Back in the good old days of gaming of 2011, back when BioWare was blowing people’s minds with the Mass Effect trilogy, they had community forums. A place where fans of Dragon Age and Mass Effect could gather and speculate about what happens next. Or, pester the developers for whatever romance they believed should be in the next game.
And then, after the release of Mass Effect 3, they promptly erased their forums and moved all discussions to Twitter. This effectively silenced many discussions, because by nature, Twitter is an algorithmic beast that prioritizes only certain things.
With the collapse of web2, Twitter especially, I wonder if they might bring those forums back.
BioWare, if you’re reading this, bring back the forums!
Apart from posting announcements, news, and patch notes (which can be done on a blog) I don’t see the benefit of an “official” community these days. Fan-run forums have been a thing for decades. More recently the likes of Reddit, Twitter, and now federated alternatives make it really easy for communities to form and be discovered.
Personally I think game devs/publishers should be spinning up their own federated instances (e.g. Mastodon or similar) on their own domains to make announcements on. Let communities form naturally.
Dev studios spinning their own instances would be cool, but you mention Reddit and Twitter, both of these websites are on the way out, dying, and that’s the sole reason I feel like BioWare should bring back their forums, because Twitter is the reason they deleted them