I definitely think the bigger news article should get threads. Not every new article as some aren't important enough and could clog up the forum and bury other topics, but the more major ones absolutely, good idea.

The reason its declining is because it absolutely shockingly badly optimized for mobile use. Which 99% of users visit the site with. Apple or Samsung phone. It should be an App you download from the store. As it is its riddled with adds so you cant even post.

This is basically the reason why I’m not posting much...

Or maybe doing one major thread with recuring updates and ongoing discussions for news we can expect regularly, like one for weekly sales estimates or one for the Vita series of article, just to name these two.

Yeah I think it's pretty obvious at this point that an essential part of "revitalizing" the site successfully is a full overhaul of its mobile format. Nowadays more people browse on phones than Desktops/laptops.

Wow, a lot of cynical people in this thread.

Xxain is over there telling the whole site to commit suicide because apparently everything is pointless and a bunch of people think that the mods getting rid of all the people from that really toxic era is the reason the site is declining. What a bunch of nonsense.

First, as to where the people are going? They're going to social media sites, especially Reddit. When you can draw millions under one site for a variety of reasons and keep every gamer there by giving them a dedicated subforum for every conceivable fandom and gaming interest, it's a bit hard for a site like this one to compete. Take me for example, when I'm using an internet browser, I don't really use any other website besides this one, and reddit, which I mostly do through an app now. Everything else I used to use a browser for I use an app for now. I don't own a PC, and even once I do, I will likely experience the internet mostly through Reddit. That place is so full of gamers it isn't funny. But there are other social media sites that draw similarly large audiences of gamers and can similarly provide any gamer with a community of fans of any specific gaming subject they could imagine, and all of these sites have an app. On that note, the other place they're going is to mobile phones. PC just doesn't hold the internet browsing marketshare it used to. This site won't revive until it has a kickass, modern mobile layout that is pleasant to use. If I could use it on mobile phone, I would, though I'd come back to the PC site often because I like to type out long responses. I don't think we'll ever, ever get an app, because that's probably a bit much to ask for, but this place will die without a good mobile site. Even PC users like myself consume a lot of internet on their phones now, few people exclusively consume internet content through desktop or laptop. We need a mobile site that people actually want to use.

Second, as people have pointed out, we've lost a bit of what made us special with the loss of the sales charts. That's big, and not easily solved. We need to ask ourselves, why are we still coming here? Because yeah, there's less of us, but some of us just keep coming back. Why? And what brought us here in the first place, besides just "sales data" because I think it goes a little deeper than that. I know for me, one thing that keeps me coming back is the community. It's sadly shrinking, but the way the site is structured makes it easier for a REAL sense of community to form. I don't know a single soul on Reddit. It's just not a place you make friends, know people, or even recognize users most of the time. There are a few celebrities of a sort that make a name for themselves on one sub or another, but they don't know you, and no one ever will know each other. Most sites like that, be it Reddit, Pinterest, or even Facebook, we're all just a sea of faces and no one cares. This site is different. I feel like I really know certain users, and they know me, even if it's only an anonymous internet persona of me that they know and that I know of them. That's one thing about our format that will always have an advantage over these social media sites, the fact that we facilitate real, meaningful, lasting social connections, like an actual, legit community. We should lean into that more, I think. I remember when we had threads where you got to see a lot each other's personality, like role play threads, mafia threads, threads where we planned online gaming sessions with each other, shit like that.

The other thing about this site that attracts me, and it gets back to the sales that originally drew me here, and mind you, this might just be a shot in the dark by me, but I think beyond just sales, the site is full of people that like data, data analysis, and well...charts! You know, like VGChartz? Like the name? So many threads that were really popular on here took from our huge wealth of sales data and made charts and comparisons and analyses and was basically like a little video game themed r/dataisbeautiful, if anyone knows what that is. Not all of us, but a lot of us love data, we're just that kind of nerd. Certain sales, but not just sales either, anything video game related you could put in a chart. Be it the hardware and software, or attach rates for a particular title, or tie-in ratios for consoles, or the rise and fall of a particular franchise, or metacritic scores, or ranking games in each series or on each console or overall, or comparisons of tech specs for each console, or most anticipated upcoming games, if you could find a way to represent it in a chart, we would put it in a chart on this site. What are the most popular, long running threads and features on this site? Things like the monthly "Most Anticipated Games" thread, the COMG preorder tracking thread (God bless you, Boutros, for your tireless dedication to that thread), the Metacritic prediction threads, the monthly NPD threads, the yearly VGChartz game ranking thread with our top 500 games, stuff like this is everywhere, and it's what makes us weird, other places don't do this shit. Let's embrace this and lean into this, and try to attract more people like this. Reach out to places that like to crunch data and discuss trends that also love games, and post some of our content. Like really, how do people even find us? 

That's the third thing, and I admit I obviously don't have the data that the site's admins do on this, but where are people who do come here coming from? I suspect mostly from searching for video game sales data. Maybe a little from the news articles. But without our regular software sales data, we're becoming harder to find. And news? Come on, it's interesting, to be sure, but how many people are going to see us as the first result in Google? We don't really have much of a way to get our content out there. How are people supposed to find out about this community and what we do here, and why they should check us out. Once we get them here, how do we get them to stay? If there's a plan to make this happen, I don't see it. This isn't a "build it and they will come" situation. We're in the backwater country of the internet, people can't see us. Sure, we need to make a nice site so that people coming on their phone don't run away at the first look, and we need good content that creates a sense of community and gives us a sense of identity for that community, but we need a way to make people see us, invite them in, and convince them to stay. We need a plan here. We can't just rely on the internet growing indefinitely and the flood of new users just randomly stumbling upon us like we could in the early days of the internet. Everyone who's going to have the internet has it, just about, and the internet has centralized into a handful of sites. Getting people to try out our little community will take effort beyond just making the actual site and its content, and getting them to stay will take even more effort than that.

I for one am not ready to give up on this place, but it's going to need a lot of work if we're going to save it. It could be a really happening place again though, and I think it would be worth it!

I've really glommed onto just liking comments to show appreciation, or if I'm too lazy too add to the conversation, but that was lovely.

I've talked to a small number of former members about why they left, and have received a wide array of responses. All were, at the very least, fairly well known, active members, and all seem set on staying away completely or simply lurking.

I know some of my friends have visited after I told them about the site, but none registered. Maybe I can try to gauge interest and see if I can get some of them to give it a shot. Pretty much all of my friends are good-natured, multi-console owners, unlike myself, and the toxic PS fanboys I mingle with here on VGC. Scum.

I'm just guessing here, but I think forum use in general is just down.  And Reddit has probably soaked up most of what is left.

About the news thread thing - Most members beat the writers to the punch in that regard so I dont know if that will change anything.

I was thinking about how to replace the excitement for sw numbers with something else. What if we official track the a averge of meticritic scores for 1st party, 2nd party, and exclusive 3rd party games per console throughout the gen to see who will end up with highest rated games per gen?

^ Yeah. Most of the important news items have accompanying threads already, and although it doesn't really matter IMO, it's not an uncommon occurrence for forum threads to be posted before news articles.