The reason this site is dying.

[The Dark Warrior]

I normally don't really be on MFGG as much as I used to because Discord is a thing and my interests lie with SMW hacking but I will say that site mismanagement is actually the #1 reason why MFGG is dying. Its not due to "muh push for Nintendo accuracy saturation" nor DMCA takedowns. People will always make what they want out of the Mario series regardless be it carbon copy official or weird original takes, and MFGG for the longest time has been and still is a testament of that with a variety of games it has in its repository on the mainsite. And for the latter it didn't stop SMWC for SMW, nor anyone involved in the SM64 hacking scene from making mods of those games. Not even anyone who made games using the Hello Engine that saturated the YoYo Games Sandbox till that was shut down.

Mismanagement was because for years MFGG hardly embraced using social media such as Twitter, YouTube, etc. until recently to spread awareness to the world that they exist and to connect to younger Millennials and Gen Z who do use such platforms and towards gaming content creators such as Vinesauce that have more than 100K subs. That should have been done ideally 10 or more years ago when the site had more life to it, and it should have been used to promote not only the best games on the site but also promote their activities such as minigames, drawing, and gaming tourneys, as well as invite other communities from time to time to be in on the action. It's why places such as SMWC, 1-up World, and the Flashback community still thrive to this day.

[Evil Yoshi Toes]

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.

I guess my point with this was more that I don't think it makes sense to dedicate a ton of time to the forums when the vast majority of members people the discord format anyway. If we had more staff and the staff had more time we could definitely come up with a lot of fun events for the forums, but were all so busy right now and staff is so limited that I can't realistically see us making such extreme changes on the forums at this time. Its easy to say we will organize lots of fun events, but fun events can take a while to time to come up with, and with our busy schedules they take a very long time to come up with. And keeping a dying forum alive would require us to come up with these events very consistently. Then there's also the issue of whether these events should just take place on the discord. Of course that wouldn't help to bring people to the forums, but if people prefer the discord anyway why would we not try to better our most popular platform. The Discord's main criticism is already that it isn't fan game oriented enough and these events would help with that. But maybe I'm wrong and we will be able to pull it off now, or maybe some of our schedules will free up soon, or maybe some community efforts will help to bring people back to the forums. I would prefer to see the forums kept alive, it's just something that will take a lot of work, more work that I can see the staff putting in in our current state. But that can always change. I'd just hate to dedicate a large quantity of already limited time to a platform most members don't care as much about when the preferred platform is still pretty flawed.
(Sorry if this is hard to follow I had to type this quickly on my phone)

[GeneralGuy]

Another thing that really hurt MFGG's activity was The Split back in 2010. That was a major mistake.

[Mario]

It could be time to retire the forums. I think the format has its usefulness but it really doesn't make much sense to maintain this if not many are using it. Discord has disadvantages to the longer form discussions you can have on forums but there are probably ways around that if we get creative. It just doesn't make a lot of sense to have new members sign up for 4+ different parts of MFGG and check all of them these days. And I say this as someone who is passionate about forums.

Proud member of the Shadow █████████████

Interested in web development? Check out Super Mario Web Development. Wahoo!

 

""We choose to go to the [Suggestions board] not because it's easy, but because it's hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
- John F. Kennedy"
- gothgirlgangblastermaster

[Mariotroid]

Dont think of it as the forums dying, think of it as moving on.

[Kritter]

Popping my head in. I remember saying I wouldn't leave this place until either I or the site died. You might notice I haven't been here in a while... and I'm still alive.

MFGG died when it became boring. That's what it is, it's dull, and it fought against that for as long as it could but that's where it is.

The site needed to evolve a long time ago and that time came and went, nobody has the resources, knowledge, time or commitment to have made those changes happen. Changes to the forum itself weren't ever going to be enough to re-invigorate things around here, it was just a temporary band-aid.

Also fact is, making fan games weren't as much of a stepping stone in the old days, people were just having fun making cool Mario games. These days you grow up hearing about an indie hit taking off and making millions. Coverage of those kinds of things is far more vast and people are growing up with their sights set a lot higher. And for those who still want to make fan games, getting resources for those things is now much more easily done elsewhere on websites like TSR.

MFGG is old, clunky and broken and is solely focused on a single brand where it probably should've evolved long ago to cover a wider range of Nintendo things in order to have had a hope of surviving. Not only that but as mentioned, none of the parts of this site are linked well with other parts, it's disjointed and there's no real reason for people to register on the forums if they have a site account. Frankly I'm shocked it survived as long as it has until now. The whole site feels like something stuck in the past, because it is.

Sharing your games is even easier now thanks to the myriad of social platforms we have available. Back in the old days, forums were life and chat programs like AIM and MSN were secondary that you'd mostly use with your friends, but that's tipped vastly in its head in this day and age where Discord, Twitter and other platforms make life so much easier for many budding fan game and indie developers to share their work. Who would come to a small Mario forum when it's so much easier to get an audience out there in the world of social media?

There are probably ways to salvage or save this place but who could put their hand up and say they have the resources, knowledge, time or commitment to make that happen? I used to love this place like it was a weird, blue and red child but even I ran out of those things long ago. Turning things around would probably take money above all else.

Anyway, apparently my last visit was a good 7 months ago, so that's me done again for a while. Take care.

[DustinVG]

Most of you probably already know, but I basically left the site back in 2018 (barring a very brief “return”). The atmosphere of the site had just grown entirely too difficult.

And I say this as someone with a strong nostalgic connection to the site, basically a very strong inclination to tough it out, but it became too much after a while, even for me. And I can't imagine a newbie would respond with nearly as much hesitation.

My Webs Site

join my discord join it join it right now i'm not gonna ask again

[GeneralGuy]

Great post, Kritter. Yeah, MFGG is really boring now and it should have spent its time branching out to other Nintendo franchises and advertising on Twitter, YouTube, etc. a long, long time ago instead of breaking the community apart.

Most of you probably already know, but I basically left the site back in 2018 (barring a very brief “return”). The atmosphere of the site had just grown entirely too difficult.

And I say this as someone with a strong nostalgic connection to the site, basically a very strong inclination to tough it out, but it became too much after a while, even for me. And I can't imagine a newbie would respond with nearly as much hesitation.

I don't understand. What exactly about the site is "too difficult"?

[MDragmire]

I thought the forums were sure to die after the MW split, and even that happened well after I had "left" MFGG around 2008/09.


As for visiting forums in this modern mobile centric world... I hate viewing the forums on mobile. It doesn't show me the latest post/thread in each subforum because it's either cut off or intentionally designed that way for mobile devices.

[EDGE]

I still check from time to time.

Nothing really interests me besides seeing old members still around honestly, so I suppose nostalgia.

Games and Art being made doesn't look much different from what I've seen since 2005 so I barely give criticism or comment anymore on those topics.

Everytime someone mentions the site dying or being dead, old drama is brought up.
Not that is a bad thing but I don't think that has a big impact on activity since most of us grew up and moved on or have actually apologised and feel good and care that others are still around and didn't end up bad.

I guess what I mean is what has been said already, life happens.

Also, there are many other ways to share and join people with similar interests.

As some mentioned back then forums where the best thing around but feel outdated now.

I'm too busy with life to have time to start or finish a fan made project now.

The ones that are young and have time don't have some of the tools we had back then and mostly everything has to be paid to be able to use it's features now so of course that holds the young ones from doing what we did back then.

Also, I don't know about others but I use my phone for almost everything now. To check e-mails, pay bills and even post this comment.
I haven't sat down in front of a computer in a while. I think if I sat down in front a computer even if I had 20 to 30 minutes to spare I could do some sprites or work on a project but mobile devices keep me away from that.

[DustinVG]

Great post, Kritter. Yeah, MFGG is really boring now and it should have spent its time branching out to other Nintendo franchises and advertising on Twitter, YouTube, etc. a long, long time ago instead of breaking the community apart.

Most of you probably already know, but I basically left the site back in 2018 (barring a very brief “return”). The atmosphere of the site had just grown entirely too difficult.

And I say this as someone with a strong nostalgic connection to the site, basically a very strong inclination to tough it out, but it became too much after a while, even for me. And I can't imagine a newbie would respond with nearly as much hesitation.

I don't understand. What exactly about the site is "too difficult"?

Hard to get into, honestly. But since I'm no longer staff, I could probably deal with it on my own.

My Webs Site

join my discord join it join it right now i'm not gonna ask again

[darkblueyoshi]

Sadly MFGG is not very active anymore, I used to visit the forums everyday, but I am busy now and have a lot of responsibilities. I would if I could make a 3d Mario engine for everyone, but I never got anything done.

[SonicKade2048]

Sadly MFGG is not very active anymore, I used to visit the forums everyday, but I am busy now and have a lot of responsibilities.

Gonna be honest, that sounds like the case for a lot of people on this site. We've all grown up, gotten busy with more and more things, and soon enough, don't have time for MFGG. I'd even say that goes for more than just MFGG; 2020 was going to be a great year for a lot of people, but it seems like we're sitting here doing nothing. We could, per say, try some more, smaller community events to fill time while bigger ones, like the recent MFGG Game Jam, are saved for the future.

Maybe that's just my perspective, though.

Twitter / YouTube / Bandcamp / Neocities

[Hyper]

Most of the activities moved to the Discord servers but only about few dozens of users are active. I agree with Kirb, as we grow older, we got more important priorities with real life matters. Most of the newer generations lost the interest to make fan games due to legal fears. Even if we explain, some of them still don't get it or don't read it at all.

Thanks to the recent quarantine, I managed to make a game as an attempt to push the community's manifest. But that didn't helped out much but at least the Game Jam got some traction. I had some difficult decisions whether to leave here but in the end I grew into this place. I'll drop in more fan game to grow an audience base and then move on back to indie games.

It's hard to say where is this community is heading to. I personally would like to see this as a general fan game and indie game development community. But I honestly am not sure how to gain more userbase. I felt like our main site needs serious remodeling since it is severely outdayed but unfortunately I don't know anyone who has the caliper and motivation to create a new and better software. I still thought about renaming the community to "Fan Games Galaxy" since even if we mentioned this is a general fan game community, people would still assume it's a Mario fan game exclusive community. However that idea was turned down last year and I don't want to open up another can of worms.

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Main Site | YouTube | Bluesky | My OC

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[Pedigree]

A lot of people got their "make my own mario levels" itch scratched by Super Mario Maker and Super Mario Maker 2, both much easier than trying to make your own and learn some custom engine, so I'm not really surprised that activity has slipped.

You also have to consider that forums are a software no one likes to use anymore. Join the discord and you'll find it is much more active.

 

[GeneralGuy]

A lot of people got their "make my own mario levels" itch scratched by Super Mario Maker and Super Mario Maker 2, both much easier than trying to make your own and learn some custom engine, so I'm not really surprised that activity has slipped.

You also have to consider that forums are a software no one likes to use anymore. Join the discord and you'll find it is much more active.

Also the fear of getting C&D'd or DMCA'd by Nintendo like with AM2R, Pokemon Uranium, etc. And the exponential rise of small indie game developers in the past decade would encourage prospective members to rather develop their own Mario-inspired indie game and make money off it.

[GothGirlGangBlasterMaster]

The members of this community have a life aside from MFGG.

Great post, Lexi.
I am also employed.

for any inquiries please contact me in hell

[fireball3k]

[oldtimer]

i thought mfgg was dying in 2001 when the great kyle flamewar happened, but it obv didn't turn out that way

[/oldtimer]

[DiggingJam]

I think this site is fine. Explain THIS!

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I think this site is fine. Explain THIS!

Yeah think is fine

.

[SonicKade2048]

I think this site is fine. Explain THIS!

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I think this site is fine. Explain THIS!

Yeah think is fine

I don't think you checked the timestamps. Even if that thread was made a day before this thread, it's more than 3 months later by now.

That thread seems irrelevant, if you ask me.

Twitter / YouTube / Bandcamp / Neocities