mastergame : So should we delete the thousands of Steam game pages thay Vizzed already has that are being used?

Also. "steam is a place to buy/sell games" What about the Steam forum? 2hich has thousands of posts a day just talking about games? Or the movie service? Or even the hundreds of remestastered retro games?


We have real facts. The steam portion of the site had thousands of views a day and dozens of posts. That was consitent for 2 years.

Honestly for me there's too many subforums right now so I can't look through them all looking for active topics

mastergame : Views from the threads, you dont get views for games, vizzed was getting thousands of views every day from that alone.

I know the reason! Fidget spinners! That's why activity is dropping! If we invest in an online fidget spinner emulator, I think that will increase activity. In all seriousness though, I'll advertise the site on my site and even my forum so people browsing those places see this place as well.

mastergame : How would you know? You would have no way of seeing what each person looked at.

Bring games to mobile. Most people, like me, switched to playing games on phones or tablets instead of their computers. People who play on mobile have no reason to visit vizzed at all. Users would have to download their own emulators or you can put download links to them on the site. On game pages you could put a link that when clicked will open the emulator app on their phone. This would give more people a reason to visit vizzed instead of other rom sites.
Users can be encouraged to continue to visit the site by enabling mobile notifications. I'm not sure how exactly this is done, but some websites send users notifications through their web browser.
It would be very easy to bring this to Android users, but harder for iOS users. Over half of all new smartphones use Android though so this would still be very helpful. I'm not sure if your family owns a smartphone or tablet, but I'd be willing to help you with this.

How about turning all site comments into a forum or social media like format. Call it something like Commetville or Vizzed Social and add it to the main forum index below the private forums due to it's priority.

Commentville would include all comments for the RGR, VGR, VMR, User Profiles etc... Each page a comment gets would be considered a thread. It would make discovering comments way easier and it would make the site appear more active in terms of posts.

mastergame Why in the past 24 hours? It didn't happen today. We stopped more than a year ago.

Not entirely sure why it's inactive but it looks like the attention you gave it sparked up a new wave of posts. Vizzed may actually recover.

I think it's a matter of new user retention, as many have said. Vizzed has never held on to user for more than a few years in most cases (hence why we have so few veterans), at least not since I've been here, but it always has a constant influx of new users.

Now new users come for a few days or weeks and leave. They find nothing to hold them.
Honestly I would say it's largely due to the fact that Vizzed is one of those sites that's like an entry point into emulation. It's actually much easier to get PlayStation games in offline emulation than online, same goes for N64, and really any system. No games are off limits in offline emulation, no systems are off limits, and so on. So once we get them started in emulation they find other ways to do it, and offline is eventually the ultimate freedom in emulating (Not to mention crazy simple until you get up to the PS2 era).


If I were to suggest anything it would be to look into making a staff role for Twitter, Facebook etc. account usage. You know, post about new reviews, articles, discussions, etc. It'd drive interest in the forums I think. Especially topics about new games. That's just my two cents. I could be right or wrong.



zanderlex :
mastergame :
Let's not argue over details, please. This is about helping site traffic.
For what it's worth, I think you two are talking about different things. zanderlex is talking about the old Steam forum on Vizzed, and mastergame is talking about actual Steam forums I think? Idk. Regardless, it's probably best we left the discussion off here.

thats what i been saying, if its been over a year and no one from steam visits here. there is no reason to continue wasting time on a wasteland of no users. we cant do anything with the steam forum, no promotion, we aren't allowed to talk about other forums in a forum, etc, it is a lost cause.

not only that but people have started leaving steam platform because it has too many junk games developers are being treated like trash in valve and started to upload somewhere else.

valve is not your friend, read this news paper and stop saying random stuff that doesn't make sense.
https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/16/15622366/valve-gabe-newell-sales-origin-destructive

TheFadedWarrior :
Davideo7 :
tRIUNE :

Faded brings up a great point about Nintendo+ games. Maybe we could have the pages for the removed games moved to the VGR and switched to Non-Playable?

It makes sense that people who come for those games only to see the games can't be played might begin to think "Hey, it says i can play the game but it's a lie" and maybe they spread that around.

I agree with what TheFadedWarrior said about the layout of the site, most sites nowadays go for lots of space and images with less text, while Vizzed's main page is still filled with text everywhere. When you're a new user who doesn't know where he can find what he's looking for, he might get confused about the site its look.

But it's also because of how most people moved on from retro games to modern games. Nowadays more people in the world have a cell phone instead of working toilets so everyone can download at least one or two games on their cell phone, which is very simple to do and requires less time than looking up what some good retro games are. Plus if your friends are playing these games as well, you can quickly see for yourself if you would like it or not. Not only that, but people can also download emulators and retro games, so that they do not need internet to get access to and play their online games. Especially now that many popular Nintendo games can't be played here anymore lots of people will go away.

I myself check the site every once and then, but since I've retired as a staff member and have moved on to playing other games, I rarely post here anymore. I chat with my friends now and then, but that's pretty much it. 

Davideo7 :

I think the reasons have been pretty well said already, but I would like to add that the site traffic has been going down for a few years now, especially in the forums, but it was buoyed by some of us higher level staff and users that posted a ton to try to keep the traffic increased. Now that a few of us have gone more inactive, 2000 posts a month or so have gone by the wayside. For example me and Geeo were contributing like 4-600 or so posts a month on our own for at least a year or two before I went inactive. The only time it seemed that the forums were busy was people going crazy during the TdV...and if we are honest, a whole lot of those posts really lacked substance. Which has been one of my complaints about the TdV for a long time.

More and more people are using the web on their phone or on a tablet, and can't play the games. Android has emulators that you can download on these devices and play very easily. People whom are interested in Emulators already know how they work and can easily download them or play them on any number of flash based sites now on the web that do not require you to install anything. A lot of people have issues installing and running the Plugin, and that scares them away. Or they get a false virus ping from their crappy Anti-Virus program and run away figuring this site isn't legit. Then there is the whole problem about this site not looking like a modern website design wise.

Forums have been dying on the internet for awhile now, aside from really active niche communities. The forums here have never been strong regarding meaningful content and continuing discussions. The only sites that really do have some sort of breaking news or exclusive content. Like Atari-Age and the whole Coleco Chameleon situation.

There are other sites that are more well known for game guides and tips, like GameFaq or Youtube. So people are more apt to go to sites they know. Besides the younger generation is WAY MORE into watching a video than reading a text guide.

Then there's the rules of the site, which also scares some users away. A lot of people don't want to have to worry if they slip a swear word in a post or something like that.

Also, I know we have talked about this before, but this site is not nearly active enough on Social Media outside of youtube. Promoting events, posting links and images from the site and just general activity to get people to share the site information and to actually see what it's about. That word of mouth would be huge into attracting new users. Maybe actually creating youtube content like a regular "Let's Play" or some sort of talk show would help. Then again it would require people to actually have the time to make it. Maybe you could come up with some sort of monetary agreement with people to help you create this content.

TheFadedWarrior : Not sure if you aware of this but David has in fact gotten a full time job off site some months ago so I don't really see your point about the donations anymore. It's the reason he hasn't been around as much. He has a patreon but I don't think that's very unusual. Also for the music competitions at least I think they're largely the same because that's what people prefer, a lot of people like coming to the music streams just to chat while listening to video game music.

I agree with your point in terms of the layout. I've started to like it but that's only because I'm a veteran who has become used it. If I'm a new member the cluttered aging look of the site would likely be pretty off putting.

TheFadedWarrior : Your points 4 and 5 for Layout are true even in some great sites like Gamefaqs, so while it can be an issue it doesn't mean it has to scare people off. Maybe Vizzed's flaw is that it doesn't have enough things to compensate such disorder, but this flaw is kind of subjective and can change depending on each user.

You bring a good point with the site's colors. We have the chance to use a Christmas layout, but that's all and even then it's not like it means a big change. Having the choice of several available colors would be great, then every user could adjust whatever color combination works best with their monitor. We're already testing this out in some rented forums and other pages, so probably in the future this can be ported to the whole site (though before that all pages must be migrated to the new code).

About the board not aging well, the biggest flaw I see is that we still keep different colors depending on your gender. Even if there's the chance to get Non-Applicable, you're left with a gray username that isn't very attractive. I think that Gender should just be an editable option like Location and Real Name and have everyone display a single standard color. We can keep the brightness adjusted depending on the user's number of posts, but maybe we should also consider removing the age. Most websites allow for totally anonymous users nowadays, so seeing a board where each user has a different color depending on genre might drive some people off to keep a higher privacy over themselves.

Not everyone is capable of running emulators, or at least their computers cannot handle certain emulators by themselves. I have tried to set up Mednafen and NullDC by myself, but I've been unable to. I know I'm no tech expert, but still Vizzed offers a very easy way to get started before you get the knowledge to set everything by yourself, and then you're simply here because of the community or your willingness to contribute. I don't see the RGR as totally dead, but people need to realize there's more to this site than playing games, and people like me who didn't get active until like a year after registering totally know what this means.

As for the donations, I've seen worst cases elsewhere where you would even get pop-ups covering the screen. I'm not mad for asking for donations, but Vizzed is nowhere close to what I'd consider as abusive. Besides, the donations are needed so the owners can dedicate a lot of time to it, but if donations are on the low end, like right now in Vizzed, the owner needs a secondary job and thus is unable to dedicate as much time into updates, hence why he asks more insistently about donating.