One thing that I noticed is that the amount of questions we get for new AAA releases seems to be getting lower. I don't have much hard data here, comparisons to the games where competitions were run are probably not all that meaningful anyway. But my subjective impression is that the big new games don't get a lot of questions on the site when they're released compared to the time when the contests were run.
Assassin's Creed Unity got 4 questions since it was released, Civilization: Beyond Earth had 5 questions on the first day, 48 now in total. Those are simply the last big releases I could think of, I haven't played any of those though.
The main reason I'm concerned about this is that I think that the first few days are crucial to establishing our site as a place to get answers to questions for those specific games. Compared to game-specific sites we have the disadvantage that we're a general site. If we don't establish ourselves as a good source early on, people that aren't familiar with our site already are going to ignore us or never even find us in the first place when searching for their questions.
The reason I'm bringing this up here is that I think the situation can be easily changed with just a few users per game making a bit of an extra effort to ask good questions early. I was one of the users participating in the first Gaming.SE game grant, where SE bought games for a few users in exchange for those users asking and answering questions. I did ask quite a few questions about The Witcher 2 due to that grant, and just looking at the most viewed ones of my questions, they brought more than 700.000 views to the site.
I think it would be a good idea to encourage the experienced users of the site to ask more questions, especially for newly released games. Having a certain amount of questions already present is necessary so that new users can find our site when they look for their questions about the new game they're currently playing. We are at a disadvantage here compared to most SE sites, our topic essentially changes every few weeks. We can't rely on our old questions to reach people playing newer games.
I'm not talking about bringing the contests back, I suspect they were unsustainably in any case. But I think we can encourage the community here to ask more good questions. And maybe more low-key contests could still work, without the big prizes and elaborate design changes. We're gamers, we are easily tempted by meaningless internet points.