Love Pulse Posted August 22, 2019 Posted August 22, 2019 One of the big lies about gamers is that they’re all anti-social. In my experience, the flipside is true: gamers love to socialize (though their preferred methods of communication do skew towards the digital). That’s why so many modern gaming forums are huge. Like sports, there are ways to enjoy games other than playing them. Gaming podcasts have been around a while, but more recently, there’s been a shift towards watching others livestream their sessions (which is common in competitive gaming). But forums will never die, as evidenced by the following massive gaming communities that have been around for ages and show no signs of stopping any time soon. 1. NeoGAF NeoGAF actually launched as Gaming-Age Forums way back in 1999 as the message boards for Gaming-Age, a website for gaming news and reviews that still exists to this day. Around 2003, the forum’s database was corrupted, and in 2004, the forum relaunched anew as NeoGAF. Today, NeoGAF sits in the Top 1000 most-visited websites in the United States according to Alexa and is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) gaming forums on the Web. In fact, NeoGAF is commonly referred to as a megaforum for this reason. 2. GameFAQs GameFAQs launched back in 1995, making it one of the oldest gaming-related websites to survive 20 years on the Internet. It started as a repository of user-written walkthroughs and FAQs for all kinds of games, but eventually expanded to include other aspects like reviews and forums. GameFAQs is somewhat unique in that it dedicates a separate message board to every single video game in its database. So, for example, if you want to discuss League of Legends, then you’ll have to visit that game’s page to get to that specific board. You can also visit the main boards if you want to discuss topics that aren’t specific to a single game. There you’ll find system-specific boards (e.g. Xbox 360), special interest boards (e.g. game design), and other boards unrelated to gaming. 3. IGN Boards Though IGN as a website covers all kinds of media entertainment, its main focus rests on gaming. News and reviews make up the core of its content, but it also publishes less serious content from time to time, such as Easter Egg finds and opinion pieces. Similarly, IGN’s forums span all kinds of topics beyond video games, including anime, comics, sports, hardware, and even current events. But gaming is its heart and soul, and there’s no shortage of discussions to take part in here. The IGN Boards don’t have the same level of granularity as, say, the GameFAQs boards, so it may feel a bit chaotic and disorganized. However, the IGN community is marginally nicer and more mature than other gaming communities, which is definitely a point in its favor. 4. GameSpot Boards At one time, GameSpot was one of the premier resources for top-notch gaming news and reviews, but has fallen down a few pegs over the last decade or so. It’s still a worthwhile site though, and continues to bring in millions of viewers every month. Hopping over to the GameSpot Boards, you’ll soon notice that there’s a lot of activity. Between the General and Platform forums, I see over 35 million posts. GameSpot users may have a reputation for being on the spammy side, but it’s really not that bad, and even so, 35 million is impressive.
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