I’m still here, just don’t post much anymore. Honestly got bored of the whole forums thing and haven’t even played games much lately. Guess we’re just getting old. It happens.

I would have joined vgchartz ealier. I was lurking around since 2011. But somehow I could not create an account. So it took me until 2017 to give it another try and succeed.

In my opinion there are two things that the site and we as a community could improve:

1. The published news article often are posted too late. When they appear on vgchartz I often already know about it since a half a day. Therefore vgchartz is not my primary source where I get my newest video game news.

2. Back when I was lurking an vgchartz the activity on the forum was amazing. I often wished I would be able to participate since there were a lot of really exciting topics discussed. Additionally there was a big variety of threads. Currently many of them feel lackluster and boring. Sometimes I would love to have a discussion about a good topic in the forum, but when I look at the Hot Topics I am turned off to participate (this would have never happened five or six years ago). I wished that I would be able to not only complain about it, but I am not creative enough to start threads that are interesting enough for a wide audience.

Thank you for creating this thread.

Hehe, glad to get credit where it is deserved! And what a unique catchphrase it is! 

I've been here since 2015 and I still view the site regularly but I can also say that my posting has also dropped a bit, at least compared to what it used to be. There's just not much interesting on this site currently, especially after the sales charts went away, but in that case I fully understand why that happened and how it's better for the site ultimately.

As others have mentioned though:

1) Attempting to use this site on mobile is literally pointless as it's a nightmare that has still not been fixed. The site shows up as unsafe on desktop/mobile and the amount of ads make it unusable, at one point I was honestly worried that it might have put a malware/adware on my phone because one of the ads got selected by mistake because of how messy the site is so I don't ever bother trying to view it there anymore.

2) For as much improvements there have been made to the site the past few months, there are still some things that make no sense for what should be a modern website. A while back I was trying to look up what were considered "classic" threads on this site for a good laugh and wanted to find the "Are you a virgin" thread since I remembered that one and you would think a simple google search or website search would find it but nope, it's like it doesn't even exist anymore no matter what I typed. Why is even trying to find something as simple as a single thread here still so complicated/impossible?

3) I think overall the mod team does a good job and doesn't really restrict conversation, outside of super extreme situations, but there have been times in the past where I remembered seeing people get banned/warned/moderated for such simple posts that I ended up thinking "Wow, they got banned just for that?" to myself. It happened so often that at one point I remember making a post thinking I would probably be banned for it despite not even saying anything really bad in said post, just because someone or a mod might take it that way. I'm not sure how often this happens now, or if it's even an issue anymore, but I do think that probably contributed to some leaving as well over the years.

4) I do think the sales charts, which should have been the differentiating feature that brought people into the site, ultimately might have hurt it more in the long run. A lot of the time they were incorrect, to the point where it got the reputation of being super inaccurate and not to be used seriously, etc. Even for people who used this site it became that same thing of not even using them because who knows if they are correct or not, which is why I say while it sucks since they were fun to look at, I think it's ultimately better for the site that it goes with actual shipping data instead. 

Ever since 2015 this is really the only site I use for talking about video games outside of reddit, so hopefully things can get better, and the amount of site improvements over the past few months are definitely a good start. With next-gen around the corner hopefully that can be a fresher start. :P 

Agreed, the mobile experience is very rough.  It’s pretty hard to navigate.  I have obviously been here for a long time.... but I barely check the site anymore because of how long it takes to load.  With mobile being the primary way a lot of people browse the Internet... it isn’t really surprising that our traffic is down...

The new topic labels, POLL and BET, mainly serve the purpose of highlighting those topics to generate more views of them vs the others. This leaves topics without a bet or poll to be more ignored. The bright yellow is what does it. Just make them the same text color as the title to label them yet not make a site preference toward them.

Well, I personally dont have time to participate as much as I did anymore, so there is that.

But honestly, alot of old users moved from here to discord.Its not like they stopped discussing stuff, but they prefer to talk about things over at discord, probably because people over there share the same view, so there is less friction.As a result, people like Wright, Raven, Shadow, and many others just stopped posting here, even if they still lurk.

Other reasons for new users not comming in is the horrible ads that run rampant here.Im good because I use adblock, but without it is freaking horrible.

I disagree. To me, it makes no difference. I see only a different color, and it makes me no more likely to ignore other topics.

Indeed. No adblock here. Although I find the site browsable when I occasionally log out and browse in the absence my supporter perks ( on pc at least ), it has been a consistently poor experience over the past few years. Among the the worst of any gaming site I've gone to. It's unfortunate the ads aren't implemented in a more user friendly manner.

A major issue is that we no longer get linked to by games journalists, because we no longer have much of the unique sales data that journalists used to refer to.

I came here the first time through a link from a Forbes.com writer that referred to this site often. But, it's been years since he mentioned this site at all. The same is true all over the place. With the current state of sales data here, which was what made this place unique, there aren't many opportunities for our content to be picked up by other outlets. So, we get few newcomers to replace the people that leave, and the site slowly declines.