1Up - Chairman of the Boards

1UP has an article up called  Chairman of the Boards,  which talks about  how online forums are a vital component of gaming, and can influence players, game makers and marketers. It examines one particular site, NeoGAF:

 The site is proof that, though ancient by Internet standards, message boards are a vital part of the gaming ecosystem, providing an outlet for passionate players to be heard by and influence industry tastemakers, creators, and deciders. It also allows them to indulge in that most cherished of Internet traditions: thumbing your nose at authority -- anonymously, and with as few properly spelled words as possible.

There's a certain negative element to all this:

Any regular GAFer will tell you that news is only part of the reason to visit. The thing everyone's really looking for (and this is where the bloodshed comes in) is a scandal, a batch of bad screenshots to joyously tear apart or a misspoken, out-of-context quote from an industry VIP ragging on the competition. Like chum in a shark tank, these occasional events can provoke impromptu swarms of violence, page upon page of whining, yelling, and piss taking, usually to comic effect. Sometimes, the GAFer army manages to make so much noise that the din reaches the upper echelons of the industry.

But all the fuss seems to be at least partially effective in getting attention. 1Up asks some developers and marketing figures whether they actually listen:

1UP: Do the game developers who participate in these forums actually take the feedback they receive into account when they close their web browsers and get back to work? Are they influenced by what they read?

Rob Fermier (game developer, Ensemble Studios, Age of Empires III): "Well, of course I'm influenced.... There's not much point in a discussion if you aren't going to be open to new ideas or changing your mind! Feedback certainly gets folded back into the churning mass of neurons in my skull, and that in turn fuels all kinds of different game development work."
Brad Wardell: I think of QT3 and NeoGAF as a 24/7 Game Developers Conference panel. The comments on the forums about our games are taken very seriously. Both Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire had significant features integrated into them both before and after release based on feedback.
Soren Johnson: Forums are a great way to get unfiltered feedback on your game, and I can think of many interesting ideas and suggestions for Civ that came from the forums. With Civ III, unfortunately, most of that feedback came after release, so the changes were only evident in the patches. To solve this problem with Civ IV, we pulled in around 100 of the best posters from the Civ forums into a private test session over a year before the game's release.