ParanoidObsessive posted...
I'm going to be honest, some of those wikis are part of the reason why I haven't used a FAQ on this site in about 15 years.
Oh, absolutely. Wikis are just a better format for answering gaming questions than full guides/walkthroughs: It's easier to find the exact section you're looking for, it's more amenable to having multimedia resources (text explanations, screenshots, maps, data tables, videos), you're less likely to stumble across spoilers than if you have to scroll through a full guide to look for what you need, updates happen faster when anyone in a community can make small edits instead of waiting for a single author to finish and publish a whole guide (especially important in today's world of games getting regular updates, since that means wikis/guides need to update as well)... It's no mystery at all why wikis have mostly supplanted FAQs/guides and GameFAQs has stopped being the major gaming hub it once was. Wikis just work better in the majority of situations. Fandom's wikis in particular are often a little iffy in terms of overall quality, and are miserable formatting-wise because their ad practices are awful, but they're still a better option than GameFAQs guides.
ParanoidObsessive posted...
And all of this probably isn't helped by the fact that the younger generation generally just looks on Google (or uses Alexa/Siri/etc) to ask a specific question, then follows whatever the first link they find to the answer (I know my 20-something nephew does this), which generally just points them to wiki pages or YouTube videos. So even if the answers are here on GameFAQs, the target audience they're looking for is never going to find them, and never going to care.
I do a similar thing (usually not defaulting to the first result because that can be hit or miss, but usually not going past the first few), but I'd argue that that's mostly because I know there isn't a single, reliable hub that I can consult for all games. Because wiki creation is so inconsistent (some games have official ones, some have fandom ones, some have ones that fall under another umbrella like fextralife, some have totally independent unofficial ones, some have none), it's a bit of a crapshoot what information I'm going to be able to find for any new game I search for, so I can't just go to any one gaming site and expect to find answers (and not just because these different wikis all have their own domains). That means Google is effectively the site I go to knowing that it will have the information I need.
The thing is, that's not new. Even back in the late 90's, there were alternatives to GameFAQs that we'd find through Google, and I know I'd often check 4-5 different sites for the information I wanted. GameFAQs just managed to be the best one consistently enough that it beat them out, to the point that I stopped checking others even before they died off. It's still very possible for one site to offer the answers people need consistently enough that they stop Googling the game they're looking for and instead default to checking that site first. To become that site, though, GameFAQs needs to switch tacks to be more wiki-like (plus bolstering its community significantly to be able to sustain those wikis, plus going a whole lot more SEO to actually show up on people's radars).
Again, though, Fandom's already positioning itself as being *the* wiki community (entirely by buying out as many previously-independent wikis as possible, rather than building a community themselves, but that's beside the point). They're very unlikely to cannibalize all of those efforts by trying to promote GameFAQs as filling that role, especially given how hard it'll be to pump up the community numbers enough to sustain healthy wikis. For that matter, though, even wikis are kind of dying out as more and more gaming communities shift to having Discord servers and focusing activity and information there instead of any static website (a trend which I
despise
, but the clouds never seem to listen when I yell at them), so even a wiki-focused rebrand probably wouldn't take off.