The reason this site is dying.

[GeneralGuy]

If fangames continue their slow but steady spiral into being generic, cookie-cutter clones of official products, they might as well die off for all I care. I know it's a tired topic and a bit gauche to say, but I genuinely miss the days of games like Mario Left the Cheese Out and Yoshi vs Windows, because those felt like they had an actual reason to exist. Why do we need a dozen uninspired clones of Super Mario Maker when we could just, I don't know, go play the actual thing?

Like, wow, dude, I can't believe you've made a really accurate Mario engine (for the 120th time) and a lot of high-quality Mario sprites! What are you going to do with them? Another generic platformer? With grasslands? Underground levels? Castles? Oh, you spoil us way too much.

This honestly

MFGG's fangames should stop trying to emulate official gameplay and instead be something unique and fun, like Let's Go Thingio! or Psycho Waluigi. Isn't that the point of fan games?

VinnyVideo should be doing an e-mail blast sometime soon to advertise MFGG to existing members of the Main Site and old forums, but we really need to find a way to attract new members to keep things alive.

I wouldn't mind helping with an e-mail blast for the MyBB forum users if there's something for us to promote. I haven't seen any big events since MFGG Awards.

Don't forget the phpBB forums, IPB forums and the Main Site. We could promote some upcoming or newly released fan games. And we could finally implement a Super Mario Maker 1/3DS/2 level database, which would attract a lot of people who still actively play and want to show off their custom levels and make fan games. It's too good of an opportunity to pass up.

The forums are definitely dying and honestly there is not much we can do about it.

I'm not a fan of this attitude. Maybe the MFGG forums don't have long for this world? I don't know. People said this same thing over a decade ago. Whatever you believe, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I agree it's harder when you're not growing, but there are many things we can all do to stimulate activity: Post useful content regularly, organize events, and tell friends about MFGG.

this

But whatever happens, as long as MFGG is serving as a place for people, even if just a handful, to share their passion for fan games and games in general, it's serving its purpose.

Totally agree with this. Mario fangames are a fairly small niche, and if we're still making people happy, we're serving our purpose.

this too

@Roo I hear ya. I'd definitely like to see more fangames that put a fresh spin on the Mario series. Vitiman's games are another good example of this. Nintendo hasn't done us any favors by churning out a lot of rather generic games in recent years.

Agreed. We need more silly fangames like Let's Go Thingio!

One other reason why fangame activity isn't what it used to be is because MFGG has been a Game Maker-centric community for the past decade, but Game Maker is no longer accessible to the majority of users here. In the past, the free version of GM was fully functional - it could export stand-alone .EXE files, possibly with a GM splash screen or a few functions dummied out. The regular paid version was just $20 or $25. Now, with GM Studio 2, you have to pay $99 to do anything (even open an existing game). The one-year license is still pretty steep at $39. That's a very reasonable price for the small-scale indie developers YoYoGames is targeting nowadays, but it's prohibitively expensive for a lot of kids entering game development. YYG's educational licenses aren't much better, and YYG makes it hard to download or even find resources for GM Studio 1.4 or GM 8.x.

Godot seems promising, but MFGG has few tutorials and resources for that particular tool.

It also hasn't helped that we haven't embraced 3-D game development.

Can't people just use older versions of Game Maker?