I have always been in two minds about a shoutbox; partly because it gives an avenue for bots to quickly and easily spam the shout box. There is also the matter that shout boxes are typically un moderated; that is not to say that they CANNOT be moderated, but it is something that people need to be on top of.

And the busier the forums, the harder it is to keep track of stuff that happens on it. So if you intend it to be "useful" for conversation; that could be hard to achieve. They also tend to have "limited" history, so unless you really want to put important information in it, it can be hard to find it. All you could really say is "Check back and try to find it..." which isn't really handy.

They have been used quite successfullly for *guild* websites, because they rarely have lots of people using the forum at the same time. For a website dedicated to a game, especially closer to its launch, if anything it becomes more of a hinderence/spam attractor rather than a benefit....