Doom lost popularity?

I don't think the new forum build counts any downloads prior to the update.  Pointing at the low numbers of downloads via the forum's features really doesn't account for any downloads off the old /idgames archive, downloads offsite, ModDB listings, mirrors, etc.  It's a bit of a fallacy to think that the total number of downloads on something ever is reflected in the new forum's listings.

6 hours ago, NinjaLiquidator said:

When your identity is once cursed by obscurity, there is no way back. People didnt accept something about you and they started to ignore you FOREVER.

Nah, that's bollocks.

6 hours ago, NinjaLiquidator said:

What you have to do is to create new identity (= new DW account)

Don't try this at home, kids.

Considering the original Doom will be 25 years in December, the fact that it still attracts communities as strong as this one and the ZDoom forums is a testament to how timeless it is.

Theres literally no other shooter from the 90's that still has a community as active as this one (Even Half life modding mostly died off a while back)

I'll take a new spin on this... Doom went from being from more installed than Windows (supposedly) to now being 1% of all PC games. How do you go from 99.9% to less than 1%? Clearly its lost popularity. Doom 3 went from being 0.001% of Steam to 0.00005% in a mere 4 years! To get more popular they had to rerelease the HD version.

48 minutes ago, geo said:

Doom went from being from more installed than Windows (supposedly) to now being 1% of all PC games.

I think it was actually more installed than Excel, but the point of the tale is still the same.

I'm not sure if your comment is a joke or not, but either way I did enjoy how much you completely mixed up figures and comparisons into a totally meaningless collection of stats.  To clarify though:

• Just because Doom was installed on more PCs than Excel means nothing when we don't know how many PCs Excel was installed on (hint, it wasn't 99.9%)
• Being "1% of all PC games" is lacking necessary clarity.  1% of game sales?  Of games being played?  Of games being talked about?  Of games being modded?  
• Doom 3 was never part of Steam originally, and the original Doom sure as hell wasn't, so as a tool for comparison doesn't tell us much
• Without defining the size of the universe, stating something goes from "99.9%" to "1%" does not necessarily infer a loss.  99.9% of a $100 million dollar industry is still less than 1% of a $10 billion dollar industry. 

So we need much, much more information to make conclusions from this!

1 hour ago, geo said:

I'll take a new spin on this... Doom went from being from more installed than Windows (supposedly) to now being 1% of all PC games. How do you go from 99.9% to less than 1%? Clearly its lost popularity. Doom 3 went from being 0.001% of Steam to 0.00005% in a mere 4 years! To get more popular they had to rerelease the HD version.

An HD version that wasn't as well received by both fans and critics alike as the original game was :v .

Also it's not 1993 anymore, times change, and much less people owned a PC at the time, one was more like a luxury back then than a necessity, and not all those machines had Excel/Office. @Bauul has made some good points above.

Either way, the thing is, it may not be as popular as it was when it first came out, after all everything loses its popularity with time, but it's still far from dead or close to falling into obscurity, which is unfortunately more than can be said for Doom 3 and Doom 64.

1 hour ago, Bauul said:

So we need much, much more information to make conclusions from this!

I got you.

In 1993, approximately 22.9% of all households had computers in the United States. [1]

There were 259.9 million people (roughly) living in the United States at that time.

Also at that time, there was an average of 2.66 persons per household. [2]

Solving from here suggests there were about 22.37 million computers in America in 1993, when Doom was released.

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In late 1995, Doom was estimated to be installed on more computers worldwide than Microsoft's new operating system Windows 95, despite million-dollar advertising campaigns for the latter. The game's popularity caused Microsoft to hire id Software to port Doom to Windows with the WinG API, and Bill Gates briefly consider buying the company. Microsoft developed a Windows 95 port of Doom to promote the operating system as a gaming platform.

And

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Experts estimate that the game sold approximately 2-3 million physical copies from its release through 1999. According to PC Data, which tracked sales in the United States, the Doom shareware edition sold 1.15 million copies by September 1999. The Ultimate Doom SKU reached sales of 787,397 units by that date.

[3]

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By 1995 the shareware version was estimated to have been installed on more than 10 million computers. The full or registered version of Doom, containing all three episodes, was only available by mail order; although most users did not purchase the registered version, over one million copies have been sold, and this popularity helped the sales of later games in the Doom series, which were not released as shareware.

[4] How appropriate one of my sources is the Doom Wiki itself.

Using the figures above, saying Doom was installed on 99.9% of all computers in the United States alone is a gross exaggeration. It was closer to about 40%, and that's only the shareware version in 1995, not '93.

The sales figures are, obviously, less than the actual figures of copies of Doom actually played and installed on computers (courtesy of piracy), and they're now 20 years in the past.

Assuming (incorrectly so) that these figures are static, and doubling them to account for piracy, suggests about 5 million copies of Doom installed on machines today, where approximately 80% of all households have a computer, suggesting that the percentage (not the actual figure) dropped from ~40% to around 5%, still pretty good, even considering these grossly incorrect assumptions.

As for total sales, given that Doom was cheap (especially compared to today) and only sold roughly 2.5 million copies in about five years, it's unlikely that Doom's sales comprise any significant portion of those of video games, given many games today sell well over 15 million copies, and some over 100 million. So if Doom comprised 1% of the number of copies sold, it would've sold at least 10 million copies throughout its lifetime, which, while certainly possible, seems very unlikely given today's market and the proper release being 25 years ago.

So, did Doom lose popularity?

Probably not. Not in any notable way.

Doom is a classic that stood the test of time, like all classics it looses popularity as time passes, to the point that falls beneath mainstream attention and becomes something of a niche, but it's still recognizable today and is still enjoyable by newer generations of players, potential modders and mappers, and by newer generations i mean people who aren't prejudiced towards old games and FPS genere in general.

Sometimes i wonder if John Romero did summon an actual demon from hell and bound it to the ID Tech 1 engine in a blood pact to ensure it's popularity, because it's weird how this game still mantains an active comunity, while Quake's and even Half-Life's died off.

I think the idea of inventing a different mapping personality is very good. If you've been mapping for a while, everyone already has an established opinion on your works. Those who like what you've made so far will continue following your releases, while others will continue ignoring them. Of course this is not 100% stable and sometimes people rethink stuff, but overall it's much more efficient to simply begin releasing maps under a different name. That way everyone will have to take a fresh look at what you're doing and form an opinion that will be relevant to your current output, not based on what you've been doing five years ago. So I say go for it. I'm not sure about making another account here but you certainly won't get into any trouble if you just send some files under a different pseudonym to /idgames. It's actually a quite refreshing and liberating feeling when people judge you by who you are right now, not by something they remember about you from years ago. And if some of the most successful artists ever (e.g. J. K. Rowling) are allowed to do this, so are you.

Mods like Brutal Doom will always keep on getting people onto playing Doom. It was Brutal Doom that made Doom popular once again. The biggest irony about the mod is that it is also the mod that purists sometimes criticized this mod for spaghetti code and other reasons, which I find to be ironic since it WAS the mod that made Doom gain popularity again, or else Doom fanbase would have died by now if it wasn't for it.

To the OP: Doom isn't losing popularity, it will keep kicking as long as more good games get released in the Doom series and as long as mods like Brutal Doom is created.

17 minutes ago, Cacodemon345 said:

Mods like Brutal Doom will always keep on getting people onto playing Doom. It was Brutal Doom that made Doom popular once again. The biggest irony about the mod is that it is also the mod that purists sometimes criticized this mod for spaghetti code and other reasons, which I find to be ironic since it WAS the mod that made Doom gain popularity again, or else Doom fanbase would have died by now if it wasn't for it.

 

To the OP: Doom isn't losing popularity, it will keep kicking as long as more good games get released in the Doom series and as long as mods like Brutal Doom is created.

I beg to differ, the community was as active before mods like Brutal Doom and Project Brutality were made as it is today, also most people who "joined" the community because of BD were never part of the community to begin with, they just pestered modders and mappers to make their mods and maps compatible with BD, and once the rip and tear novelty wears off they get bored and move on, those people never cared about Doom nor other mods besides those i mentioned.

I agree that what keeps the community alive is in part thanks to great mods, not only Brutal Doom wich is a good mod, the most popular, but not the best ever created.

2 minutes ago, Solmyr said:

I beg to differ, the community was as active before mods like Brutal Doom and Project Brutality were made as it is today, also most people who "joined" the community because of BD were never part of the community to begin with, they just pestered modders and mappers to make their mods and maps compatible with BD, and once the rip and tear novelty wears off they get bored and move on, those people never cared about Doom nor other mods besides those i mentioned.

 

I agree that what keeps the community alive is in part thanks to great mods, not only Brutal Doom wich is a good mod, the most popular, but not the best ever created.

With the amount of new 3D games that was made after Doom 3 was released and when Doom 2016 wasn't even available, without BD, the fanbase would have died by now. And if the unimaginable happen, either Doom 2016's glory kill wouldn't see daylight or it would be outright cancelled due to the lack of interest for it. And considering how less Doom was moddable back in 2012, you wouldn't be surprised to see the spaghetti code.

12 minutes ago, Cacodemon345 said:

With the amount of new 3D games that was made after Doom 3 was released and when Doom 2016 wasn't even available, without BD, the fanbase would have died by now. And if the unimaginable happen, either Doom 2016's glory kill wouldn't see daylight or it would be outright cancelled due to the lack of interest for it. And considering how less Doom was moddable back in 2012, you wouldn't be surprised to see the spaghetti code.

I agree with Solmyr. While BD and its derivatives are undoubtedly popular, they're not that popular here.  Doomworld is evidence in itself that the Doom community is far more than a single mod. 

If we were having this discussion about Doom's popularity specifically on moddb, I'd be more inclined to agree. 

14 minutes ago, Bauul said:

I agree with Solmyr. While BD and its derivatives are undoubtedly popular, they're not that popular here. 

As if the existence of Mark's account wasn't enough. Doom is more popular indeed on Moddb.

I actually started with classic Doom though.

37 minutes ago, Cacodemon345 said:

With the amount of new 3D games that was made after Doom 3 was released and when Doom 2016 wasn't even available, without BD, the fanbase would have died by now. And if the unimaginable happen, either Doom 2016's glory kill wouldn't see daylight or it would be outright cancelled due to the lack of interest for it. And considering how less Doom was moddable back in 2012, you wouldn't be surprised to see the spaghetti code.

You are trying to pass a personal opinion as a fact. Members of the community were saying that with the release of Quake in 95 Doom and it's community would die off, that didn't happen, so the release of 3D games with better engines than ID tech 1 has nothing to do with the state of the community in general. In fact what boosted the lifespan of the community was the release of Doom's source code and the introduction of source ports in 2006, before that there was only primitive and limited Dehacked used to modify the classic doom game's executables, large maps with tons of details were impossible to do because of outrageous lag.

Doom 2016 golry kills were in part inspired by BD, but also from the gloriously cheesy Doom comic wich was the source of inspiration behind BD's fatalities, that and Mortal Kombat, maybe we would still have glory kills but slightly different, well glory kills are for the most part less amusing to perform than BD fatalities, they are a key aspect of Doom 2016's gameplay but they aren't the most important element of the game by far.

Doom 2016 was made as a love letter to the original classic Doom games, it wasn't a direct response to Brutal Doom's popularity.

1 minute ago, Solmyr said:

Doom 2016 was made as a love letter to the original classic Doom games, it wasn't a direct response to Brutal Doom's popularity.

You are grossly misunderstanding my point here. Doom 2016 has nothing to do with Brutal Doom. It is not a mod, it is also not a source port, it is a game. No one said that it was a direct response to Brutal Doom.

2 minutes ago, Solmyr said:

In fact what boosted the lifespan of the community was the release of Doom's source code and the introduction of source ports, before that there was only primitive and limited Dehacked, large maps with tons of details were impossible to do because of the outrageous lag.

Take a look at Duke3D too then. It's source code was also released too. Mods for it are still made today; take a look at the recently-released Kickass Duke for example. There was people to make source ports for it, and it happened. It's modding community is still alive.

6 minutes ago, Solmyr said:

well glory kills are for the most part less amusing to perform than BD fatalities,

BD's fatalities was inspired by another game's executions.

9 minutes ago, Solmyr said:

Mortal Kombat

It is an entirely different game than Doom. Had Doom 2016's glory kills was made by the inspiration of it, it would be more different.

-Sgt.MkIV said that brutal doom's fatalities were inspired by Mortal Kombat and the Doom comic.

-What im trying to say is that Brutal Doom impact in the community wasn't as big as the introduction of source ports, without source ports the community would have died off by now, if Brutal Doom was never made in the first place, the community would still be as popular as it was before.

1 hour ago, Solmyr said:

Doom 2016 golry kills were in part inspired by BD

Actually they weren't at all, they ended up being a complete coincidence. The original Doom4 had a "sync melee" system where you and an enemy would get into some sort of melee fight animation. When transplanting assets and concepts to Doom'16 as we know it, the sync melee system stayed, but they sped it up. Thus glory kills were born.

9 hours ago, Solmyr said:

-Sgt.MkIV said that brutal doom's fatalities were inspired by Mortal Kombat and the Doom comic.

 

-What im trying to say is that Brutal Doom impact in the community wasn't as big as the introduction of source ports, without source ports the community would have died off by now, if Brutal Doom was never made in the first place, the community would still be as popular as it was before.

 

 

-I meant Mortal Kombat by another game.

-Sourceports aren't enough for keep an community alive. Take a look at Shadow Warrior for example, which should have died off by now because its sourceports never got properly updated.

7 hours ago, Edward850 said:

Actually they weren't at all, they ended up being a complete coincidence. The original Doom4 had a "sync melee" system where you and an enemy would get into some sort of melee fight animation. When transplanting assets and concepts to Doom'16 as we know it, the sync melee system stayed, but they sped it up. Thus glory kills were born.

I disagree.

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Glory_kill

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Comments made by id Software and Bethesda in the run-up to and aftermath of QuakeCon in 2014 suggested that this feature was inspired both by the popularity of Brutal Doom and the insane violence of the Doom comic.

That's a rather weak reference (and I'm surprised it was even kept from the Wikia transfer, as that's where that page initially came from). "Have you played X" from generic PR person is not indicative of the development process. Meanwhile, these sorts of games are typically developed in a closed loop as to prevent possible legal liability if someone turns around are complains about rights and ownership.

10 hours ago, Cacodemon345 said:

Mods like Brutal Doom will always keep on getting people onto playing Doom.

Oh god, this sounds really bad. I hope this is not the reason, at least in my opinion.

Just now, GarrettChan said:

Oh god, this sounds really bad. I hope this is not the reason, at least in my opinion.

Brutal Doom is a great mod, so anything that's a great mod but isn't like Brutal Doom will make people onto Doom.

The keyword in that reference is "suggested."

At no point is it explicitly stated that the Glory Kill mechanic was inspired in part or in whole by Brutal Doom.

10 hours ago, Solmyr said:

also most people who "joined" the community because of BD were never part of the community to begin with, they just pestered modders and mappers to make their mods and maps compatible with BD

And this quote is, rather distressingly, very true, because many modders suffer from massive influxes of people wanting their mods to be forced to be compatible with Brutal Doom (Citation: https://realm667.com/index.php/en/forum-board/page-discussions/308-brutal-doom-it-s-worse-than-plague), and if they comply, they then receive some complaints ultimately anyway, and their work went to waste.

Here's a nice quote from our own @scalliano on that very page which sums up my own thoughts on the matter.

Quote

Anything that brings new players to this frankly aging relic that we all love can only be a good thing. But here is the problem - if BD is an absolute prerequisite to you playing Doom at all, then you're doing it wrong. Same goes for all gameplay mods.

I think it more likely that Doom (2016) contributed to the modern community and that Doom Eternal will do the same in some capacity.

I think it comes and goes in phases (like most things), but I don't think has ever been truly "unpopular". I think probably the late and early 2000's and late 00's are when Doom was least popular in general, since not much was happening with it, and it was more reserved to its niche community like here.

I would say Brutal Doom was probably one of the bigger things to help revitalize some of the popularity of the classic games. As much as some of you may hate it, BD brought a lot of new people in that likely wouldn't have played the games otherwise.

And then, of course, we have Doom '16. With how successful it was I would no doubt say that the series is far more popular than it's ever been, especially with the hype now surround Doom: Eternal. So I think we'll be perfectly fine as a community for years to come.

4 minutes ago, Aquila Chrysaetos said:

(Things about BD)

This is very very true and this is why I said the thing above. Besides BD or similar things like PD never being appeal to me, gameplay with non-cosmetic mods is not the same thing. I'm really frustrated when people think they are actually playing Classic Doom when the gameplay is loaded with other stuff.

I personally never consider the part of the community who solely play with gameplay mods as an actual Doom community. When these things affect the actual community, I would say the effect is not very good, so I prefer and I don't mind Doom being not very popular, and Classic Doom is not really popular anyways.

I would agree with @CasualScrub here. From what I have been seeing, it feels like there are two sides of this argument.

8 minutes ago, GarrettChan said:

(Second paragraph.)

Classic Doom not being very popular has to be one of the biggest lies I had ever heard. The community already sells itself; PC Gamer is one such place where Doom mods are already featured.

Then again, I agree with your first paragraph here. Brutal Doom is never supposed to be Classic Doom.

I think the whole "but does it run with BD" has long reached its peak. I don't think I see anyone ask this in Doomworld. This should not be an issue for Doom's popularity.

Btw I play lots of Wads with BD and it works fine, even when custom content is involves (with exception to inbuilt weapons). I don't need to ask anyone to make anything compatible nor Would I.

13 hours ago, Cacodemon345 said:

The biggest irony about the mod is that it is also the mod that purists sometimes criticized this mod for spaghetti code and other reasons, which I find to be ironic since it WAS the mod that made Doom gain popularity again, or else Doom fanbase would have died by now if it wasn't for it.

Where's the irony here? It's a proven fact that BD is extremely badly coded and full of bugs due to that. Just have a look at the mess of code it contains!

But that doesn't change the fact that overall it is a very creative product with a large impact.

Sorry, nobody around me actually cares about Classic Doom. Besides DW, I can't find a place where I can actually talk Classic Doom. I just forgot to put relatively in there, and if I'm imagining Classic Doom not being popular, so be it. I'm not saying Classic Doom not being popular back in 1994. I mean it's not popular now. I don't mind anybody who doesn't agree with me.

Most people nowadays play other megawads than Classic Doom mapsets. The Doom community is nowadays a modding one - they make mapsets for and mod Doom. The OG games don't have that much replay value without mods/maps, you have to accept that.