Can Clickteam and Multimedia Fusion 2 Continue?

Alright, so this has been the topic of discussion on and off for years now. Most likely in the form of a quote we're probably all too familiar with: "Teh community is dying!!1" The question though is, does this really mean anything? Should we be concerned? Honestly, do many of us even care? And if it is, and we do, then what can anyone do to avoid it? Can we?

Let's start things off by asking what exactly could be causing people to think that the community is dying off. I think we all have a different idea of what a dying community is, but if we were forced to come to an agreement, it would be generally be that the place is failing to hold it's appeal and as a result, people stop coming. When people stop coming, the place loses even more appeal, and even more people stop coming. Ultimately it's a snowball effect, and for years now we've been having people going crazy and jumping ship because they think it's happening already.

From what I've come to understand, the perception of what it means for the community to be dying though, beyond the above generalization, is rather broad. Some people think that too many rules are a hint that the community is dying. Others might say that it's a lack of new people and in the same respect, the current population dying down or people moving on. It could also be sparked by unruly behavior that's not taken care of or ironically enough, poor behavior being taken too seriously. We see the same exact accusations being thrown around by older generations of society, don't we? Think about it. How often have you seen older adults or elderly people scream something to the effect of "Society is going to hell. Back in my day, we never had to [insert some form of security measure or inconvenience]!"

So do we really need to be too worried about these chants about the community dying? From what I see, we are all here because we have the common interest of designing games or applications using Clickteam programs. Yes, we have a section for games and a news page displaying information on what we do. We even have articles and such. When you look at the forums though, are we really here because we use Clickteam programs? What two topics in the forum, have the most discussion going on? General Chat and Misc Chat. Go head, check it out if you don't believe me. The majority of what we do on the site, is talk about pretty much everything but what we do in Multimedia Fusion. In fact, I think we're all kind of surprised to hear about what most of us do in the program. Most of us have more unreleased content than released content on the site. Why? I'm not sure. This isn't necessarily a bad thing though, it's more or less a unique quality for this site. I think it's sort of our insurance policy against a dying community. We will always have people coming here just to generally talk to people they know. It's nice to have a community of our size because we know everyone, if not from direct association, but just by seeing them around the site.

With that said, I don't think our community really has too much of a chance of spontaneous death, or even a slow painful death for that matter. Unless all the admins see something we don't, and get fed up with the site and drop it, we should be good for quite some time now. Then again, there is always also the chance of funds not holding the site up, but that's a completely different topic all together.

Branch off of the direct topic of a dying community though for a moment here. Clickteam also plays a significant role in the communities that it sparked around the web. Do they have the potential to sustain them? Do they even honestly care about them? I'm a tad cloudy on what exactly Clickteam wants to aim for in the future. Are they aimed more towards a community or a business. Judging by their decisions lately, I'd say business. This puts a hurting on communities like TDC though, because we've always thrived on them aiming, for the most part, towards us. However with explosions of communities such as the the ones born around the XNA which supports PC, Zune, and Xbox 360 game design, it's put a strain on our community. It's given people who would have otherwise enjoyed our community, somewhere else to go.

There is a distinct disadvantage to these communities though. Easier than main stream design, it's still significantly harder than Multimedia Fusion. However they're also a hell of a lot more powerful. People in our community continue to insist that Clickteam add this functionality to Multimedia Fusion. What they all seem to fail to see though, is the added complexity that comes with it. Yes, they might be prepared for this added complexity, but think about it, is everyone else? We all see Multimedia Fusion as being this extremely easy to use, very logical, powerful program. By industry standard, there's absolutely no mistaken that it absolutely is. Try to remember about how the program was when you first started using it. It was pretty daunting.
I think a large majority of us can say that we actually learned how to use these programs by using the Step Through Editor in TGF1. Well this isn't in Multimedia Fusion anymore. So what happens whenever a new guy comes in and sees this grid and has no clue how it works? So what happens when we add things like scripting or 3D? It adds even more daunting complexity to something that is simple by nature, but daunting by first impression. Even by first impression, coding is rather simplistic if you know the syntax and programing flow. The whole goal of Multimedia Fusion, at least from what I understand, was to make it as easy as possible while maintaining power. I think it does a fantastic job at that.
In other words, we put Clickteam in a rather sensitive area. We expect them to make this program more powerful so that we can do more with it, and hope that as a repercussion, more people will see the added power in the program and join the community. At the same time though, we fail to see what makes the software so unique, which is the all around simplicity of the program. One broad solution would be plug-in support rather than this primitive extension support, however we wont be seeing this in Multimedia Fusion 2.

Is there much of anything we can do about a dying community? Not really. We can try to change the rules around, we can try to encourage more people to come, we can even scream "Teh community is dying!!1" for... some weird reason, but none of these are going to really fix the problem. By time we notice it dying, it's too late. I'm not convinced we've hit that point yet though. We've slumped here and there, but we are still very much alive.