@faraday said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:
@Ghost said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:
With 90% of the playerbase being consumers (as opposed to producers) and regular talks about how hard it can be to "sell" someone on the hobby, I think it's fairly realistic to assume that there will not likely be a torch-passing to some following generation of future coders/game owners once the current 10% of producers ages out, get old, or turns to dust.
You seem to be assuming that there's no way to make it easier to be a producer, or to make it easier to 'sell' someone on the hobby. I would argue that the development of new platforms like Ares and Evennia have the potential to change both of these foundational assumptions.
Will they? Only time will tell.
I think that from within the hobby there's definitely a desire to promote it, and I don't think you're wrong that time will tell. I just think that there are some logical places where I find it to be likely that the platform won't pass this current "generation" of players.
Logically excluding one's current love for the hobby...
- The overall population per game has dropped significantly since 1995/2000 (excluding Shang/pendes)
- The community isnt known for its friendliness or lack of judgmental power figures. Weird politics.
- The time sink required to run a game, let alone a free one, and even PLAY a game requires a lot of investment including paying for cloud-spun servers.
- The number of people willing to invest time into game ownership is heavily overshadowed by the people that dont want to do those things.
Even if hardware can be used to make spinning up a server easier, MU existed in the 80s/90s because there were no MMORPGs or services like Roll20/FG. What's left is a number of die-hards who have been doing it since then, 2-3 people who were coding back then, and yourself and maybe 1 other who are coding games using something other than an antiquated code base that they know how to modify but dont understand the actual guts of the code.
So I figure, what, the average age of the "coder" in the hobby is currently somewhere between 35-50, and the average player age is sitting somewhere around 35-45?
Not trying to attack the hobby, I'm just sharing where I think it's highly probably that the "average age" will continue to go up, where the # of people willing to own/run/code games will remain the same. A couple of new players trickle in here and a few of them may stay, but unless there's some kind of cultural boom where "retro unix-based BBS systems reappropriated into online real-time pseudo-novelist slash rpg" becomes a fad, I see 10 years from now it's still gonna be the same people.
In the end, I feel it's logical to assume that when THIS crowd and the MUDder crowd dont have a younger generation to pass the torch down to, the speakeasy factor of places like PenDes will be the main core of people running server games (and attracting high numbers) like these (look at the numbers difference; it's already happening).
Point in case: Mudstats
Filter by 30 day average. Furry, Shang, PenDes are all pulling in numbers in the 500-600 range. Then some MUDs. This crowd doesnt appear until Arx/CoH show up around 125. Then more MUDs and Furry games until Heroes Assemble clocks in at 90. The 30-day average quickly hangs to between 20-40 shortly thereafter, which tells me two things:
- The story-driven lit-rpg crowd is a niche crowd in a hobby currently known for furries, sex, and gemstone 4.
- Despite what people assume the number of players may be in the story-driven-lit-rpg crowd is, it isnt enough to fill 2 school buses and I place the # of people willing to run/own games to be less than 20 (and that number hasnt shifted much, nor have the identities of those people, in the last 15 years). Most games in this crowd are jazzed if they have 20 active players.
Anyway, time will tell and thanks for coming to my TED talk apparently. Holy shit I typed one out, here.
