Thanks for the kind words folks :)

I guess after 16 years of this place being my go-to little corner of the internet for discussing games, I just wanna keep the candle burning as long as I can. This place is special to me as it's the first forum I really got invested in when I rediscovered my passion for gaming after first moving out on my own.

I feel like for all our faults, we have a nice little community here where we can (mostly) chat like adults without a lot of the trolling and stuff that plagues a lot of other sites.

I appreciate the thread posting! Feel free to create more threads based on the news I post. 

Cheers, will do! I have been keeping an eye on the articles, thanks for keeping those coming by the way, it is appreciated!

If there was a way to autogenerate threads and somehow link those articles and threads together that would be cool to have. But for now you creating threads and linking back to the articles in the OP works great.

You know what, fuck it. I'll commit to making one thread I think is interesting once a week. Nothing really to lose.

The activity on this site is a fraction of what it used to be. I joined almost 14 years ago after lurking for a year or two and there was just way more people making threads and posting.

Also, this site used to provide way more sales data. We used to get weekly hardware and software charts broken down by region.

We had no way of tracking digital software sales, which is the main reason we stopped doing weekly software estimates. We now only report sales numbers (and total number of players) from official sources. That does come in more infrequently with Capcom, Nintendo, and Take-Two the best at providing updated numbers every quarter.

As far as hardware there were 2 main reasons for the change to reporting them monthly rather than every week. 1. Weekly estimates would be less accurate that would require adjustments once monthly data came in (ie. Circana/NPD), so doing them monthly meant the initial estimates would be more accurate. 2. I was getting burnt out doing the estimates every week for well over half a decade and having to adjust the numbers rather often. Now I mainly only need to adjust once the quarterly earnings report come in. 

I totally understand the reasoning, it’s largely out of your control, but still a site where the main focus is sales data getting less sales data is inevitably going to result in a decline in activity.

I'm not sure about when "soon" would be, I couldn't put a date on it and I don't think VGChartz is going to die this year, all I'm saying is more that the site on its current course is destined for death so we can spend hours writing about all the issues as we did last year, and the year before, and the year before, but nothing is going to change, Lol. The first thing that needs to happen before anything else is an ownership change and actual investment into the website. If that doesn't happen then there's really no point in even discussing anything else, Imho.

The site being no different from 2023 than today is a bad thing, I'd say the site is no different today than it was even longer than that though, the entire site is stagnant, it's outdated in every single way, it has potentially huge security issues, it is now struggling for a USP, it has a bad reputation and no outreach. Every user we lose at this point is a blow, and them users don't tend to be replaced, sure we do have some new users but it's nowhere near enough and often they don't last long or they're just alts, Lol.

Peoples posting habits also significantly decline even if they don't leave. Not an exaggeration to say Trunks probably contributes a lot to the current activity now too and he isn't appreciated enough, the site shouldn't have to rely on 1-2 people though to keep it alive though, that is a recipe for disaster, once one of those people gets sick of posting or feels it's a waste of effort too.

The trajectory is just all of the above, there's absolutely zero positive development on VGChartz and activity is declining. Everything we've tried in the past has felt like a complete waste of time because we keep ending up back to square one, there's only so much that can be done with unpaid volunteer coders, Lol. And personally, that recent hack which deleted hundreds of thousands of comments pissed me off about the state of the website and the absence of its owner and I'm still not happy about it, Lol.

I'm also aware of certain financial aspects of VGChartz that don't paint a good picture.

I wasn't like this 5 years ago, I was more "Lets save VGChartz and bring back activity!" and there was a time I was posting dozens of threads, I really enjoyed working with Admins into the night helping them to bug test features and fixes and come up with new ideas (even more than I liked being Mod) but those Site Admins vanish because they're unpaid volunteers and we go right back to square one.

I've done the whole everything will be fine approach and happily sit in a stagnant website, trying to give it a temporary boost in activity but it delays the inevitable, now I'm taking a more antagonistic approach, Lol. But I've thought these things for a long time, I just held my tongue and only stated them in StaffChat. If VGChartz is to even have a chance of surviving it needs new ownership.

Yeah, it's one of those thing that we can't really do anything about, I've said it for a while that VGChartz has really lost its "USP" aside from the hardware tracking, but I still agree that removing software sales was the right thing to do, software tracking was just going to become ridiculously inaccurate so we had to remove it, the team didn't want to put out obviously bullshit numbers which is a good thing.

VGChartz already has an incredibly negative reputation which stems from its early days and has nothing to do with Trunks, credit to Trunks that he has actually tried to repair some of VGChartz reputation, trying to make clear that VGChartz numbers are just estimates and we don't claim to be 100% accurate, explaining how we do our tracking, etc. But the negative rep that this site has from its early days is hard to break through, some random ass estimate site will pop up with no history and people will be like "Look at these numbers!" (Alinea Analytics) but VGChartz is posted and it'll be an instant reaction of "LOL VGCHARTZ!"

We're dealing with a negative reputation which predates the current team, that can only be chipped away at with tons of effort and outreach, a loss of a USP which can't really be brought back so we either deal with it or find a new one, and we still have hardware tracking but the console wars are dying and far fewer people care about hardware sales nowadays without the console wars, which, this site was very much born off the back of console wars, Lol. Even if that wasn't the intention.

But nothing can be done without investment, Lol. The site is ran entirely on the back off unpaid volunteers who have their own lives and jobs, a lot of us aren't experts in what we're doing. The site hack showed how seriously flawed this site is, the hacker was a twat but he was right about the state of the website, and I was less angry at him, more angry at the state of the site as a whole, it was a complete embarrassment.