Hello, Something I've noticed recently is the huge drop of active players in this game. From what I saw earlier this game usually hovered at about 150 - 170 active players.. now It's dropped to 130 and Celeste has overtook it as the biggest speedgame on this site? Does this mean SM64 speedruns are losing popularity, or is this something that happens often on these leaderboards? Streamers have also been losing viewers. I don't mean recently, I mean throughout the history of this game. Siglemic averaged about 3k viewers 5k - 10k on a WR pace run, puncay was pretty much the same, Cheese got about 5k on wr run and now Liamkings struggles to even get 300 (Yes I know Liam hasn't achieved world record yet but I feel that's still a good thing to mention)
I Think People Are Quitting This Game Simply Because It's Hard To Master. They Lose A Bunch Of Their Attempts,Get Angry,And Decide to Quit Because They Can't Take It Anymore.
Leaderboards die, and then come back. They are most likely taking a break from the game, and trying out other games.
It's hard to make observations and come to conclusions on phenomena that only naturally occur over a large period of time. Assuming your assessment is correct that active player number has dropped, right now it's impossible to say whether this is the beginning of a declination, or whether this is just a random fluctuation and player numbers rise again later on. This applies to Twitch viewship too, in which most people have experienced and observed the understandably unpredictable and random nature of viewship - sometimes you will have lower viewship for no real reason despite a generally growing audience. For example, through August and September is when school begins for many people around the world, which could account for the current loss of players as opposed to the game dying in general. Another possibility is that while the vanilla game speedrun could be losing players, interest in SM64 in general isn't dying because of the prospering ROM hacking scene diversifying the community's interests. This would make it seem like the community is dying based on the active players on this board alone, even though general interest in the game is on the rise.
The long story short is, don't worry about it. Play the games you like, watch the streams you like, and do what you gotta do. Worrying about whether SM64 is dying or not is just a waste of energy. The only exception is if you actively benefit from interest in the game, like if you're a popular runner of it or what have you.
tl;dr dunno, probably not, lul
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