How many people play Angband?

[BlueFish]

How many people do you think have played angband at least once in the last month?

Are there any statistics about this, or evidence from which guesses could be made?

[Djabanete]

Quite a lot --- probably at LEAST 10 or 15 people.

Honestly? No idea.

[Storm-Sky]

Well the forum say's theres over 200 or so active members, probably half play variants, but then you have to think about all the people who play the game that might not be aware of this forum, and download the game from alternate gaming sites that advertise it. You have to think angband has been around a long time and I'm sure a lot of people, particulary university students have a copy somewhere.

[UglySquirrell]

You can also play it on android, its been available from the marketplace for quite a while. I'm guessing that will get a lot of people hooked.

[d_m]

My sense is that the set of people playing Angband on any given day is larger than we'd think (lots of people still play e.g. 3.0.9b), and I think even more people play periodically (e.g. pick Angband up once a month or once a year).

I'm not sure how many of these people visit rephial or oook though. Maybe we should take a page from DarkGod and include a network client in Angband that can report stats and upload high-scores/savefiles (if the user wants these).

EDIT: And I agree that there are probably lots of new Android players thanks to david3x3x3 and co

[Jazerus]

I noticed recently that Ubuntu's software center still downloads Angband 3.1.2 rather than 3.3. Is that something fixable on your end?

[fizzix]

I'm not sure how many of these people visit rephial or oook though. Maybe we should take a page from DarkGod and include a network client in Angband that can report stats and upload high-scores/savefiles (if the user wants these).

Even though I'd like to know this information, I'm not really a fan of 'spying' on users even in a seemingly innocuous way. What I'd be ok with is logging the number of times Angband is downloaded from rephial. That'll give us a feel for the number of new or updating players, and that's useful.

[Derakon]

You could also include a registration app that is downloaded alongside Vanilla, which users can use if they want to let us know that they're playing it.

But given that we have no plan for that information, I doubt it's worth the effort.

[Magnate]

I noticed recently that Ubuntu's software center still downloads Angband 3.1.2 rather than 3.3. Is that something fixable on your end?

Sort of. Ubuntu get (most of) their packages from Debian, and 3.2.0 was uploaded to Debian a month or two ago, so it will be available in the next release of Ubuntu (next month, IIUC). 3.3 is not yet packaged for Debian - I started work on 3.3.1 and realised it had a nasty bug, so I'm going to wait and package 3.3.2 instead. That will hopefully be uploaded in Oct/Nov and will then arrive in Ubuntu a few months later.

[awldune]

I think even more people play periodically (e.g. pick Angband up once a month or once a year).

I suspect this describes a LOT of Angband players. I'll play quite a lot for a little while and then go away for a year or two and then come back. Been like that since 1994 or so.

[david3x3x3]

We're keeping anonymous usage statistics in the Android version of Angband using Flurry.

We get about 100 users who use the app each day, 400 who use it each week and 1200 who us it each month. User retention is pretty low. A lot of people run it a couple times and then not again. I'm not quite sure how to read the retained user graph, but it looks like the number of retained users has been growing recently. Up from about 10 at the end of last year to 53 in August. They define a retained user as someone who uses the app twice in a week.

This also tracks number of users by location (by country internationally and down to the city level in the US).

We've had about 27,000 downloads since the app was released in July 09.

[d_m]

Even though I'd like to know this information, I'm not really a fan of 'spying' on users even in a seemingly innocuous way. What I'd be ok with is logging the number of times Angband is downloaded from rephial. That'll give us a feel for the number of new or updating players, and that's useful.

I guess I wasn't clear, I mean there might be a box "Enable anonymous statistics? y/N" that pops up when you first run angband or something. It would be opt-in.

I agree that spying on users is unethical. Anonymous usage isn't spying, but I'd probably ask anyway.

[Therem Harth]

I don't think there are many people playing Angband any more. It's what, down to a few hundred worldwide? Whereas Doom 3 sold more than 3.5 million copies.

I can think of a few things to blame...

- The "pure" nature of Vanilla. In theory, it's an almost ideally balanced game. In practice it gets boring after a while.

- The death of various variants. Zangband might have been the big one... Also Pernband/ToME, which I recall being very popular back in the early 2000s.

- Being overshadowed by other roguelikes, most notably Nethack, which seems to have a bigger following.

- The sheer difficulty of the game: one small mistake and you have to restart the whole thing. That kind of risk turns new players away.

[Magnate]

I don't think there are many people playing Angband any more. It's what, down to a few hundred worldwide? Whereas Doom 3 sold more than 3.5 million copies.

I can think of a few things to blame...

- The "pure" nature of Vanilla. In theory, it's an almost ideally balanced game. In practice it gets boring after a while.

- The death of various variants. Zangband might have been the big one... Also Pernband/ToME, which I recall being very popular back in the early 2000s.

- Being overshadowed by other roguelikes, most notably Nethack, which seems to have a bigger following.

- The sheer difficulty of the game: one small mistake and you have to restart the whole thing. That kind of risk turns new players away.

?? IMO the decline in numbers of people playing Angband (or indeed any roguelike) has much much more to do with the rise of the X-box/PS3 and its associated eye-candy twitch gaming than any of the above.

[nppangband]

I don't think there are many people playing Angband any more. It's what, down to a few hundred worldwide? Whereas Doom 3 sold more than 3.5 million copies.

I think it is probably more than that. I have found out there are many players who simply download the game and play without being active in any on-line discussions or logging onto .oook. Over the years I have met several of people who play Angband & variants casually.

I think the biggest barrier is probably the steep learning curve. This is the Steve Jobs era, and people just don't want to memorize 40-50 commands to play a game anymore. That and "you die, you start over" games are practically unheard of these days.