GameFAQs was necessary in a time of dial-up modems. The guides were just plain text documents that were tiny and downloaded quickly. The site design was basic and not overly flashy. The forums were a "go-to" spot for any game that got announced. I spent a lot of hours in my summers in the late 90s and even early 2000s writing FAQs for N64, Gamecube and Game Boy Advance games and patrolling the message boards.
In the mid 2000s, a lot of that traffic got diverted to IGN (who started siphoning off prominent FAQ writers to write guides for their own site) but also Digg and then Reddit. Having a game-specific forum on GameFAQs didn't matter as much when you could moderate your own subreddit community for it.
In the mid 2000s, a lot of that traffic got diverted to IGN (who started siphoning off prominent FAQ writers to write guides for their own site) but also Digg and then Reddit. Having a game-specific forum on GameFAQs didn't matter as much when you could moderate your own subreddit community for it.