A Question of Size.

[Russell_P]

I've been wondering recently exactly how many people are still playing and downloading Doom stuff. Okay, doom is an old game but it still kicks arse and there is a reasonable ammount of interest out there (and i'm not refering to doom3 interest here).

Some figures that may help. The last 'serious' level i released (nullspace) attracted around 5000 downloads from my site in it first few weeks of availability. The figures rapidly decreased after that so i stopped checking the access logs. I didn't bother looking to see how many downloads my lego stuff got.

The DW forum has just over 1500 members, and although the number of those active in the forums is a LOT less, it may be reasonable to assume that the majority of those do veiw the forums occasionally and do visit the DW site on a semi-regular basis.

So what do you think the potential audience size is for todays designers?

[Rellik]

While our community isn't huge, it'll gain some when DOOM3 gets established I think... prolly not much tho.

[Linguica]

Doomworld gets visited by about 5000 different IPs every day. Some of those are surely the same person on different modem IPs, or trawling spiders and spambots, but others probably represent multiple people visiting through the same proxy. The front page only gets about 3500-4000 views a day, which means that there are more people visiting than views of the main page, which seems a little odd to me.

[gatewatcher]

Linguica said:

The front page only gets about 3500-4000 views a day, which means that there are more people visiting than views of the main page, which seems a little odd to me.

Search engine referrals, maybe.

[elbryan42]

I still play Doom everyday. Most of the new games are total crap, and it's hard to find gameplay as perfect and balanced as Doom's.

[IMJack]

Linguica said:

The front page only gets about 3500-4000 views a day, which means that there are more people visiting than views of the main page, which seems a little odd to me.

Some people go straight for the forums.

[picklehammer]

9 inches long, 3 inches wide

[Ichor]

Then there are those that get it from 3darchives.

[deathz0r]

IMJack said:

Some people go straight for the forums.

like me.

[Naked Snake]

Linguica said:

Doomworld gets visited by about 5000 different IPs every day. Some of those are surely the same person on different modem IPs, or trawling spiders and spambots, but others probably represent multiple people visiting through the same proxy. The front page only gets about 3500-4000 views a day, which means that there are more people visiting than views of the main page, which seems a little odd to me.

Main page? Where? :-P

[999cop]

Of course, there used to be a lot more people visiting this board. However, as you can see, as the game is getting older day by day, people depart from the board one by one. It applies to most of the places for game forums. Such as Q3W forums, the amount of visitors has been reducing; when GTA3 first came out, there was over 3000 people on the board at the same time. Doesn't that sound logical to you?

[myk]

It feels like the "doom community" has stayed at about the same time for some time now (4 or 5 years?) Maybe with a decrease but not much. Plus DOOM III has promted the older games a bit. It's natural though to see a sharp exodus from games that have recently had commercial coverage and are being replaced by new titles.

[Little Faith]

I think it's just a matter of information.

Nullspace was downloaded by everyone because it was hyped to the skies by the entire Doom community.

The Lego wad, though a novel idea, passed through rather quietly. A few news items, a review or two.

'Tis all a matter of airplay folks.

[Erik]

I play Doom DM on a daily basis. And I also do speedrunning or casual play on many new wads that are reviewed in the newstuff chronicles. Doom has the best replay value of any game, ever.

[Disorder]

picklehammer said:

9 inches long, 3 inches wide

Liar, liar, pants on fire!!

[boris]

Disorder said:

Liar, liar, pants on fire!!

Heh, I gotta remember that one :P

I think 5000 downloads is pretty good. All my maps together did by far not come anywhere close to that.

[Woolie Wool]

IMJack said:

Some people go straight for the forums.

Like me.

[SyntherAugustus]

IMJack said:

Some people go straight for the forums.

Like me. Why does it take so fucking long to load?

[Woolie Wool]

/me points to Ling's post referring to the 5000 IPs that visit the forums every day.

[IMJack]

RailGunner said:

Like me. Why does it take so fucking long to load?

DSL modems don't like DoomWorld for some reason. I don't know why.

[Naked Snake]

IMJack said:

DSL modems don't like DoomWorld for some reason. I don't know why.

My Cable modem speeds through DW. I loaded the reply page in .821 seconds according to Mozilla.

[myk]

I have cable and it takes ages for each DW page to load. And it's telefragged, not my connection, as most other pages in the net work fine.

[MORBIDTWATT]

the doom community is a tight family of oldschool and newgen kiddies...i doubt the doom community is decreaseing in size if anything i think its only getting bigger...you gots to remember there are many doomers out there that dont even know of doomworld nor doomcenter nor other doom sites..there underground doomers i call them...i was one my self.. i used to think i was the only one that still played but i was wrong...when i found you guys i was like yay home sweet home...ya but that was years ago..my first doom site i found was doomnation then i found doomworld then etc.... you guys took me in and excepted me witch really rocked...remember doom has only been around for 9 yrs i cant think of another game in witch its still around and has as many people like we have...doom will always be god...and as for this community well we will grow in size and keep on fraging...i love you guys you all rock...

[Grazza]

Russell_P said:

The DW forum has just over 1500 members, and although the number of those active in the forums is a LOT less, it may be reasonable to assume that the majority of those do veiw the forums occasionally and do visit the DW site on a semi-regular basis.

I imagine there are a lot of non-members who visit DW quite often just to get information - Ling's figures certainly bear that out. For instance, I visited DW on a more or less daily basis for about two years before becoming a member.

Regarding the size of the potential audience for new Doom projects, there was an extraordinary figure given on the Legacy homepage: Legacy 1.32 beta 4 was downloaded more than 130,000 times in six months - that's just one beta of one sourceport.