out, Gamewise and VGChartz are very different things. Gamewise is doing a lot of things that have never been done on a gaming site before but I do believe that it is the future. It will feel less like a traditional gaming website - there won't be the usual news, videos, games and forums sections like every site has copied from IGN / Gamespot (1up, GamePro, Gamesradar, Jeuxvideo, Eurogamer, Videogamer, Nowgamer etc) - we are trying to do something different. One of the many roles of Gamewise will be as a news aggregator (far more effectively than N4G, Digg etc) and on this front we will be partnering with a number of gaming blogs to pull in and syndicate their news. We will also be working with other specialist gaming sites to syndicate their content so the idea of keeping Gamewise and VGChartz linked so that doing stuff on Gamewise adds points on VGChartz just wouldn't work - we don't want Gamewise to be an extension of VGChartz but to be a stand-alone site.

We don't have to "get rid" of it here, but it will not be supported any more.