Does the game dev.net community seem to have less people than before or is it just me? I remember a few years ago, it is a lot more active.

I don't know, I'm here for three years and I'm not seeing any difference in traffic (maybe even more people than before are present here).

I think the activity goes in spurts. Most people here are either A) full time employees and/or B) full time students.

That means a good 30-50 hours minimum [edit: per week] of their lives are sucked into work or school. Then they have family, friends, and other non-game development related activities. That can often leave little time for gamedev.

I can't say I've noticed a huge change in active users. The number of pages in the Active Topics may have decreased a little over the last few years, but nothing drastic that I've noticed.

Yeah sorry. I have been active, just not here.


So how's everybody doing?

HI!

I'm going into hibernation.

When I first came to gamedev originally back around 2002, the community was much less active. And yes, it does seem to come and go in spurts. Some days, I will get home and the Lounge, Game Programming forums, etc., will have 15 new threads, and some days there will have barely been 3 responses. It just depends.

I got the impression that the site was increasing in activity in 2005 and decreased a bit after 2007, but I don't know if that is true in a statistical sense.

The elements competitions probably got a bunch of temporary people here. In the long run, the forums are filled with a great knowledge base of past discussions, maybe it is becoming easier and easier to just search for answers instead of actively discussing (already solved threads).

On a side note, it appears IOTD eliminated the Announcements forum. The more technical forums depend on available technology... Few visit the Isometric forum now when there's so much 3D technology, but it was pretty active in 2004.

Also, many places around the world have been inspired by Gamedev.net and created sites in their native language, so it's not natural for many anymore to search for the English predecessor.

It's interesting if you look at the google trends for "gamedev". Not sure what's causing that.