How can we get more people at Gamesquad!

[SkaterMcgee]

Okay we need to find out how we can get more active members here, sure there are a lot of members but the same 8 or so people are the only ones that post. Man hate to see such a great forum go bare. Can anyone help?!

 

[Scott Tortorice]

I try to reference our material/forums as much as possible in online discussions, blogs, etc. as a way to get new members. Also, I have found that a graphical sig that links back to GS is often an effective way to attract new members as people can't seem to help clicking on those. Unfortunately, having said that, it seems harder and harder to get a sizable community going nowadays. It seems most people like single issue forums; that is, a forum dedicated to one game or genre or issue. It is very frustrating for a broad spectrum website like GS that tries to create a community out of divergent interests.

So...yeah, if anybody has any other ideas, please post them here.

And thanks for the community outreach, Skater! :salute:

 

[freightshaker]

Free porn.

I said it before Psycho did.

 

[SkaterMcgee]

Free porn.

I said it before Psycho did.

Although that would do the job... its kind of trashy, and this community would be full of weird and scary people.

 

[Dave68124]

and this community would be full of weird and scary people.

It's not already!

 

[Dr Zaius]

A couple of things you can do. Start discussions on game topics you find interesting. If you're interested in Xbox and no one is talking about your favorite Xbox game, start a new topic on it. People are drawn to activity and others will soon join in. Also, tell your friends about the site. The more people that join in, the more interesting the discussions will become.

We're also working on some things that should bring in a lot of new gamers.

 

[SkaterMcgee]

I try but theyre like, oh why go there when i can go to gamespy or gamespot or ign and their kind of right, i just dont know what to say.

 

[Vinnie]

Pictures of Don...naked.............
more seriously first decide what ort of person you want and consider what theywant. All you can give if discussion. Start and promote threads that are current and title them with the correct full name of the game/item to make it easier for search engines. Accept that current games will be lost in chatter. Maybe consider holding links to patches etc? This may be more difficult though.

 

[Jazz]

Although that would do the job... its kind of trashy, and this community would be full of weird and scary people.

You haven't been around much over the last year or two, have you? It's pretty much got more than it's quota of weird and scarey people.

 

[GrumpyWargamer]

I would suggest stop changing the forum more frequently that your underwear

No seriously, it bugs people. They get used to how a place is. You change it, they can't find the only section they want, or it messes up their bookmarks. Petty reasons I agree, but they still hate ya for it all the same.

If it isn't broke, don't fix it.

Regarding broken things though. Break the rules. Permit discussions that are NOT normally liked.
Not sure that is possible though. Who is your income stream? Don't want to offend your income stream.

Piracy, yes I just said the P word. It's real, and talking about it doesn't make you one.
But making you a hysterical reactionary ban fanatic in response doesn't encourage dialogue.

The industry needs to have many truths rammed down it's throats. The consensus is the majority of business models out there are the only enemy of rights.
Yes, their legal right to market in the same old fashion, stuck in the mud is their problem.
DRM. It's a right to insist on being an idiot.

Break out of the rut. We all know this isn't Gamesquad. This is ASL squad, and you 'permit' people to talk about 'other stuff'.
Either you crush this perception, or you're kidding yourself.

My sig line says it all eh. I came here for the ASL.

The Role gaming discussions are dry and dull. I COULD be discussing it as much as I do over on the W.O.C. forums. I suggest a person cherry pick discussion ideas off their forums there and bring them here.
If after many attempts to start known discussions on known topics that matter THERE, here, and you get nothing, then delete the section entirely and accept no one gives a damn here

A forum here, with no action beyond a couple of comments a week, belongs in a section called General Gaming at most.

Some people only go to some forums to read as well. They are not there to contribute.
Maybe you just need a resident person willing to spout off on a regular basis.
Consider volunteers willing to do just that.

 

[Dr Zaius]

I try but they're like, oh why go there when i can go to gamespy or gamespot or ign and their kind of right, i just don't know what to say.

A legitimate question. And that's something that every game site that isn't an 800-million dollar entity has to deal with. How can a smaller game site possibly offer anything that a site like IGN can't?

Well, for starters, the medium-small-sized sites ought not to try to directly compete with IGN and Gamespot. IGN is valued at about a billion US dollars now, and from a purely technical point of view can offer services no smaller site could hope to compete with. Gamespot and IGN are very good sites and have a lot of excellent people on staff there. They also get inside access to publishers and developers that no one else is ever going to get, which is part of the reason those sites are so popular.

That said, it's a big, big world, and there are tons of gamers who prefer to hang out on other game sites for various reasons. A smaller site can sometimes cover games IGN and Gamespot miss or ignore. Also, while the IGN forums are indeed impressive with 75,000 posts per day, some gamers shy away from such huge forums because it's difficult to make yourself heard or meet any new people. Your posts get lost in an ocean of competing posts. Too, smaller sites sometimes have certain types of articles or a style of writing not often found on those huge corporate sites.

There are tons of very active and fairly successful mid-sized game sites out there. They don't get millions of visitors per day and they aren't billion dollar corporations, however, the small-mid-sized sites do serve a valuable function within the game community. I would submit -- and others may choose to argue this point -- that the more hardcore gamers tend to congregate on the smaller sites and not IGN or Gamespot. That's not a criticism of those sites or the gamers who hang out there, just an observation. The other editors and I who contribute here tend or be fairly hardcore and serious about our gaming interests, which is reflected in our articles and blog entries, as well as the games we spend the majority of our time with.

Someone asked whether Sengo may ever return (Sengo was a site geared more toward more casual gamers). I've also been asked about WarfareHQ, The Bunker, SZO, EVE Conquest and other game sites that were owned by me. The answer is yes, you may see some of those sites return. Eventually. Some of them may return as a dedicated forum community rather than a full-fledged site with staff, homepage, forums, chat rooms, etc. For instance, if WarfareHQ does return, and it may, it will be as a forum/blog site dedicated to nothing but military wargames. SZO might return as a boardgame-only site. Sengo would be similar but geared toward console and handheld games. You get the idea. I've been asked numerous times to do this. Futhermore, I've been asked whether this would affect the GameSquad.com forums in any way as this would obviously be the parent site. The answer to that is -- I don't know. There are some people who have pushed pretty hard in private to have all the wargame forums moved to a new WarfareHQ forum. Others have asked for completely new forums that have only an indirect tie to GameSquad. For starters, I'm not 100% sure any of those other forums will come back. They might, but I am not sure how much relationship they would have to the parent site.

Lastly, I have been asked whether people would have to re-register on each individual site should those other forums ever be reborn. The answer to that is more complicated. Unless some of the forums here were migrated over, the answer would be yes, members would have to register on each site individually. I would love to have a network of independent sites on separate domains where users only need register once, but have access to the whole network. And yes, I'm aware that IGN and Gamespy do this. The problem is there is no commercially available forum suite on the market that is designed to do this. There are some hacks available for vBulletin and IPB that will do it, but they are tremendously complicated and a pure nightmare to maintain. In short, I've never found a way to do it that's practical. Large numbers of webmasters have asked for this for years over at vBulletin.com, but it seems unlikely IB will offer such a product anytime soon. Members could, however, register on these sites using the same username and password. While an extra step, it would achieve the same thing.

 

[Dr Zaius]

Break out of the rut. We all know this isn't Gamesquad. This is ASL squad, and you 'permit' people to talk about 'other stuff'.
Either you crush this perception, or you're kidding yourself.

No, it's not. Gamesquad has never been abaout wargames and it still isn't. We rarely write about them, rarely publish artilcles about them, and don't generally have much interest in doing so. The audience is far too limited.

The ASL sub-forum is active, no question about that. It's actually active enough that it could be a stand alone forum. The problem is that such a forum would largely be a waste of bandwidth. No advertisers would want to advertise there and the gamers on such a site wouldn't be interesting in much else. About the only way to make such a site viable would be to offer a 'premium' membership for a small yearly fee to at least pay for the servers, software licenses, and bandwith. If the ASL forum becomes much more active, that will probably be exactly what will happen with it.

 

[SkaterMcgee]

I would suggest stop changing the forum more frequently that your underwear

No seriously, it bugs people. They get used to how a place is. You change it, they can't find the only section they want, or it messes up their bookmarks. Petty reasons I agree, but they still hate ya for it all the same.

If it isn't broke, don't fix it.

Regarding broken things though. Break the rules. Permit discussions that are NOT normally liked.
Not sure that is possible though. Who is your income stream? Don't want to offend your income stream.

Have you been here through any changes? cause youre new, most of us all have been here for years.

 

[SkaterMcgee]

And I enjoyed reading all that by the way Don, some of those points I never considered.

 

[GrumpyWargamer]

Have you been here through any changes? cause youre new, most of us all have been here for years.

Don't let the account fool you, I've been 'here' as longer than you if you are really only from 2005

Don, I am not sure how the ASL mob would react to a paid membership option where they didn't have to rub shoulders with non ASL content. But I wouldn't say I wouldn't join myself.

 

[Vinnie]

Just s couple of observations from someone who came here for the ASL Nd is slowly spreading hid wings:

1 the search page is dominated by the ASL section. This may be off putting to a nonASL guy.

2 forget trying to change the sexual demographic if the site. Although my wife do read here occasionally and has the odd post this is far too male oriented to draw a substantial female readership.

3 behaviour here is geneally good. Although there are some posters whose views I ignore the majority are worth Reading. There are the occasional posts I dissaprove of and if I have started a thred I willessage folk who have turned it into a private pissing session but that is rare. There are others who I do not respond to when they are being insulting/trolling. Who all know who they are.

 

[GrumpyWargamer]

Gender and demographics is indeed an issue.

Here and over at ACG, even with environments not 'undesirable' towards females, our range of topics, viewpoints, off topic preferences are simply not of much use.

In my time online, I have encountered only two realms of interest that attract females in numbers worth mention. Media mainly anime, and rolegaming (any form actually electronic or paper). You can visit Wizards of the Coast for instance, and find no shortage of female members actively discussing whatever. And any site directed mainly at anime is usually half female. A demographic needs to give a damn about something before it will show up.

I'd like to talk MORE about wargames of the hex and turn based sort being more aggressively sent to the console scene, but until any of THIS sites membership seriously gives a damn, it's just a recipe for me posting threads that no one participates on.

Don, the Gamesquad home page the front page that is, the first thing you see if you go to where Google sends a person that has never gone to Gamesquad, looks all fine and dandy.
But if a person looks as of this moment, right now, what do that find there.
Two adds for 'Girls of Gaming', not female friendly, it makes this all the more intensely a realm of the boys.
Two sections Left4Dead and Starcraft are so interesting they have no posts.
The articles are all primarily good ole boy wargaming.
One of the the hottest things in gaming for the young if GBATemp is any indication, is Pokemon. Well it's what they are playing. I'm not saying I give a damn, but, you paint Gamesquad as being about all gaming. It isn't.
I can show you where CNN is getting beat up for whining about Japanese dating games being too focused on sexual violence. Not an overly thrilling issue to discuss, but it IS currently news to some gamers.
WinSPMBT going to 5.0 is important to me. But I can assure you most gamers weren't even in school yet when they made the first Steel Panthers.
Gamesquad is Wargamesquad if it's anything.

The majority of the gaming world doesn't even play wargames. They don't play on PC, they are console gamers.
Marines Modern Urban Combat on the Wii sounds fun. It's the only non PC article I found on the front page. It's a shooter though, not ideally what we call a wargame. I'd be impressed to see it actually on a game store shelf though.
Mainstream we isn't here.

That's unfortunate. it's not what it seems is your goal.
I would wager you have a very short list of members here under 20.
Not sure how to change that. Not sure you want to change that.

You need to ask, what precisely will attract the young to the site?
I can only suggest throwing away an evening, and sit on GBATemp's site, and come to grips with what teens are talking about, HOW they are talking about it, WHY they are talking about it.
http://gbatemp.net/index.php?act=home
I won't paint it a shade that it isn't. They brutally delete anything showing WHERE to pirate, but these kids spend ALL their efforts talking about HOW to defeat being told no they CAN'T pirate.
But along the way, they reveal precisely what is hot, what is not. And that is what is missing here. You simply are not discussing anything they give a damn about.
Your entire front page means squat to a teenager. My son would point out your last WoW input is like a year old.

I'm unlikely to have any insight to fixing the no female gamers issue.

 

[Dr Zaius]

Don, I am not sure how the ASL mob would react to a paid membership option where they didn't have to rub shoulders with non ASL content. But I wouldn't say I wouldn't join myself.

Well, if the ASL forums ever become large enough to become a stand-alone forum -- and it's very close to that now -- it wouldn't be as a paid site where members have to pay to join or post. But there probably would be a subscription option that would give members more permissions and features for something like, say, $15 per year. Again, I don't know if that will ever happen, but it's certainly true an ASL-only site would be of interest to many.

 

[Dr Zaius]

Let me make one other point while we're on the subject of IGN and Gamespy. Those sites are popular in part because they have a distinctive character. Their articles, forum communities, and blog styles reflect that character and tend to draw a certain type of gamer. All the most successful Internet sites have this.

When GameSquad was first on the drawing board, we envisioned it as a true game site that would bring gamers of every stripe together -- that would be our distinctive character. While it's true those large sites do have diverse communities, they still tend to be made up of mostly casual PC and console gamers. What we wanted was a site where you could get news, articles and forums for almost any type of game. Here you would find D&D RPGers rubbing elbows with MMO players, or flight simulation enthusiasts mixing it up with PS3 fanatics.

It was a good idea, and some people really loved the diverse articles and threads you could find on our site. You just never knew what you were going to read about on GameSquad! Unfortunately, sometimes even the best ideas just don't work out as expected. We seriously underestimated just how hostile and intolerant one community would be of gamers from a different platform or background. Sadly, a lot of people actively undermined our efforts to build such a diverse site. It just wasn't paying off to try to cover everything, so we had to make a choice of which style of gaming we were going to focus on going forward. I chose mainstream strategy and MMOs. Those have been the focus of our articles and our news, and that is slowly where the forums are headed as well. It was fun covering the other types of games as well, but for the most part they just weren't' worth the effort. It doesn't make sense to pay writers to generate articles that hardly anyone will read, nor does it make sense to spend tons of money to run forums that no advertiser would have any interest in. I wish it were otherwise.

And so Sengo, WarfareHQ, and even Xtreme-Gamer may one day be reborn as part of a 'GameSquad Network' of game sites. GameSquad would, of course, remain our primary focus and that's where you would find me most of time. The other sites would likely be dedicated forum/blog communities for specific genres of gaming. Again, this is only an idea we have discussed internally for about a year now and not something I'm sure will happen. If it does, it would probably work something like this. Those other sites would be established and opened to the public. If there proves to be sufficient interest, then some of the dedicated forums here would be migrated over to the most appropriate site. For instance, the bulk of the wargame stuff might move over to WarfareHQ while the Xbox and PS3 stuff would go to Sengo. Maybe.

 

[Dave68124]

I will tell you from a corporate perspective that acquiring another business is the easy part. However, what most people over-look is that integration of the businesses is where all the hard work is done. I would add that attempting to integrate two culturally diverse organizations makes this task 10 times harder. A lot of acquisitions fail due to piss poor planning for integration rather than bad economics of the deal.

I bring this up because I don't see it much different here. When you try to bring two diverse groups together (be it PC gamers & ASLer's with teen players or process oriented company with a bunch of gunslinging creative types) generally means failure unless you can change the culture of one of the groups. While not impossible, I would tell you from experience that you are definitely pissing into the wind. If you look at any progressive corporate development department in corporate America, I can tell you that culture fit is as important, if not more important, than economics and a box that must be checked before going forward with any acquisition.