The Weekly Raid: Where Do You Go To Talk About Games?

The recent drama surrounding NeoGAF over the weekend, and the firing of all-but-one paid staff members at The Escapist has spurred me to reflect on the changing nature of Internet communities.

While internet forums are not yet dead, its clear that social networks and aggregators like reddit have put the whole standalone forum format into terminal decline. The ascent of Discord has surely had a similar effect on legacy chat clients like Ventrillo, Team Speak, and Skype. Earlier this month, it was announced that Verizon would be shutting down AOL Instant Messanger (AIM). For many of my generation (I'm 29), AIM was our first window into the lives of others outside our immediate vicinity. The recent explosion in popularity of services like Slack and Discord show just how powerful real-time text based communication remains.

Several gaming communities I used to frequent are now gone. GameSpy, which was owned by IGN, was sunset back in 2013 and with the recent layoffs at The Escapist, it seems that site is not long for this world. On the bright side, GameFAQs is still up and running. I must have made hundreds, if not thousands of posts on those forums throughout the years.

Today, reddit and Discord are my primary outlets. Both serve as open (more or less) platforms where users can create smaller communities. This seems to be the best model thus far, but who knows if it will last.

We'd love to hear from you, where do you go to talk about games? More importantly, how have your destinations changed of the years? Are there any old communities you were part of that are now gone?