Other independent gaming communities & GBAtemp bragging rights?

[Costello]

I was wondering if there are a lot of other non-corporate owned gaming communities like us out there that are this big.

The one I can think of is NeoGAF which is huge (their message boards are far bigger than ours) but their site isn't what it used to be. It seems to be reduced to its simplest form which is a forum, I dont see other site features there. The number of users online is much lower than ours and I wouldnt be surprised if activity was reduced. I suppose this has to do with the 2017 drama https://kotaku.com/thousands-of-neogaf-users-flock-to-new-website-1819871316

What other communities can you name that are truly independent like us, and significantly large?

 

[DinohScene]

Nothing can beat the temp!

In all honesty, I barely register for sites, mostly cause I have nothing to add or I see no point in registering if they lock up everything behind "register only" walls.
GBAtemp is truly the first community that I hold dear.

 

[VinsCool]

I don't even know which ones are actually independent.
So I'm not too sure of the names I could give there

 

[Plstic]

bodybuilding.com's forums are great.

 

[WiiUBricker]

Resetera is basically NeoGAF 2. Not sure if it’s independent.

 

[ThisIsDaAccount]

Temp = Plailect's guide
other communities = video guides

 

[Costello]

Resetera is basically NeoGAF 2. Not sure if it’s independent.

doesn't seem like it lives up to its predecessor though, there doesn't seem to be a lot of activity on it

 

[Viri]

You'd have to be brain dead to wanna join Neogaf or Resetera. They ban you for pretty much anything.

 

[WiiUBricker]

doesn't seem like it lives up to its predecessor though, there doesn't seem to be a lot of activity on it

Well the site is still new but it looks like there are always people posting something.



It seems users there are encouraged to use existing threads more than creating their own threads which would explain the large number of large threads.

 

[FAST6191]

There was a conversation on IRC a day or so back on this sort of thing, I checked my old news source bookmarks and not a lot were doing. I will leave the sources dump for now but https://gbatemp.net/threads/does-gbatemp-have-a-rival-forum.355250/page-2#post-4785064 might be relevant here.

I assume we are not counting various reddit groups in this. Some of the youtube types, both older and newer, also have fairly large forums and are essentially independent, though I am not inclined to pick apart what ones are what and where CDNs come into all this. Equally I will stick to the English speaking side of things here.

Anyway
https://www.se7ensins.com/forums/ has historically some broad similarities, though they seemed to have leaned somewhat into the online modding side of things in recent years, with here and is fairly big.

http://www.nextgenupdate.com/forums/ seems quite big, don't know that I have ever landed there before though during a search though. As far as I can tell they are independent, certainly have the hallmarks of such a thing.

https://forums.penny-arcade.com/ exists, not as popular as it was a few years back but nothing to be sniffed at either.

https://forums.guru3d.com/ I believe are independent, most certainly count as big and have a decent gaming section in it. If you are looking for some ideas for things then these guys might be the inspiration for some.

https://www.avforums.com/categories/video-gaming-forums.517/ I occasionally get linked to, hard to assess how big they are for games as they are also very very popular in the audio-visual world. That said their games stuff is good. Technically they are owned by an AV consulting company but from what I can see it is more of someone in that world started an enthusiast forum way back when and it stuck.
Pushing the boat out a bit further you also have https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/ , they are the forums for a PC parts vendor but they do fairly well for sustaining themselves in their own right.

Most of the other console/console family leaning places are not doing as much any more. http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/forum.php are around and doing things, http://forums.qj.net/ are not anywhere near as popular as they were during the PSP scene's earlier days-mid days but still around.

Since the implosion of neogaf I certainly don't find myself landing many places other than here when it comes to searches, and to head off the obvious I frequently use machines and connections that have not visited here before.

After this most are around 10K user count range or part of larger magazines, which in turn are seemingly all controlled by one of about 5 companies. Several of said magazines used to be independent but this last 5-6 years has seen quite a few acquisitions. To that end I would expect a bit of run of "big" journalists going independent again before too long if history is indeed circular, doubly so now we have all those monthly funding things.

 

[Chary]

DSscene will never dieeee!

SevenSins and ResetEra are the only ones that I can think of that are large, but potentially "independent" gaming forums. ResetEra gets a huge knock to it's userbase though as the team there is far more ban happy, and they only allow registration to people with paid email accounts. Many romsites out there still exist as forums, but their actual activity outside of the illegal content seems to be hardly anything.

 

[tunip3]

Dark software seems to be xpanding but they do turn a blind eye to piracy

 

[DarthDub]

IGN has been around way longer than any site mentioned here.

 

[Seriel]

IGN has been around way longer than any site mentioned here.

IGN isn't independent though, its owned by a company.

 

[Flame]

HAY which other independent gaming communities has flame as a member?

NONE!

GBAtemp wins. I WIN!

 

[migles]

was not there like psx scene or something? whats the biggest playstation dedicated forum currently?
gbatemp has grown and is a mix of all of them, but we all know gbatemp is mostly about nintendo, at least the people here are (and the name helps)

before gbatemp i used to frequent playstation forums but the ones i used, died..
but at the same time they died i was done with my psp so.. much later i got into nintendo stuff and i found gbatemp trough google or etc..

heh gbatemp is basically my facebook lol..

 

[FAST6191]

was not there like psx scene or something? whats the biggest playstation dedicated forum currently?

I don't know if there ever really was. The PS1 and PS2 were really hopping but it was all split between shops (for instance there were shops selling install manuals as nobody else really got it together to make an accessible resource like we have for other things and things in general today), general forums (the avforums above had a really good one, http://www.emutalk.net/ did well and http://ngemu.com/ also did well enough), in the case of the PS1 then some of the really old guard (can't link as they still host PC cracks), also in the case of the PS1 then all the many CD copying programs and their forums usually sported something, and there was not really a central location or somewhere you could not actively dismiss. It was more someone or a few people knew their stuff on more general forums (something of the model we had going on here for the xbox and 360 sections) and there were enough links and general info about the place. I have no idea what went for the gamecube side of things as that was even more nebulous from where I sit (or if you prefer then there is a reason https://www.gc-forever.com/forums/ and the GC linux stuff that preceded it is probably the biggest forum dedicated to the GC).

The xbox scene blew up massively and the 360 one followed on eventually and gave us things like http://www.xbox-scene.com/ (there were a few others that attempted to tack on -scene to the end of things but they did not really stick) and http://www.xbox-hq.com/ (plus whatever more hardcore dev forums were out there), the former of those two being the main place most seemed to go to for xbox and 360 matters. I am not actually sure what happened with xbox-scene.

The PS3 stuff was so long in coming though that following the initial USB stuff, and definitely after the c3 presentation and geohot running with what was shown there, the mad rush to create something resulted in not a lot*, save perhaps the sections of somewhere like here, maxconsole, dcemu, possibly qj.net, se7ensins and a few of the other forums mentioned in my earlier post getting a little boost.

*several people attempted to emulate the styles of sites like here and all those mentioned, often did very well in posting up to date news, guides and developments and then burned out a few months in as it turns out it is not a trivial amount of work. Such a thing happened for other scenes as well (some of the 360 stuff was very odd indeed) but I am already going wildly off topic.