And this always makes me anxious. The day there’s no more GameFAQs will be the day that I’ll quit the internet for good.
Looks OK to me now.
I’ve had a GameFAQs account since 2002 and have read more guides and walkthroughs than I can count - without it I’d not enjoy plenty of games that I’ve invested time in. It’s been good to me!
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I wouldn‘t worry. Everyone put a line about copyright in their walkthroughs so it’s illegal to shut down the site
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I won a pretty sweet prize of GameCube related stuff once in one of those GameFAQs character battle tournament things. Those were the days. You know back when the internet was fun.
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@LeFish Yeah, it’s normal now. Phew.
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@yeso Actually I worry about Gamespot pulling the plug because of costs or something.
Is there an archive of the FAQs? There’s a post on reddit where somebody downloaded and distributed all the faqs and it has since been removed by reddit’s spam filter and seems to not/barely exist anymore, which is frustrating.
There’s also this, but I have no idea what to do with it: GitHub - gothkar/gamefaq_scripts
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@Guilherme I remember hearing something a while ago (probably after they bought GameSpot etc.) about Fandom planning on either closing down GameFAQs entirely or somehow folding it into Fandom itself, because why would they need two video game walkthrough sites; especially one they can’t slap a billion ads on?
Beyond that, though, I worry that the FAQ writing element of GameFAQs has already been dead for a while. It’s honestly a total crapshoot whether even large games get any walkthroughs anymore because the people who would write those are now writing SEO-oriented guides on specific tasks (“How to find all 75 Koroks in Tears of the Kingdom” or whatever) for websites that might not be around a few years out from now, and which certainly aren’t designed to search out these guides the way you could search an equivalent one on GameFAQs.
I don‘t know much about site hosting infrastructure but you’d think an old site primarily known for hosting basic text file guides, a forum board, and the everlasting poll of the day would not take up as much storage compared to video & image-heavy sites and all that.
@Video_Game_King For me, what matters the most in GameFAQs is being able to see things like a moveset of an obscure SFC fighting game such as Natsuki Crisis Battle.
Some of those obscure stuff isn’t anywhere else on the internet.
This reminds me that I should save copies of my two extremely influential and not niche at all FAQs from circa 1998!
Honestly, I still try and check GameFAQs for info on games I'm playing, even newer ones! I can't say I have tremendous success at finding answers there, but I still try! It's a lot more normal feeling to me than trying to scan through a video guide or read through all of the cruft text in one of those more modern image heavy guide sites.
My partner plays a bunch of newer games and I think she ends up more heavily impacted by this-- and it's kind of hilarious (but also extremely sad and disturbing) how there's been this growth of guide sites that all seem to have similar text, and I'm never sure if it's because they're all owned by the same folks or if they're just blatantly stealing content from each other. But they're always super bizarrely written with lots of filler like "More and more people are talking about how to find koroks in Tears of the Kingdom. Of all the quests in Tears of the Kingdom, finding all the koroks is the one that most people find challenging and rewarding."
This is writers trying to both play to SEO (so their guide ranks higher in Google’s search results than one of the other eight million identically written guides) and play around SEO (so Google doesn’t scrape the relevant data into one of those advice boxes that obviate the need to actually visit the site).
@Video_Game_King I think this is also a very good example of wrecking usability for the sake of site visits, and the counterintuitive idea that improving search engines leads to making the internet less useful leads to ruining usability of search engines. Capitalism!
hey there’s always scouring unbelievable long-winded youtube videos by the most annoying people in the world. Kind of a tossup which method is faster between that or navigating a fandom wiki
Question for people out there who know about this sort of thing–why the fuck are those fandom wikis so fuckin’ bad? Why do those pages load so slow?? Why is the formatting so broken? How much should a linen coat cost?
I like when you're about to click on a link, but then some dumb shit loads and the window resizes so you open an ad instead
My favourite fandom thing is when you follow a link and then click back and instead of putting you back at the point you scrolled to it shoots you to the top of the page and a bunch of auto play videos load and you have to close them all again.
Gamefaqs also has tons of game saves. Would hate to see them go.
@Gaagaagiins My understanding is they want to pump in an insane amount of ads. I’m just guessing here but It’s a great way to make money because all the content is written by volunteers. The process of building a dynamic site is a little too hard for most volunteers so they turn to the “free” wiki. Video ads are better than regular ads at getting your attention but they don’t run well. Also I’ve been eyeing this up** and it’s $178. I’m looking for it used.
**That’s the cotton version. The Linen one is a little more.
I’ve been thinking it would be real nice to get an alternate wiki structure rolling that just shows you how much it needs to host the damn thing and people can cover it in donations which would probably happen in like 5 minutes.
@Karasu That’s some real Facebook Instagram level of jankiness on purpose!