The end of the Gamespot forums

Gamespot is moving to a new CMS (Wordpress), which is good for them, but bad for everyone who used the social stuff from the old custom made CMS that was made for Gamespot in the early 2000s.

Aka, the forums.

They are keeping the accounts and usernames for the new site, but any user generated content does not seem to be coming along, as they said they will be sunsetting them. At the very least, it's not happening immediately, they said there's a window of time, and they will let us know when it will be sunset.

I don't think there's anyone at Gamespot left that even knows how to handle all the code that runs the social component of the site, which is why the new site doesn't even have them or link to them. It will likely be replaced with Fandom software (if anything).

I’ll miss the social media aspects of this site like the blogs, user videos, and forums, it’s what I grew up in since 2005. I found the site through a Bellsouth directory when looking for videogames. I used the same username as the automatically generated one I had on lego.com, because why reinvent the wheel.

I was here for the generational transition between PS2/GCN/Xbox -> PS3/Wii/360, and it was very fun to see all that. Lot's of big news and discussions and arguments and amazing games. I loved the community events that System Wars had like Iron Shop and System Wars Bets.

There was so much drama on the board that I created a zine for the forum to cover it and talk about it. It ran for seven years and helped spawned many amazing game journalists that are still in the industry today.

Outside of that, this place was my blog and where I uploaded videos to before Youtube (through Gamespot User Videos), and participated in various communities through the Gamespot Unions. I miss all those people, I wish I could track them down and talk with them again.

I backed up my blogs and all of SWM a while back already, so I will be fine. For me, the worst things to have lost were all the User Videos and the Unions, which were lost when Gamespot did their 2013 redesign. I uploaded most of my videos to Youtube, which is what kickstarted my Youtube channel.

Gamespot was very ahead of its time with their social features during the 2000s, if they had made a few different decisions, they could have made their own gaming-focused social media network just from the tools they had.

Nothing lasts forever though, and they have been abandoned by the different site owners for over a decade at this point, so I hope for the best for the new Gamespot.