>>56107768And vgc is at LESS than 1m games, dude.
Also there's nat dex OU which hasn't banned sleep. And ubers, and past gens.
But every single format has died down in activity compared to the start of the generation.
Pokemon is fotm, like palworld, it's actually spectacular that showdown activity only dies down to 1/3 of peak activity compared to the actual SV game which surely dies down to 1/1000000th of peak activity.
15k online showdown rn is probably still more than nintendo's whole fucking online across all titles lol.
Will it die eventually? Sure? But people whined that smogon banned all the strong dragons in gen 4. They whined about how gen 5's weather wars were handled. They whined about aegislash and greninja being banned in gen 6. Whining about smogon's bans is a tale as old as time.
OU only got 200k games a month in 2009. Activity rose steadily throughout gens 4 and 5 and 6, I think, although I don't have data to support this, I didn't start playing personally until gen 6 and I thought it actually peaked then.
I think Pokemon GO's launch in 2016 indirectly brought traffic to showdown too lol. You can see their first (i think) 3m month right after its launch actually.
https://www.smogon.com/stats/2016-08/ou-1825.txtThe smoggies actually in charge don't care about this shit btw, they only care about their tournaments and other autistic cult traditions, they're completely oblivious to the outside world.
Smogon is unironically a coincidence, they've never done jack shit to foster growth. On the other hand VGC has millions of dollars being pumped into it by western jews and marketing it as a fucking new e-sport lol.
I'm not trying to be hostile btw, I genuinely think this subject is interesting. It's hilarious that smogon is what it is.
