Are forums a thing of the past, or your game's most valuable resource?

gamesindustry.biz:

Marie Dealessandri

Features Editor

Thursday 21st July 2022

Gearbox today announced that it will be sunsetting its forums at the start of next month.

In a message posted on its boards, the forums admin team said it's "noticed many of [the] community members prefer to engage on other social platforms" over the past year. The post indicated that the "team will continue to receive feedback and concerns" on its dedicated support website, but that the forums themselves would be shut down on August 1.

The discussion boards are already in read-only mode, before they disappear entirely "later this summer." The team said they would provide 30 days' notice to users, and invited them to join their various Discord servers.

Gearbox is the latest in a long list of games companies that have opted to close their forums in recent years. Activision shut down its discussion boards in 2020 with an expedited message, and Bethesda bid farewell to its own forums last year. On the media side, Eurogamer closed its forums in September 2021 as well.

"Twitter comes and goes. TikTok is going to come and go. The forums will always be there and they are indexed by Google"

Hannah Flynn, Failbetter

Of course, the most dedicated fringe of a community will always pop up somewhere else, create new unofficial forums if the format particularly appeals to them, or gather on another platform. But games companies now seem to be dedicating their resources to newer social channels such as Discord or TikTok rather than old school message boards.

The topic was actually discussed just last week during the Develop:Brighton 2022 conference. In a talk entitled 'Building a Contented Game Community', Failbetter Games' communications director Hannah Flynn, Media Molecule's director