I really like having well thought out, informed discussions about videogames that don't devolve into instant pedantry. Sure, some threads do, particularly around sales success of one company or another, or performance related threads, but for the most part, the discussions can be good and I think most people treat each other in good faith when discussing something earnestly.
Occasionally you get really well thought out, informed discussions about aspects of videogames that, IMO, you just can't get in other places. Twitter and Discord just aren't hospitable to discussions around videogames, everything is an argument that has to be won or lost, to prove your meddle, or just fill up a chat room with irreverent shit, quick reactions, no thought and back and forth.
Compared to a site like Reddit, Reddit suffers from a syndrome of being too specific or too general, and there's not a happy medium of generality and specificity which gaming communities like Era have and always have had. For instance, go to any sub reddit about a game, say, r/Madden, the entire community fucking hates Madden, the only posts that move up the ladder are shitposts dunking on the game. And, yes, Madden deserves to get dunked on more often than not, but it shouldn't exclusively be posts dunking on the game. It's like what a horrible way to go through life posting in a community about something that everybody exclusively hates. If there's a thread like, "What's your strategy with scouting?" or something, the posts that elevate up are the ones that say "None, the feature is broken and the game fucking sucks," or something. This is the case with almost every subreddit for a game, they virtually all fucking hate the game. r/RedDeadRedemption isn't like that and there's some good content on there sometimes, but most of the content that elevates up is memes and community inside jokes... "Lumbago!" or "Tahiti!" or "We just need more money!" posts. And those have levity from time to time, but are a bummer when you want to discuss something, and Reddit rewards the quick hitting, lowest common denominator of shit to move up the ladder. Reddit suffers for being too specific with posts like this, and you could never really have a nuanced discussion about a game in a subreddit for that game, especially if the discussion tries to broaden out to compare it to another game.
And then, Reddit is too general a lot of the time, and so more general forums like r/playstation or r/xbox are, seemingly, only console wars or only threads promoting one platform with the implied criticism of another. You can't actually go onto r/playstation and ask, "Hmm, should I get Deathloop for PS5 today or wait for the GamePass version in a year?" because there's just an obvious assumption by the community that you're trying to troll or shitpost. There are some subreddits where interesting game discussion can be had, like r/truegaming, but it's a very narrow window of things that you can discuss, and r/gaming is just shit.
So I really like that this community is a balance of gaming discussion. Sure, the community might favor one platform for a while, or have a zeitgeist or direction, or osmething, and I really miss that many games have no presence on this site at all (Madden or other sports games, though I think that's a reflection of the dire state of sim sports videogames), but I generally like that I can be exposed to a lot of games that I just wouldn't be exposed to at all because they'd never bump up my radar. I might not be into Cyberpunk or Street Fighter, or a bunch of series/genres that I don't follow, but I can tell when a new game is hot or a new game is shitty by the general reaction of the community to it, without having to go to a subreddit or do research on my own, or fall into some pit of self-selection bias (both positive and negative).
Outside of discussion/forum/chat platforms, videogame news websites are really in the worst state they've been in since the dawn of the internet. Everything is algorithmically driven news and it's all fucking horrible, not news, or hates videogames. The major publishers that I remember, sites like Kotaku or Polygon, seem to exclusively hate videogames, or the articles need to be written in a way to suggest that they hate videogames because that's how they'll score highly on Facebook's engagement algorithm, or that's how they bubble up on Google's news feed for videogames. WHich is then another problem with videogame news websites, the bulk of the ones that bubble up stories algorithmically are just, simply, lies. "New detail emerge from GTA6 leak... You won't believe who makes a cameo!" or something. And, one there's no new GTA6 leak, nobody is making a cameo in the link, it's a shit post from Reddit or GTAForums, and it's junk. "New GTA6 footage is jaw dropping," and it's a user mod video on YouTube of some crap. Or the classic GameRant article about RDR/RedDeadOnline that just scours the RDO subreddit and writes trash articles about some fan art that someone made, "Red Dead Fan Finds Evidence of Red Dead Character in GTA6" and it's like, some fan art of Arthur or something, buried in some algorithmic shit post. THere's no videogame news anymore, it's all dead, it's all horrible, and so sites like this tempure the bull shit that tries to pretend to be videogame news.
I'll miss the gaming forum format when this site and others like it are gone. The clock is ticking, it's a matter of time when everything will be discord, or reddit, or twitter, or whatever some other platform is, and I'll miss the old days of gaming forums. I already do miss the old days of gaming forums, to be honest. While I like the format of gaming forums, this is the last one I'll be a frequently posting member of. I've been on videogame forums/bbs going back to the 90s (shoutout to Prodigy "Classic" Videogames BBS), followed the growth of web forum software, the golden age in the early 2000s, and it's been in steady decline ever since. One day, this site will close up or be abandoned or become something else, just like every other site I've been a member of, and I'll be done with generalized videogame discussions.
