What would be the best platform for this niche?

Howdy,
to jump straight to the point

I wish I could be positive but I don't think you have any chance.

What is your goal? If you want to make some money, forget the idea and focus on Youtube. If you want to make money out of it, Youtube is your guy.

If you want to create a community for whatever other reasons, the answer is also no sadly.

Why?

Your niche/subject has a shelf-life of 6 months (12 at best). Then people will move on. Your niche is not the game itself, but specially the glitches. Casual players could care less about that. So your target audience is very low. And those also will move on, once another new shiny game is out there.

You say yourself, people post their stuff on Youtube. You would be competing against Youtube first of all. On top of that, all games have a discord channel these days. So, all people will use that. Also the game itself will probably have in-game chat. And last but not least, Reddit absorbs all gaming communities sooner or later, if it is a popular game.So you will compete against them too. It takes 1 minute for someoe to create a dedicated CoD glitches sub.
And if that is not enough, you will be competing against the game. The game will fix bugs as soon as possible. So the initial launch, like 1-3 month you will have your prime time. And then maybe another 3 month before all relevant glitches are gone and all people left the game.

So, these are your competitors (and I haven't even touched on the topic that there are thousands of gaming forums, who all will have a dedicated node for that new shiny game).

Now, besides you would have to compete against all those. Let's focus on the subject of what your site could offer to people.
What?

Unless one of the other forums/sites woudn't do it before you. You would have to create a wiki for your glitches. Your place must be the number 1 place when people want to look up glitches. (But why should they honestly?)
Do you have the money, time and expertise to do so?

Building a forum is very difficult from zero. You have to invest in content. You need content so Google indexes you and so people can find your forum. But what content? The investment in content for that niche is pointless. If you had a niche where the subject is always permanent, then you can play the long-term game. Like invest in content which at the start won't pay off but over the years it will pay off. Like let's say a forum for overweight people or a forum for insurances. Or if your niche would be seasonal like a sports forum for a team/sport or like skiing forum. Those have shelf-lives for eternity basically. Your niche will be irrelevant in 6 months (or maybe in a year or 2, depens on how big the game starts).

But of course, there is a small window. You could use it as a springboard. You could gain traction from the game until the decline starts and then from there you could hop into the next glitches of another game.

Another thing is if you are passionate, if you have too much free time/money, you can always give it a try of course. But I don't think in this case you would ever get the investment back you would put in (not talking about money). Would you feel satisfied after a time? I don't think so

My tip for any new starter is this:

Don't start with a forum and then try building a content around it.
Start with a content and then try building a forum around it.

What does it mean?
It means, first figure out what you can offer to people. Let's say your forum is about overweight people. The first thing would be to acquire a database for food. Like dozens of entries where each food is listed like with how many calories and nutrition etc. That is your content. You need that. THEN you can think about how you could build a forum software around that content.
If you just open a forum and wait people to create content for you, that won't work anymore since Facebook became popular in 2008.
All people are also leechers these days thanks to smartphones and their small screens. So it is your job to provide content. First, find your content or make plans how you would get content. Then think about the platform you can present the content. WordPress is a popular platform for example. Or in our cases a forum software.

Sorry, I wish I could be more positive. Hope it has some helpful points to you.

BioWarfare You might want to edit your post to make it readable. The test is far too pale on my screen.

BioWarfare said:

I am also concerned about the legality of it

Click to expand...

Just to be clear client side game exploits are not against the law but they will almost certainly violate the game's EULA which could lead to a player being banned from the game. Server side exploits or exploits sold for gain may result in the developers bringing a civil suit that could empty your bank balance but a forum as described would probably be left alone.

This thread may interest you
https://theadminzone.com/threads/gaming-forums-survival.149967/

It’s difficult to build a community around any game that doesn’t have some sort of mod tools or game server to drive traffic from. You may get a few people but don’t see it being a hit.

Thank you Steve

I don't "want" a large project that I have to constantly contribute posts to myself. Rather, I want a lightweight resource for this content with a super hassle-free registration process. People in this niche do not want to register for a forum, post an introduction, THEN post an embedded link to their YouTube video. I want this site to become the first resource for people who really like Call of Duty to go to for when they want to show their friends awesome glitches in the game. I don't expect people to come to this site and become power users because I have a fair understanding of this community and the vicious competition. I think with the new Call of Duty coming out in October, this niche will find its way gradually back.

I am thinking of using XenForo with the lightweight UX theme but I don't know if that is the best platform. I want the site to have content visible as soon as people visit the homepage. This is another community who doesn't want to hit the homepage, find a forum, look at thread titles, and spend time finding what works for them. YouTube is the best platform for this niche but I posted before that the community is really competitive and I want my site to become a resource for everybody and even give some people a chance at making their YouTube account more popular.

Please let me know if I am daydreaming.

Well, if you have the motivation and the funds, give it a try then.

If it is gonna be a lightweight project, you could actually go with Bob's ShowCase as your frontpage or alternatively with Jaxel's XenMedio.

With both you can do nice things. You could just use the feed importer to import youtube vids from your community members and display them (not sure if XenMedio has that). Jaxel's site has great examples of how you can offer content to your visitors in a gaming niche.

sbjsbj

Thank you for those recommendations but I won't have enough content to fill up those media pages and with this particular niche, you will often find people making videos of the same thing which is why it won't be a good homepage. Imagine coming to TAZ and seeing the same exact threads but they're just typed slightly different and they all contain the same content. And that is on your homepage lol. I was thinking about XenForo's media addon and using its feature that allows you to put the most recently added videos above the nodes. But I don't really want a full fledged media page for that. Is there something else I could use to put embedded YouTube videos from a particular forum to the homepage?

I'm starting to lose track and confuse myself. I'll need to put together a plan.

You can always use the feed importer which XF2 has built in. Youtube offers feed, so you can always post threads into your forum automatically like that.

Well, I just thought, as you said your target audience is mostly on youtube as a creator, I thought you might want to make a use of that. Anyway, good luck.

You're right in that glitching is on the decline and focusing ln COD would limit your audience, however exploiting glitches is on the rise and you could make join that larger subculture instead. New games out, old ones ditched, your community would still be here instead of betting the farm on COD staying popular forever.

Lots of twitch streamers and youtubers record themselves speedrunning and glitching is behind pretty much all world records and attempts to break them. It's leagues above classic competitive play and almost always enjoyable to watch, especially if you're time constrained or looking to get competitive for your own plays.

If it's gaming, if its meant for money and branding. Go with YouTube and Twitch or any other streaming platform.

Steve said:

This thread may interest you
https://theadminzone.com/threads/gaming-forums-survival.149967/

It’s difficult to build a community around any game that doesn’t have some sort of mod tools or game server to drive traffic from. You may get a few people but don’t see it being a hit.

Click to expand...

I agree and disagree!

I disgaree becasue my site is around a game that doesn't have mod tools.
I agree because COD probably has some very well established forums already. People will just take the content and post it on other outlets.

Considering glitches/exploits are often patched quickly in the newer games, and the older games aren't really relevant anymore, what would be the point of the forum? The glitches available for the older games like Black Ops 2, Modern Warfare 2, 3, so on, are all pretty well known by now, so what could your forum bring that's 'new' to the table?