Are large companies moving away from official forums?

Because over the last few years, it seems quite a few really large companies and organisations seem to have shut down their official forums and communities, often with talk of moving to social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

For example, the Nintendo of America forums shut down a few years ago, as did the European ones. Another example is ITV, which shut its forums down a while back, moving all its community support to Twitter and Facebook. And yet another is probably the Star Wars official forums, which shut down quite recently as well.

I think the most likely reason is probably money, with the second being the general decline in forum activity compared to other social sites. I mean, many big company run forums use those super expensive (ripoff) scripts like Jive and Lithium, which means fees of hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on top of the money needed for servers, paid staff and support. When you factor in that these forums don't directly bring in money (most boards used for a community and support on business sites are ad free and tend to be free of things like premium memberships), I expect some bean counter looked at the relative costs of running an inhouse forum compared to just running a few pages on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube and realised that the former was costing about a hundred times more yet bringing in only the same income. So of course, the forum got shut down.

Is this a general trend at the moment? Is it something a lot of big companies are doing now? Are forums seen as too much of a time and money investment for too little return for them?

 

I'm not sure, maybe for now but sooner they'll realize these social networking sites will also fade in the picture. I haven't actually saw a facebook fan page appear every time I look for a How-to tutorials in google. Those social networking site would have to keep up and make their features interesting unlike forums where its just their contents that are to be updated from time to time.