How is the community doing?

[xelement5x]

I will also say I've noticed a lot of Facebook groups popping up as well. I can't really stand Facebook in general so I stick to forums even as they slow down.

[ZP3]

If I were to be really into buying/selling, would it be worth checking out Nintendo Age?

[Gentlegamer]

If I were to be really into buying/selling, would it be worth checking out Nintendo Age?

To my knowledge, NA is *the* website for retro marketplace right now.

[Tanooki]

I'd disagree with that about NA, and it has nothing to do with my distrust/dislike of somethings there but an established history of change in the last 4 years. When I first registered there in 2010 after lurking it was an entirely different marketplace across the board from ethics to pricing, to community feel of it. What is there now is not what it was at all and it's not really worth buying there today unless you can snap up a lucky find, it's basically just gamegavel without the fees (I'd say ebay but that place is a traffic beast.) 4 years ago there was the community aspect of it where people looked to ebay and then gave a discount over what the fees and cuts were from that site, it was a bonus for being at the site as you'd get treated right. There always were reseller types, but the amount of them then to now has exploded. Those modern resellers/shop owners just make an account to sell there and they'll ask the high paid BIN level of ebay or more so the deals are gone in that respect. There are few deals to be had at NA now, most often, unless it's something obscure or unique, or a random lucky refresh at the time, you'll pay less using ebay and have a lot more copies of X game to pick from. If you're after the obscure and unique it's the best place if you want prototypes homebrew with limited run stuff and oddball merchandise finds go for it. If you're wanting games, systems, and accessories, stick to ebay for a better price and more of them posted to find the price/quality you want.

[JSoup]

To my knowledge, NA is *the* website for retro marketplace right now.

If you don't mind constant e-mail harassment, GamersGavel sees a lot of business.
If you don't mind dealing with idiots and a dumb exchange system, Goozex is another busy retro place.

[wizardofwor1975]

I think Twitter and Facebook have taken the place of message boards for many people. For example, the majority of CGE 2014 talk was on Facebook, not the DP thread.

I agree. It certainly looks like Facebook is stealing some of the Digital Press's thunder. However, I think this is going to be a marketing decision based on larger potential advertisement revenue and the possibility of reaching a much larger target audience and is not based on any deficiencies of the DP or it's users.

Also, many of us have been hanging around for a decade to two decades now online. Talking about the same old shit for the tenth time this decade gets old.

Seconded, as a newcomer the topics to me are fresh but I completely understand your point as a DP veteran that some of topics are becoming stale by sheer repetition.

[Gentlegamer]

I'd disagree with that about NA, and it has nothing to do with my distrust/dislike of somethings there but an established history of change in the last 4 years. When I first registered there in 2010 after lurking it was an entirely different marketplace across the board from ethics to pricing, to community feel of it. What is there now is not what it was at all and it's not really worth buying there today unless you can snap up a lucky find, it's basically just gamegavel without the fees (I'd say ebay but that place is a traffic beast.) 4 years ago there was the community aspect of it where people looked to ebay and then gave a discount over what the fees and cuts were from that site, it was a bonus for being at the site as you'd get treated right. There always were reseller types, but the amount of them then to now has exploded. Those modern resellers/shop owners just make an account to sell there and they'll ask the high paid BIN level of ebay or more so the deals are gone in that respect. There are few deals to be had at NA now, most often, unless it's something obscure or unique, or a random lucky refresh at the time, you'll pay less using ebay and have a lot more copies of X game to pick from. If you're after the obscure and unique it's the best place if you want prototypes homebrew with limited run stuff and oddball merchandise finds go for it. If you're wanting games, systems, and accessories, stick to ebay for a better price and more of them posted to find the price/quality you want.

I've only been trading on NA for the past year, and I think I found good deals. Of course, most of that is common stuff. The "rare" stuff often looks like an inflated ebay BIN, as you note, thought I think I received a good deal on PCE Dracula X at $88 shipped compared to $125+ on ebay.

[Steve W]

Social media is everybody's go-to for retro gaming info now, especially considering that all social media is designed for smartphone access, whereas an old-school webforum is a lot harder to use on a phone than with a computer.

Anyway, to the other question, what's the best game for each console? I don't have much of an opinion on which game is best, but these are the games I want to play when I fire up a console, so they're my particular "flavor" of gaming fun. And I don't have extensive collections for each machine, they're just the games that I crave and come back to the most often.

Atari 2600 - Escape From The Mindmaster
Atari 5200 - Adventure II
Atari 7800 - Midnight Mutants
Intellivision (with ECS console) - Mind Strike
Colecovision - Spectar
TurboGrafx-16 CD - Exile
Atari Lynx - Warbirds
Genesis - Outlander
Atari Jaguar (with JagCD) - Battlemorph
Dreamcast - Unreal Tournament
Nuon - Iron Soldier 3
Xbox - Roadkill
PS2 - Star Trek: Shattered Universe
GameCube - Phantasy Star Online
Gizmondo - Sticky Balls
Xavix GamePort - Bowling
GameWave - Letter Zap!

If I've left a console off, it's because I have no hard opinion on it.

[sfchakan]

I think NA used to be a little better off when I first stumbled onto it. A lot of people were fairly friendly and even helped others fill out their collections.

Now everyone's trying to outdo the next guy and make as much money as possible.

[ZP3]

I think NA used to be a little better off when I first stumbled onto it. A lot of people were fairly friendly and even helped others fill out their collections.

Now everyone's trying to outdo the next guy and make as much money as possible.

See, that's too bad. I always felt like the forums were the place to help out fellow collectors when you have something you don't want, whereas eBay was the place for (attempting) to maximize cash.

[sfchakan]

When I first stumbled upon NA, there was even a thread where people posted to great Buy It Now deals. Good luck seeing that happen now. Most of the members there (and people elsewhere) would snatch it to resell.

EDIT: It appears as if some people do randomly post in a current era version of that thread.

[wizardofwor1975]

Social media is everybody's go-to for retro gaming info now, especially considering that all social media is designed for smartphone access, whereas an old-school webforum is a lot harder to use on a phone than with a computer.

Good point. I wonder if it would be possible to quantify how much market share webforums have lost to smart phones and social media.

[celerystalker]

I've never used social media for game info. It always seems to me that social media is either common knowledge stuff or uninformative surface stuff like screenshots without details. I've had more fun and better luck with forums or reading sites like HG101. It seems like the old hands who really know a lot still haunt the long-running forums.

[sfchakan]

You get a lot of the same problems with social media as you do with forums, only with more people.

The barrier for entry is lower, so I feel like the quality of conversation drops a bit as well.

DAE REMEMBER THIS HIDDEN GEM?!?

and other bullshit.

and it gets posted again every week.

[Steven]

I check DP daily and it saddens me a bit everytime. User activity here has really dropped from when I first came 10 years ago (wow time flies). I just remember this place was HOPPING back then, and now, it's not nearly as active. It makes me wonder if there are thousand others like me... logging in to see if there are any interesting new threads we can reply to, but when we don't, we do nothing and thus that accounts for the lack of activity. But it just seems nowadays (in general) people don't find much that riles them up enough to go and start a new topic about.

Kind of just the sign of the times we living in, really.

Chakan, lol at that MK64 pic.

[JSoup]

I check DP daily and it saddens me a bit everytime. User activity here has really dropped from when I first came 10 years ago (wow time flies). I just remember this place was HOPPING back then, and now, it's not nearly as active. It makes me wonder if there are thousand others like me... logging in to see if there are any interesting new threads we can reply to, but when we don't, we do nothing and thus that accounts for the lack of activity. But it just seems nowadays (in general) people don't find much that riles them up enough to go and start a new topic about.

Have you heard the word of vbender?

[Tanooki]

I haven't been registered that long but I read the place off and on over the years and I agree, it has slowed, but there's no reason it couldn't pick up again. It's just the mystery of how to get the traffic back if that's possible. If a place as high strung and cliquey as NA can get that many posts in a day a more friendlier older place with a wicked database of resources should have a chance to do it too.

[Wraith Storm]

I used to be on here all the time. Every other day before work I would log on and post or reply.

But 2 years ago I had to switch my hours at work which severly limited the time i could get on the internet, and now I have 3 kids under the age of 4. Nedless to say, i seldom get a chance to post anything on DP anymore. But once in a while like today i get a few hours free.

[Nz17]

Just some counterpoints to a few of the points brought up here in this thread:

First I think that the DP forum (although perhaps not the rest of the site) is highly accessible for mobile users. We have multiple mobile themes / skins and we're even integrated with Tapatalk if that app is your thing.

As far as finding things using Google search: it is true that Google is useful for many things including as a search engine, but then again you will have to get that information from somewhere, and that somewhere is either Wiki's being set up at various places or Web forums such as this one. Oh sure, sometimes a little snippet of the page shown on the search results is enough for people, but often times they will follow through to read more in the thread, and occasionally one of those people will stay around as a new forum member (or at least a lurker).

As to Facebook and other social media: sure they're big and popular right now and their momentum is going to carry them for a long time, but then again they're also closed-off ecosystems like a tower or a silo filled with stuff. Most of it you can't see unless you are a member because they want you to be a member, and so their defaults will be set to something like 'show only to your friends' or terms such as that. Most people don't post their items as being publicly viewable to the world, so there's a lot of discussion going on in there, but it's often locked away from the greater Web. Things like the Digital Press message board, where nearly everything is publicly visible, are much more likely to be seen in future Web searches than posts on Facebook. Unless, of course, you're searching within Facebook itself, in which case you might find some stuff, but as others have said, there's a lot of noise in there compared to actual information.

In general, traffic is down for sites across the Internet, not because the quality of the sites has gone down necessarily, but because there's just so many more Web sites and Web pages out there compared to the past. The amount of users/viewers is nearly the same over the past few years though, which spreads the hits thinner overall. And most of that traffic is only going to the top ten sites worldwide by popularity. After all there's only so many people with so many hours free in the day, and so you see a lot of people ending up spending either less time online, or they just visit only so many sites. So while we might not see as many threads or as many posts because of how many lurkers we have or those people who are just doing some quick research, our traffic actually does slowly grow from month to month in terms of total viewers of the Web site.

[Tanooki]

Not to minimize your post there to the end of it, but that's actually the best news of all -- page views are up, even if they are lurking. Eventually some of them will sign up, maybe not a lot, but some. Places like this are open so you don't have to be at the mercy of a facebook or a myspace imploding in on itself while keeping everything locked away unless you sign up.