How to revitalize this sub?

I always wait for vote sales. People preordering upvotes are crazy

Don't forget to make sure it's a "complete" or "GOTY" post, nothing worse than waiting for a mediocre deal on an incomplete post

Also all the spelling and gramatical errors will have been fixed by then.

Yeah. Commenting is important. I look at my feed under Hot and I see a bunch of new posts over the last few hours and they all have 0 comments. Lemmy w/o comments is just a community-driven RSS feed. I comment first when I actually have something to add but it's just as important as posting new links.

So, just looking at the top 15 items of what's presently on /r/patientgamers:

https://old.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/

• A daily stickied post for small, general conversation where people don't want to do a full submission.

• People talking about their impressions on games that they've just finished or played: 10

• Broader discussion items ("Did anyone else like Skyrim, but wasn't able to get into Fallout 4?", "The Borderlands Movie Should Have Adapted Telltale's Tales from the Borderlands", "Help Me Remember - Gaming's Keepsakes"): 3

• Talking about a series overall ("I'm glad Need for Speed games are still focussing on the story"): 1

In my own Reddit experience, the stickied regular post has mostly been useful for when there's too much traffic on a particular topic. /r/europe did megathreads to keep Ukraine war traffic from overwhelming the sub. However, there are some subs that do daily posts for small conversation items, maybe to lower the bar for people to comment. /r/cataclysmdda does this. @caut_R@lemmy.world commented in this thread and said that the bar to creating a new post was substantial for him:

Maybe I‘m just jaded by Reddit‘s „ackshually“ culture that jumps on you if a post‘s not a well thought out thesis, but I feel pressured to deliver substantial quality when posting (not commenting) on boards and I‘m too tired from the day for that.

...so maybe that's applicable here.

The lion's share of the posts, though, is just people posting about some game that they played and their impressions. So maybe that?

I‘d post about games I‘ve played lately (like Unravel) but I feel like „was a cool game with a cool style which made me enjoy the graphics even today and was interesting to platinum“ doesn‘t start much of a discussion.

I'll be the first to admit I mainly lurk, but I'd be interested to read about games people find interesting. Who knows, might be a title which flew under my radar and was one introduction away from being my all time favorite.

But yea, the "what are you playing" threads were fun reads.

I liked the weekly/bi-weekly „What are you playing“ posts, but they seem to have stopped, even on the bigger „games“ subs.

Well, !gaming@beehaw.org and !games@sh.itjust.works both have stickied posts from this week of that sort up with activity. How many gaming subs do you read?

In my experience, having a weekly sticky like that is essential for engagement. There are plenty of people here, they just aren't making threads. If you get people in the habit of dropping by once a week, they are more likely to post.

I'd also make the suggestion to scale the rule back to 6 months from 12. It's a good idea in general for a slow community and there were multiple big games that came out in that month 7 through 12 time period. Can always change it back when the community is active. /r/patientgamers was 6 months until semi-recently.

That said, this doesn't have to be a carbon copy of the subreddit. I liked the Meme Monday suggestion that was posed. Anything to drive engagement.

I would enjoy this as well

Send a suggestion to your Lemmy app developer! That honestly sounds like a great idea I could see being implemented by like Sync or something.

!truegaming@kbin.social. Try to use the bang syntax when linking communities rather than direct linking it like that, so that others can click it and access it from their own instance.

Even if it makes sense to have all of them, becuase they have different-but-similar purposes or goals, maybe they can crosslink to each other in their sidebars. Some subreddits have had luck cross-promoting like that.

Kinda the same, and it's almost an irony since I'm on my own instance. I must have manually subscribed to this community myself, and I think this is the first post I've ever seen on my front page from it.

I like never complete games so they go on forever for me.

Perfectly acceptable for roguelikes!

EDIT: Well, some roguelikes. Some have completable runs. I guess a lot of "sim" games also don't have endings.

If it is a community rather than an instance it might still get some views. A lot of people on Lemmy are still browsing by all/new and they'd see it in that instance and wherever that community is federated.

You sound like you might enjoy a Steam Deck. So many great games available on PC, you don't even need to take a glance at any micro transaction infested games.

Mobile games have basically always been like that. It's practically Shovelware: The Industry. They're cheap and quick to make compared to other games and mtx make crazy money, so they're basically the equivalent of those cheap Chinese clothing brands that pop up out of nowhere for a month on Amazon and then change names to something like Zivaldie.

It doesn't look that way.

Source

I'd agree and I think especially the amount of comments per post has reduced.

I am not sure activity has changed much. I'm getting around 8 messages on my instance (that's not actual posts or comments, just inter-instance messages about any form of activity) per second and this has been the case that it ranges between 5-12m/s depending on time of day and day of week. This is not too different to when I started this around a year ago.